South Africa is polarising
There are extremes like the Eastern Cape’s deep rural areas, and Northern Cape’s Orania
I THOUGHT of the lament, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”, when I read about FW de Klerk’s recent speech.
He had tried to avert an unsustainable future, but he is now asking questions about the sustainability of a new form of racism. Elsewhere called Black Supremacy.
In fact, The Economist has often pointed out that when minority-rule dominates the majority, especially if that is by force, it is unsustainable.
But when the affirmative action favours the majority, then you are on the edge of something more sinister, going down the road to ethnic cleansing.
Looking at a map of Israel with the Palestinian Authority inside it is not so different from looking at an apartheid atlas of South Africa. Except in Israel there are only two states. One operates inside the other, but that “two-state solution” is not in vogue any more.
But is South Africa really moving towards a melting-pot model like Brazil, where there is plenty of racial mixing? There are still extremes – like the deep rural areas of the Eastern Cape, which remain very traditional. And on the opposite extreme – Orania in the Northern Cape.
South Africa is polarising – as are many countries. Whites almost need the wealth advantage to counterbalance the fact that they are outnumbered. What will happen to the whites if that epicentre of wealth shifts suddenly? It would have the same effect that “load shift” has on cargo transport. Those boats crossing the Mediterranean might suddenly be filled with whites looking for a port of entry into Europe, instead of blacks.
This sounds a bit crazy, but within one week I have read a brilliant article in the Daily Maverick about the rising influence of the alt-right in the world – including South Africa (by Marianne Thamm), and I also received a bulletin from Abahlali Press about the government’s deployment of “Casspirs” to conduct military repression of the surge for land being guided by Abahlali baseMjondolo. Land and dignity. Is this one and the same country?
What about language? Tshwane University has just decided to adopt English as its medium of instruction. How does that make white voters feel about the future of their country?
What about land expropriation without compensation as a policy, heading towards legislation? Yes, it will benefit blacks in terms of dignity. But it will bend property rights to breaking point.
In Israel, the two-state solution basically divides one space into two zones. Just before the UN was established, the British adopted a similar two-state solution for India. Move the Muslims to Pakistan (West and East, the latter became Bangladesh at a later date), and concentrate the Hindus in the middle. They called it “partition”.
But when Burma tries a similar approach – ringfencing Muslims into an enclave – that has become anathema. Now it is called “genocide” – for all the same reasons that so many champion the cause of the Palestinians. The two-state solution is no longer regarded as a goal, just a stage of development as history evolves.
In that part of the world, policy has been changing for millennia. Xerxes was a centraliser who brought the elite of the nations he conquered back to his capital at Suza. But his son, Art Xerxes, reversed that, even helping his minister of security (Nehemiah) to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Later, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall – across the northern frontier of his empire – to manage the incursions of Picts and Scots. The Chinese also built a wall to manage the raiding Mongols. But the Democrats are now calling Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall “a fifth century solution to a 21st century problem”. There goes the polarisation again.
We say we don’t like the two-state solution. But with our policies and actions, we are entrenching it by polarising citizens. This is hypocrisy.
What the ANC calls “unity” is not that at all; it is a strategy to avert the decline of the radical left in the context of a global boom in Conservatism. Neither faction of the ANC can possibly win an election any more – so they need one another, and thus they awkwardly stick together.
This is a kind of gridlock. South Africa takes sides with Maduro, risking further alienation from the North, whose economies are growing while Venezuela, Zimbabwe and North Korea are sinking. This kind of thinking will not take us past the two-state solution, because it probably cannot see that this is where we have ended up. Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.
Stephens is the executive director of the Desmond Tutu Centre for Leadership, and writes in his personal capacity.