IN FEBRUARY last year the Forum of Black Journalists was summarily dismissed as "racist" and condemned as out of step with the Constitution of South Africa for hosting ANC president Jacob Zuma as a guest.

IN FEBRUARY last year the Forum of Black Journalists was summarily dismissed as "racist" and condemned as out of step with the Constitution of South Africa for hosting ANC president Jacob Zuma as a guest.

Radio 702's aggrieved Katy Katopodis rushed a complaint to the South African Human Rights Commission.

As sure as amen follows a prayer, the commission's adjudicative response to the FBJ's misguided cheek was unmistakable. True to South Africa's way of life, a just-us-blacks meeting is no proposition for white blessings to come rushing in.

Seven months thereafter, in September, the good heavens were witness to Zuma being a guest of the Hellenic, Italian and Portuguese Alliance.

Last Thursday the minority communities were once more in full swing, honoured by Zuma's presence with no brow moving an inch in surprise as to why it would be an issue had it been a black gathering?

Even human rights lawyer George Bizos was also there, as if to assure all and sundry that the first, second and third generation rights were not in harms way.

In the expected, reconciliatory and mature order of things, the FBJ has not turned the tables on the commission.

The heavens have similarly twice smiled that Zuma can be met with regular ease by minority communities. Why then is there an automatic uproar when it is the turn of the component of the majority population to meet Zuma?

Part of the answer lies in the notion in which blacks are fashioned to only sing, dance and die for causes they need not bother exercising their minds for, or chance demonstrating thought leadership in the direction of changing the reality of their unique experiences by the sheer weight of their numbers to prove that they are not only in office but also in power.

But the culprits for this zombification of blacks are not solely traceable to white paternalistic mischief as it is as much a conniving act of culpable blacks that Steve Biko called non-whites.

Caught between white paternalistic mischief and conniving black culpability, the much avowed principle of nonracialism suffocates in the quicksand of mutual deceit. This deceit produces self-perpetuating, unnatural beings.

In the process, whites are unable to genuinely exorcise themselves from the given and enduring demons of their instinctual superiority complexes, while blacks wallow in terminal inferiority complexes from which they are never quite certain to emerge and declare themselves as beings in their own right without reference to white consent and validation.

The fault, dear South Africans, does not lie in the skins you were born into, but in continuing to believe that there is blissfully nothing untoward in whites meeting on their own and yet scream to high heaven of impending danger when blacks deem it fit to get into committee.

There need be no reminding that the choices so readily enjoyed today would not have been possible had it not been for the initial preparedness of the black majority to die for them .

In the unperturbed meetings that the Hellenic, Italian and Portuguese Alliance has had with Zuma, the ruling by the SAHRC that the one he had with the FBJ was illegal, stands to show that in the yawning gap between the law and justice there is always room for a good fight to be waged.

Truth warriors do not relent.