I don’t agree with the statement made by Thabile Mange in last week’s edition of the News – Statues symbolise white power.
The statues must stay.
If Thabile believes they represent ‘white power’ then we should not only stop with statues. We must also destroy Union Buildings; Johannesburg Police Station formerly John Vorster Square; how about all the colonial buildings? Oh yes!
Soweto and Alex, after all it was the apartheid government that built the “matchbox houses” and the infrastructures we have today (trains, roads) and so forth. All we must keep are the rural villages and the RDP houses as they don’t represent white power.
The problem is not the statues, the problem is that the gravy train left a lot of people behind; after all there were not enough seats for all people.
So instead of doing our best to better our circumstances and build a prosperous and desired future for all South Africans, we blame the past.
Yes, the past was painful and extremely unjust without a doubt but, we cannot hold on to the past … if we hold on to the past we will remain in the past forever, hence we see what is happening today in South Africa.
It is 2015, why do we want to remain in 1960?
Mandela was a man, not God; and if he was able to forgive, why can’t we? We need to move forward. I say let the statues be so that one day when we are living a prosperous life that we worked hard to build, we can look at them and laugh because we are better than the injustices of the past.
