COMMENT
The latest furor over racism at Cape Town restaurants has found an unlikely target: a black waiter who has been suspended and may possibly lose his job of eight years over the latest incident.
Mike Dzange, a Zimbabwean national appeared on ENCA last night, to apologise for printing "2 blacks" on the bill for the table he was serving at the Bungalow in Clifton. One of the black patrons in question took to social media to complain about the restaurant and the story has made headlines since.
Dzange looks terrified in the interview, and close to tears. I don't blame him: he's been suspended, while an internal investigation takes place. It's not clear if it is with or without pay, and he may lose his job once the investigation is completed. And I understand that he has a family to support and was saving to go back to university.
It's a bitter pill to swallow. It's difficult not to see that Dzange has been turned into a scapegoat for a system, whether informal or not, that was at least tacitly allowed.
In the interview, Dzange, acknowledges that he's done this before, including with tables of white people. But he insists it is not company policy.
He's been working at the The Bungalow in Clifton for eight years.
I'm sure it wasn't official policy, but if it was tolerated with no previous indication that he should stop doing it, the restaurant alone should take the rap for what happened. It's 2016. Racism in Cape Town, especially at restaurants in the mother city, has been a massive issue for a few years now. How was The Bungalow not aware that this was happening at its restaurant?
Cape Town restaurants have repeatedly been the centre of allegations of racism, with anecdotal evidence constantly surfacing of black people being denied tables which their white counterparts easily get. It has even led one columnist to create a safe list for black diners where they could be sure to receive a welcome.
How were you not doing sensitivity training with your staff given what's happened in your very city, in your very industry? Not to mention the current climate and history -- and presence -- of structural racism, that we must all fight?
It seems that The Bungalow and its owners sat up and took notice of what we've all been talking about for a long time, racism at Cape Town restaurants, a little too late.
They were helped along by the fact that a rather popular medical doctor tweeted the news at first, followed by other high profile individuals. Complaints by certain kinds of people always make those in power pay attention.
The patrons were quite right to complain: in a country with our history, and continued structural racism, it is ludicrous to have racial descriptors on a bill.
But the real travesty is not that Dzange did it this one time. It was that he was allowed to do it for possibly a much longer time until the right people noticed.
Now there's an internal investigation, and according to a spokesperson for the company who spoke during the ENCA segment, the system has been changed so that waiters cannot manually enter descriptors for the tables they are serving. They will have to use table numbers, which is the company policy.
This is the right course of action, as would training for all their staff, including Dzange. But to make a black working class man the fall guy for structural racism is the most awful irony.
Mike Dzange cannot lose his job over this.