What does Freedom Day mean to you?

Image from The Witness

Today (27 April) is Freedom Day in South Africa, to celebrate the end of the apartheid-regime in 1994. Listening to a South African radio news program today, one interviewee had the following to say: “[Freedom Day] means a lot to a lot of African people; but being a white person, it means nothing to me.”

This is a sad, but true report of how many white South Africans feel. I think the government, revolution leaders and supposed freedom luminaries failed at conveying the true value of giving liberty to the previously disadvantaged. The message that the new powers-that-be failed to convey to the formerly white elite is that they, too, have been liberated. While apartheid might have superficially benefited white people, it also denied them, it also oppressed them, and it also dehumanized them. Outwardly this may not be easy to see, as white people did not suffer the same physical sufferings than the other ethnicities suffered. However, unjust laws, such as legalized racism (i.e. apartheid), not only dehumanizes those that experience the brunt of such inhumane laws; the enforcers and endorsers of unjust laws are also dehumanised – their values are corrupted; their virtues traded for vices.

Freedom Day is not merely the celebration of the freedom procured by South Africa’s blacks, coloureds and Asians from their oppressors; Freedom Day is also the celebration of the release of the white man’s soul from the manacles of racism. While the previously disadvantaged celebrate their physical liberation, white people have now the opportunity to celebrate their spiritual liberation.