That old excuse of ‘We didn’t know’ (previously also heard as ‘Ons het nie geweet nie’ and ‘Wir haben es nicht gewuszt’) may be factually accurate, but it is never an ethical defence. Everywhere these words are heard, they are an indictment of structural inequalities, the domination of power over knowledge, and the failure of the moral imagination. The struggle of man against power, as Milan Kundera told us, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. It could be amended to read: The struggle of the present against the past is the struggle of understanding against not-knowing. Don’t say you didn’t know, or you didn’t mean it. That is besides the point. You were not born outside of history. Find out. Question. Change. And for those that do know, and do care – parents, teachers, lecturers, public intellectuals – the job is to keep making sure that ignorance isn’t bliss.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 12:17:03 +0000
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