References to African traditions and culture in the context of the controversy over The Spear, the painting portraying President Jacob Zuma with his penis showing, has brought back to mind one of the relatively big media stories of 2011.
This was the story triggered by the comments made by Mr Jimmy Manyi, President of the Black Management Forum and Head of Government Communication and Information Services.
I suspect the story went big because, in addition to Manyi, the other central protagonists involved in the event, were the minister in the presidency Mr Trevor Manuel, and Mr Paul Ngobeni, at the time legal adviser to the minister of defence.
But it also got traction because it was, like the perceived insult against African traditions by the depiction of Zuma’s imagined penis, yet another dreadful replay of the effects of the inherited misunderstandings of the racialised and tribalised pasts that made us into who we are.
Black people as a whole did not come out well from that story too.
Like other ugly stories of race, Manyi’s words and the exchanges that followed entrapped our imaginations because they played on the masochism and misrecognition that have become, since apartheid at least, an unhappy part of what is erroneously called African tradition or culture.
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