INSIGHT | Leaders urged to tackle social media disrespect and division

Understanding subtleties and intensities in social power and cultural politics became a persistent idea I have pursued during a historical moment of a dawn of a “new South Africa” in 1994. Witnessing developments emerging from unanticipated social integration could not allay my anxiety and suspicion about a glaring lack of commitment to reconciliation and building of one South African nation on the part of some sections of conservative white communities and tribalised disadvantaged groups. Much of the persistent internal dialogues on my part came to the surface when a situational television drama-series titledThe Line, would be played as a supplementary lesson during classes or tutorials.

A reader who thinks that these lessons were taught in political science classes would be forgiven; they were taught in first year sociology and English classes during the transitional period where one attended school in compliance with then president Nelson Mandela’s call for activists to “go back to school” in 1994. A towering black consciousness scholar: a peer to Steve Biko, Harry Nengwekhulu, Barney Pityana and Strini Moodley, and a former Robben Island prisoner – Prof Saths Cooper – would also come in as a guest-facilitator in a social psychology class and contribute to shaping students’ imagination of how a vision of a “new and better South Africa” could possibly work. He introduced himself to a curious bunch of students that we were as a founding executive council member of a unified Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) whose primary focus was on “mental liberation” and a “national psyche during a liberation struggle” during that period.

It is precisely from reflecting on these valuable teachings, humanist ideas and developmental questions that one constantly ponders over who have we truly become and how have we become a citizenry that is perpetually crying for an absent or deceased leadership whilst we have so many talented and resourceful persons in our midst. “The politics of representation is the cultural and political struggle over how images, media, and language depict social groups. It shows how power structures shape these portrayals, particularly for marginalised communities like women and minorities, influencing real-world political power and societal identity” Stuart Hall, 2012