You are probably wondering about the title. I suspect that you are eager to get to the clever (perhaps desperate) twist. There is no twist. White lives matter! You may even be wondering what I mean by blackness. Blackness is exactly that, suffocating darkness. Imagine being in a dark tunnel that is shut on both ends. Except, this tunnel is centuries long, the walls are drenched in blood and the floor has piles of black bodies. There is no light, maybe just a flickering candle that is seen only by a lucky few. The first phase of blackness is innocence, oblivion. As an infant, a black infant, born to black parents, in a blank community, I was unaware of my blackness. I was oblivious to the curse that plagued me. I imagine that I poo-poo-d like other children. I mama-d and dada-d, like other children. I guzzled milk formula and stuffed by face with Purity, literally. As I crawled and then walked, I didn’t know that I had survived higher-than-average infant mortality, malnutrition and poor health care. In a rural village in South Africa, I drank water from a river (that also doubled as a toilet and a bathtub). However, just by staying alive, I passed to the next phase of blackness. The second phase is confusion. Like most children, I woke and donned my khakis with long socks. I polished my shoes, combed my nappy hair, stuffed by face with yesterday's leftovers and walked for about an hour to get to school. But even then, as a black child, at a black school, in a black community, there was a pervading sense of otherness. The language and mannerisms enforced at school were alien and awkward. It felt as though the school was teaching me to become a different parson; a person I had never met. In each book I read, Africa, my home, was either a strange dessert roaming large elephants or a large forest roaming tempestuous baboons. The people were simple, hungry, diseased or just in need of salvation. It was all very grotesque and unfamiliar. More so because my family's kraal (a compound of houses) rested on a riverbank, surrounded by a lush green of rolling mountains as far as the eye could see. Every morning I woke up to the crackling of birds that nested on a bamboo forest across the river. As the village came alive, and the river fog cleared, there were neighbours shouting, dogs barking and roosters crowing, but never the stampede of elephants or grinding fear of wild lions that I read about in schoolbooks. I listened carefully in every class – in history, geography, maths, and science. Blacks were either not mention or were mentioned only as subjects in the enthralling tales of European conquerors. Even in art class, the village patterns were taboo. I had to draw a car or a multi-storey house, never a village rondavel, a herd of cows or pack of hunting dogs. So I started asking myself, “What is wrong with us?” I remember as a child asking my folks, “Why are we not white people?” I remember asking my mother – a very light-skinned woman who had to cover her face with red clay as she toiled the soil during the unforgiving summer sun – whether the clay (“ibomvu”) would make her a white person. She laughed as said, “If you want to be a white person, do your homework.” An exam in IsiZulu is “ukuhlolwa,” which unfortunately translates to “inspection”. One morning, when I was about seven years old, I refused to go to school. When my mother asked why, I told her that inspectors (“abahloli”) were coming to check if we were white. She laughed and said, “You did your homework; you will be fine.” I cried and told her, “My skin is still dirty.” Even then, at seven years old, just three years after democracy in South Africa, being “unwhite” felt like a problem, a curse and a mistake. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was not aware of the bigger picture. W.E.B du Bois asks the same question in his book The Souls of Black Folks, “How does it feel to be a problem?” The third stage is the awakening and shame. If you're lucky enough to pick up a book, your awakening will be delivered quickly by King’s dream, by Malcolm’s passion or by Garvey’s pragmatism. Perhaps your awakening will be through Césaire, Fanon or Biko’s sharp wit. They will bite and blow. They will tell you about the roots of black pain and disadvantage but still remind you to love yourself. If, like me, you are not that fortunate, your awakening will be slow and excruciating. For me, it took watching movies portraying lynching and murder of blacks to loud cheers. I watched on television as black bodies were mutilated and burned for sport. I watched in awe as every black man was portrayed as gun-wielding buffoon. Every black woman was portrayed as powerless and mindless domestic. If not that, black women were portrayed as prostitutes, like no other black woman I had ever seen. The village women, their strength, dignity and human spirit, were not portrayed on television. First, my blood boiled and my heart was drenched in senseless hate. I cried myself to sleep. Soon, the anger morphed to shame. I felt naked. My very existence, it seemed, was a cruel joke. If there were ever any ancestors, if there was ever a God, how dare they let us suffer for so long? How had we allowed ourselves to suffer for so long? I then looked around my own community. Families were crumbling as fathers left young children to search for work in city slums. They came back only once a year, for a week (or maybe less) in December. Rumours soon spread that, after years of loneliness in piss-reeking Durban or Johannesburg informal settlements, they took mistresses or raised clandestine families. As families drifted further apart, young teens, male and female, were forced to leave school to provide for the family thus completing the cycle of black disadvantage. The fourth phase is anger. I became very angry about the past. Most of all, I was furious about the present. It did not matter how hard I worked or how many books I read, I would forever be an outsider. Where, with a mixture of chance and hard work, I succeeded -- I did so only