“This is a sentence that I never wanted to write: I am ashamed to be South African and I am ashamed to be Capetonian.”

That’s how Tony Weaver began his column, Man Friday, in yesterday’s Cape Times (Friday, 30 May 2008).

It’s sad, sad, sad stuff: “How has it come to this? How has the Rainbow Nation let us down so badly?

“How did our heroes in the ANC become lame figures of ridicule, where our president jets off to Japan while our beloved nation burns? …

“Why has Thabo Mbeki not visited a refugee camp, a township? Why have our department of Home Affairs, our police, our military, our intelligence services, our government failed us so badly?

“Why have some South Africans become such criminals and thugs, such brutish louts, such scum, that they can do this to their fellow Africans?

“Shame on you, shame, shame, shame.”

Why, indeed.

South Africa, he said, is forever tainted, and I agree with him. This morning, I, too, am ashamed to be South African – but more than ashamed, I’m also scared for the first time because I’m beginning to see a vacuum forming that I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to fill:

A vacuum of ethical leadership.

Where are the Tony Weavers of the future? The Terry Bells (he’s a labour columnist and an activist – and he was an exile, chased away by apartheid’s police state)? Where are the Zackie Achmats? The Nelson Mandelas, Chris Hanis and Desmond Tutus?

There aren’t any (particularly not if you look to that circus called the ANC Youth League).

A generation listened to those people, because they recognised their bona fides.

Nobody listens to anybody today.

Quick: who said this? (I ask, having seen the armoured vehicles driving out of our local police station in sleepy Knysna just yesterday):

“Tell them that peace and order which are found at the end of a gun barrel will be brittle, superficial and temporary: that such a peace and order will need more guns to maintain. Tell them that there can be no lasting security there. Tell them that unless radical changes are effected in the ordering of society, then South Africa cannot survive. Nobody will win. Tell them please, before we run out of time.”

Was it a young, fiery radical fighting for peace and justice, for service delivery in the townships, for a faster roll-out for anti-retrovirals, for health care for all, for ….?

No, of course not.

It was Desmond Tutu, writing to the members of his parish at St Mary’s in Johannesburg in the aftermath of the riots of June the 16th, 1976 (quoted in Rabble-Rouser for Peace by John Allen).

And in their silence after the fact, in not speaking up and acting against the police brutality, he asked his (largely white) congregation in his sermon of Sunday the 20th of June how they would have reacted if it was white children who’d been shot on that terrible day?

Who is asking questions like that today? Who is making statements like that?

And yes, I am heartened by the outpourings of warmth, by the gifts of clothing and food, by the erection of temporary shelters for the exiles who’ve been displaced here in South Africa in the past while.

But then I’m also warmed by a hot toddy when I’ve got the flu: it makes me feel fuzzy and nice, too.

Although it doesn’t treat the cause.

After a bitter struggle for democracy, for South Africa to have to live with this…