CYRIL Ramaphosa is one of the wealthiest, urbane and sophisticated people in South Africa.
He is also the deputy president of the country’s governing party and in line eventually to become our President.
He is at home in the boardrooms of the world’s richest companies and moves with grace among the greats of this century.
His unrehearsed television interviews are laced with humour and compassion about our dark past.
He speaks an easy, fluent and unaccented English while remaining steadfastly rooted in his African personality.
He is a man for all seasons, a consummate politician and a diplomat, in many ways so different to the run of the mill politicians to which we have become inured in South Africa.
But even such a man can put his foot in it, as he did a few days ago when on a flesh-pressing tour to Seshego in the troubled region of Limpopo he advised Johana Phala to register to vote in the upcoming national elections.
Johana, you see, threatened to turn her back on the registration process because the governing party had disappointed her in a number of ways. Ramaphosa tried to defuse her anger, reprimanding that if all South Africans don’t register `the Boers will come back to control us’.
The interesting thing was that he was speaking to Johana in Sepedi, which was understood by a black reporter who thought the great man’s utterances newsworthy enough to report them, which speaks volumes for the journalist’s professionalism.
The story spread like a virus in the media, stimulating the usual flood of social media comment and repartee.
We were suddenly, despite 20 years of non-racial gentility, posturing if you like, back in the bad old days of derogatory name-calling, ethnic branding and fear-mongering.
I have some sympathy with Mr Ramaphosa in the circumstances.
Speaking in Sepedi it would be quite natural for him to use the word Boer, not in its context of the controversial liberation ditty, but simply as a descriptive adjective recalling the subjugation of blacks by whites to remind Johana of the bad old days.
It was, one may safely assume, not the Deputy President’s intention to inflame race relations but the incident should be a lesson to us all that the unconscious use of stereotyped language can in fact be regarded as evidence of strongly-held racial attitudes.
What Ramaphosa meant to convey to Johana, he later explained, was that we should all be moving forward in South Africa, that our democracy was hard fought for and that it should not be eroded by apathy, disappointment or anger.
But then the Johanas of this world, maybe homeless, jobless and hungry, are focussed on the pains of the present, not the visions of the future.