to become a token. “You are not like other blacks,” they told me. I was angry because the facts are widely available. There are troves of garish books, documentaries, movies, and other art forms. There are museums, biographies and first-hand accounts of centuries of black pain. Yet, people (blacks included) appeared to be oblivious to the fact that we are suffocating and slowly self-destructing because of reminiscent oppression. I was angry because I finally realized that the world hates slavery and colonialism, not because of the pain and suffering of million of black individuals, communities and nations, no! Leopold II killed between 8 and 10 million Africans, but, even today, monuments celebrate him in Brussels. The media reported recently that white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, beat up a black man. When he bled on their uniforms, they charged and jailed him for destruction of public property. In a similar vein, the world hates slavery because it is an ugly stain on the conscience of white folks; those who care enough to think about the subject anyway. This explains the doublespeak -- Belgium and the United States denounce slavery but still celebrate slaughters like Leopold II and Columbus. The fifth and final phase of blackness is survival. I am tired of being black. I am tired of the abuse, of being a victim, of the anger and shame. I do not want to run from the police, from poverty and diseases. I am tired of being hounded (physically, emotionally and psychologically) by whites and uppity blacks. I am tired of dodging bullets from hardened, angry and hungry black youths. I am tired of policing racism and bigotry. I am tired of pleading just to be recognised as a human being. I am tired of fighting for, and then having to defend, my humanity – the most obvious bit of my existence. I want out. Give a seat at the white table! I will be a good black. I will stop listening to hip-hop (just Iggy Azalea and Macklemore). I will never speak again about slavery, race or white privilege. I will work harder for half (or less) the reward given to my white counterparts. All I want, all I need, is just to live! Black lives do not matter! From the bondage of slavery, to the bondage of nations under colonialism, to modern government-sanctioned corporate slavery, black lives do not matter! I am willing to shut up about that. I am willing to validate my existence to the “Aryan race”. I will assimilate whiteness, if that is what it takes. I will “speak properly” and I will pull up my pants. I will apologize for black slaves that bled on white masters. I will apologize for King’s silly dream. I will apologize for Malcolm, Garvey, and Biko’s radicalism. For all this, I ask just for one thing: the right to be alive!

South Africa is a divided society with a vile history of injustice. Injustice runs along very bright lines: black versus white, women versus men, the rich versus the poor, government versus the people. For a long time, there wasn’t much debate about whom the law favoured: white, rich males, usually wielding the political power of government. Since democracy, South Africa has been locked in a different kind of struggle. While the bright-lines have disappeared (at least in law), the people are still attuned to them. Our biggest fear as South Africans is that the Beast of Apartheid may not be dead; it may be living in the shadows of the rainbow nation. Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial was bound to rub us all the wrong way. In many ways, Pistorius is a poster child for the old South Africa: a rich (spoilt) white male who wields unearned privilege and believes that the country owes him a favour. Oscar splits South African society in all ways possible. To some whites, Pistorius is a victim of rampant black-on-white crime. His fear of the ubiquitous black criminal forced him to shoot the love of his life in cold blood. To most blacks, he represents gun-wielding whites who see a criminal in every black person. To the poor, Pistorius represents the rich who buy and sell justice—jumping queues with expedited trials while poor folk rot in jail, even before they have had a day in court. To some women, Pistorius is a domestic-abuser-turned-“victim”. His case was beyond pale, just like the millions of other domestic abusers who bash women and then drench the public in tears begging for forgiveness. Judge Masipa convicted Pistorius on one count of culpable homicide (manslaughter) and on one gun-related charge. She sentenced him to an effective five years in prison, although he will be entitled to apply for parole in 10 months. Masipa has been publicly vilified for both her conviction and sentence. Billionaire Donald Trump – that true beacon of intelligence – commented on the sentence: “Oscar Pistorius will likely only serve 10 months for the cold blooded murder of his girlfriend. Another [O.J. Simpson] travesty. The judge is a moron!” Pistorius’ case was the hardest possible judicial assignment for any judge on the post-apartheid bench. Justice meant, ultimately, whatever one’s ideology and sense of history demanded. Masipa’s verdict and sentence, whichever direction she decided, were about more than justice for Reeva Steenkamp; she had to comment on the state of the Republic. After 16 months of a grueling trial, how did Judge Masipa do? To answer this question, we must take a detour to a similarly difficult time in South African history: 1990. In 1990, after centuries of brutal violence and wrenching oppression, South Africans were about to build a new country. All that the country had as a point of reference was a very recent history of repression, brutality and a biased, rotting judiciary. The biggest question, then, was justice for apartheid victims. What would justice look like for those whose families were torn apart, for those who lost life and limb fighting for freedom? Mandela and his comrades knew that the problem of justice needed a cunning long-term solution. They crafted one: a constitution quite like no other! The aspiration for the crafters of the Constitution, as Mandela explained later, was to ensure that, “Never, never and never again shall it be that [this] beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world.” The Constitution declared that its purpose was to ‘Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.’ (Preamble) The new South Africa would be founded on the values of ‘Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms… Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.’ (§ 1) The Constitution entrenches in our society certain inalienable rights. Everyone – including an accused or convicted criminal like Pistorius – is equal before the law and entitled to have his or her dignity respected and protected. (§ 9 and 10) Most of all, the Constitution is ‘the supreme law of the Republic; law or conduct inconsistent with it is invalid, and the obligations imposed by it must be fulfilled.’ (§ 2) To this end, ‘The courts are independent and subject only to the Constitution and the law, which they must apply impartially and without fear, favour or prejudice.’ (§ 165) Judge President Mlambo, who is perhaps responsible for assigning Judge Masipa to the Pistorius trial, noted the broader justice questions posed by the case. He said:

‘[In] a country like ours where democracy is still somewhat young and the perceptions that continue to persist in the larger section of South African society, particularly those who are poor and who have found it difficult to access the justice system…. I have taken judicial notice of the fact that part of the perception that I allude to is the fact that the justice system is still perceived as treating the rich and famous with kid [gloves] whilst being harsh on the poor and vulnerable.’

The challenge facing Judge Masipa was heightened in two ways. First, the facts were hardly in dispute. It was not in dispute that Pistorius shot and killed Steenkamp. The mixed question of fact and law was about Pistorius’ intention when he shot Steenkamp. Pistorius’ guilt or innocence hinged only on his state of mind. The difficulty is: only Pistorius knows his state of mind when he committed the offence—a bitter pill for the public to swallow. Second, Judge Masipa had to answer a bigger question about the meaning of justice in post-apartheid South Africa. This question is fashioned along the bright-lines I outline above and it is subject to intense public opinion. She was being asked whether the law still favours rich white males over the poor, women and blacks? She handled the task quite remarkably. She and the judiciary saw the Pistorius trial as an opportunity to teach the nation and the world about South Africa’s constitutional compact. The lesson: In South Africans, justice means what the Constitution says it does. The Constitution says justice means treating the accused with dignity, fairness and legal restraint whilst punishing him or her for proven facts. Many will ask: what does justice mean for Reeva Steenkamp? John Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice that, “The main idea [of justice] is that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it.” In South Africa, we have created such institutions through the Constitution. Institutionally, the State has formidable public resources (money, police, specialists etc.) to discover facts. The State employs gifted lawyers to place those facts lucidly and forcefully before a judge. The accused is punished for those facts proven by the State beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge must ignore public opinion and personal idiosyncrasies in order to be the arbiter of fact, ‘without fear, favour or prejudice.’ For the victim, justice means punishing the accused for wrongs in accordance with institutions of law. Justice is the rule of law. The punishment must be preponderant to the nature of the crime, the offender and the interests of society. According to Professor Snyman Criminal Law, ‘the court [must] weigh the accused's personal circumstances against the nature of the crime and the interests of society. The [accused’s] personal circumstances constitute mitigating circumstances, whereas the nature of the crime and the interests of society amount to aggravating circumstances.’ These were the principle guiding Judge Masipa’s decision, and she remained true to them. Despite considerable public opinion, Masipa did what the Constitution demanded of her. We could all speculate about how Oscar committed a different crime or how he deserved a harsher sentence. Speculating is the easy part. Adhering to a binding social contract – the Constitution – is much, much harder! John Rawls explains that: ‘From the standpoint of the theory of justice, the most important natural duty is that to support and to further just institutions. This duty has two parts: first, we are to comply with and to do our share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us; and second, we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist […].’ All of us are a single stupid decision away from a jail cell. Should we ever make such a stupid decision, we all want the justice of fairness and restraint shown by the court in the Pistorius trial. The trial highlights some worrying trends about wealth and justice in South Africa. The rich and famous can afford the most expensive legal counsel, which improves their experience in the justice system. This is an important issue. We should all support Chief Justice Mogoeng’s efforts to promote access to justice for everyone by bridging the gap for indigent accused. However, these are questions of policy and they should be kept out of the courtroom! Some people remark that ‘South Africa will never see another Nelson Mandela.’ People like Judge Masipa, and painful events like Reeva Steenkamp’s killing, remind us why we do not need another Mandela. As a country, we will survive through our commitment to values of dignity and human rights. Even if those values also work, quite uncomfortably, for the benefit of criminals like Oscar Pistorius.