The more things change, the more things stay the same? The more things change, the more they stay the same, a friend who served Apartheid for many years, told me in 1998. I rejected this notion of his and was confident in the transformation processes that were started. My Apartheid friend went through a radical transformation himself, he embraced the transformation processes and was happy to serve the new government as best as he could. Twenty years later and almost all of my friends and comrades who joined public service since 1994, who all had these beautiful & noble ideals of recreating the unjust South Africa into a much more egalitarian society, have since lost those ideals & became bureaucrats of the system they serve, or they became pursuers of personal wealth without apology. The system was harsh and absorbing to idealists. Today they defend the difference between being advantaged and disadvantaged as being natural & part of the system & they talk of their roles in society and within the system in similar but slightly more morally correct terms than their Apartheid predecessors, but essentially they sound the same, minus apartheid ideology. Today my comrades & my apartheid friend who transformed are indistinguishable. Both serve the reformed system & are happy in doing that. We wanted to redefine & transform the system, but ended up in only reforming what existed. To me reform is not a good story to tell. It merely replaces illegitimate & unacceptable injustice with legitimate & acceptable injustice. But its a price we were prepared to pay, and we are prepared to take a long-view on the transformation of our society. But my apartheid friend was correct: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 14:45:24 +0000
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