The new age slave celebrates democracy and freedom on the basis that he can now sit on the same seat and share the bathroom with a white person. He does not know that he is oppressed and he will damn you to hell if you dare tell him that we are not yet uhuru.To him you blacks are just lazy and expect everything on a silver platter; “ if you come from a poor background you should just work hard and stop complaining” he says. He will go through lengths to name a couple of ‘rich’ black people he knows to contest the idea of black people being economically excluded and systematically oppressed. The new slave is blind, for he cannot see how the majority of black people are suffering. How our mothers and fathers work for long hours for peanuts. How people carry suffering from their great grandparents and are still trapped in poverty even though they work hard. I will tell you a story of Musa, a young black man who deserves all the riches the world has to offer but struggles to put together enough cents to feed himself and his entire family . He is smart and had dreams of becoming a pilot when he was growing up but he had to leave school and work in the mines like his father after he died in order to support his family , He is suffering not because he is lazy but simply because he is black in a nation whose scares have not yet healed from its violent apartheid history.
The are many people whose story is similar to that of Musa, who had to sacrifice their dreams and are living lives that they had not imaged for themselves because they had to think of their circumstances at home and take up minimum paying jobs in order to sustain themselves and their families. Tell me what democracy and freedom you are talking about if there many people are still living like this under this new 'black’ government and so-called rainbow nation?
Furthermore we find that the minority which has managed to get into varsity and suffer through it , tend to get mis-educated and indirectly become agents of the very system that oppresses their brothers and sisters but because a human being is selfish; one finds comfort in that at least his own family can be liberated from poverty. The greater issue in this scenario is then taking your success story and using it as a basis of an argument against the existence of systematic oppression of black people. I personally fail to see freedom when there are a few black puppets of the oppressive and anti-black system who are as good as the white racist oppressors in government positions, while the land still belongs to the white minority and the greater black majority are slaving away to exist in it. I personally fail to see economic freedom when parents of households are still getting paid around two thousand rand per month and are expected to feed their families and have children with bright futures.
I cannot understand this freedom that allows our black fathers to be killed like flies in Marikana for asking for the money that they have worked hard for.I do not understand the freedom that allows armless black students to be shot at and teargassed by policemen for fighting for the free education that was promised to their parents when they voted for the ruling party.
The problem with new slaves is that they become so entrenched in the idea of them being liberated that they become the oppressors to those that try and fight against the system. Although they may be in black bodies; they are no different from the white racist people and the apartheid government during the apartheid era. That is why they will not hesitate to shoot you when you are fighting for your dignity as a black worker or student. That is why they will let a paraplegic white man walk after having murdered but imprison a black man for twenty five years for being involved in an accident that killed school children. Please do not get confused, the black man should be sentenced for his crime and so should the white man. Justice should not only apply to those whose skin is darker in shade.
Black people are still suffocating and the worst part of it is that most of our people’s minds have been colonized by the oppressor in such a way that some do not see their oppression while others have become the oppressor. So we are not only being suffocated by the white man but his black professional butt kisser is as viscous. He is the new age slave because he feels as though he is not explicitly oppressed as he is well off and does not suffer from poverty. But he is enslaved in the mind because he is mentally blinded by the shackles of 'privilege’ and ignorance and cannot understand that true freedom is when ALL black people can finally breathe.
