The Ghost of Verwoerd.

Ever walk down the street in a predominantly white area and feel an odd sharp chill down your spine and all of a sudden you notice the mist of your warm breathe in the cold, crisp air? Picture it, it's just after dark and some of the street lights begin to flicker. You carry on down the street until a knot in your stomach forces you to pause - there's something behind you. You slowly turn your head and see someone - an unholy, hellish apparition - an old white woman who let's out a demonic screech, yelling "kaffar!" before vanishing in the dark of the night? Probably not; such cases sound like something you'd read about on one of those headlines that local publisher, Sunday Sun , would put up on street lights with captions like "Chicken rapes old man!" or "Man kills himself and reports it!". Honestly speaking, I blame ourselves for entertaining such rubbish. However, this is a report of a different kind, about a restless spirit that lingers and terrorises South Africans till this day - racism. I might not have had the chilling experience that you read about at the beginning of this article, but I've encountered similar. I remember a time during my high school career when we all were trying to make it in the music biz. A friend had a small studio setup in his room and he'd go every now and again to "lay down a few verses". I distinctly remember, however, walking down on a Saturday morning with two friends and an old Opel Cadette slowed down to our walking pace and once the vehicle stopped an old white woman wiggled down her window by hand and made the slanderous statement, "you don't belong here" before telling her husband to drive off. It happened so quickly and I've struggled to process what had happened.

With cases like the Penny Sparrow and Adam Catzavelos saga, it's almost as if the same evil that Madiba and his knights once slew, is awakening and getting strong and stronger with every election and haunts the hollowed corridors of our beloved country. Making a mindless minion of any unfortunate soul to utter the "K" word. The monster we face today is subtle. It's in the way we as black people are welcomed into white spaces, it's in the way we're looked at and it's in the way the system is designed. It's implicitlies make it hard to point a finger at it, even when you know it's there - like a ghost in the night. Verwoord might be long gone, but his spirit lingers and terrorises us still.