INDIANS SHOULD NOT BE BEGRUDGED FOR EMPOWERING THEMSELVES
After a backlash by Indian South Africans following claims they had benefited from apartheid, Standard Bank, whose economic report sparked controversy, this week denied this was the case. And economist Bonke Dumisa clarified his stance. CANDICE SOOBRAMON
‘SUGGESTIONS that Indians harnessed gains from apartheid were misplaced and insiduous, according to Standard Bank, which sought to distance itself from independent analysts’ interpretation of a report it had issued on how living standards have changed among South Africa’s main race groups.
Following an outcry in the Indian community over certain interpretations of the findings – with one reportedly saying that because Indians had fared better than other race groups during apartheid, they should be excluded from black economic empowerment policies – Standard Bank this week issued a lengthy statement, under the heading, “Indians did not benefit from apartheid”.
“Apartheid was, by its definition, a ruthlessly-enforced regime of race-based exclusion and segregation. And the lines that determined those who gained, and those who were structurally undermined were both crude, and simple: whites, particularly men (professionally), benefited – and all others were undermined,” the bank said.
“Though there were undeniably degrees of exclusion – and none can legitimately contest that black African South Africans were the most grossly suppressed of all by the apartheid state – this reality should not deflect attention from the base reality outlined above.”
It said Indian children growing up under apartheid found that their futures and prospects were deeply constrained by apartheid’s structural impositions.
“Indian children received inferior education; their parents were exposed to the brutal and dehumanising controls that concretised the apartheid order; and their futures were fundamentally undermined by a system bent on benefiting one group at the expense of all others.”
Standard Bank’s study shows that since 1996 the gap between Indians/Asians and whites is narrowing at the fastest pace relative to both blacks and coloureds.
It shows that, in the aggregate, for every R1 earned by white South Africans in 2014, Indians/Asians earned 51 cents. Comparatively, blacks and coloureds earned 13 cents and 20 cents, respectively, in 2014.
The bank said its finding had attracted incorrect inferences from third parties not related to the report. It cited the example of a newspaper quoting economist Professor Bonke Dumisa as putting this down to Indian South Africans “being less oppressed during apartheid”.
Another economist, Dawie Roodt, reportedly said that “there were no grounds for Indians to remain beneficiaries of black economic empowerment policies”.
Standard Bank said it strongly disagreed with this third party interpretation. “At no point does the report refer or analyse income pre-1994 (apartheid-era) and as such no comparisons were made between apartheid and post-apartheid income distribution,” it said.
“As the Standard Bank LSM (Living Standards Measure) study has shown, the Indian community has benefited from freedom – not from apartheid. This is a source of inspiration, rather than a moment for regress and discrimination.”
Dumisa had also reportedly said businesses were now pushing Indians up the corporate ladder and not blacks, “However, people don’t want to discuss it. If one tries to raise the issue you are branded racist.”
Clarifying his point, Dumisa this week told POST he in no way said Indians benefited from apartheid.
“You have to look at this issue holistically. The apartheid regime oppressed all the ‘nonwhite’ race groups. There were, however, four official classifications, which were even enforced in the prison system; you had whites as the ‘first class’ citizens with all the privileges; there was a second category, which was rather fuzzy; then there were Indians and coloureds as ‘third class’ citizens seriously oppressed, but with some exceptions here and there.
“Then, there were black Africans as ‘fourth class’ citizens with a few extra oppressive measures designed specifically for them, and this included Bantu Education...”
Dumisa said Bantu Education was specifically designed for the “Bantu to know his place”. He said the enforcement of the dompass system was strongly enforced to also achieve this end.
“Many blacks who wanted to move into many professions were not allowed to do so. Blacks who wanted to be chartered accountants before 1983, could not do so because the law did not allow them to do so.”
Dumisa added that the Bantu education system did serious damage to black Africans. “And it cannot be denied that many of the current problems we find in black education today can be traced back to the formal Bantu Education.
“Hence, in 1994 when we moved into the post-apartheid era, the black African population group still had more hurdles to jump to be able to compete equally with people of other races. In golf terms, this is called ‘the handicap’.
“The apartheid extra-oppressive measures thus ensured the black African group had more disadvantages than the other race groups. Consequently, their average salaries had to be the lowest from the onset. It was for this reason the Employment Equity Act had to factor in this historical reality.”
Dumisa said reports by the Employment Equity Commission had shown that even though there had been an increase of black African professionals in the higher occupational levels, there had been higher penetration by the other race groups into the higher-paying positions.
“The mere fact that I am effectively being harassed for daring to comment objectively on these issues is an indication of an unnecessary inter-racial debate. We cannot redress past imbalances if we are deliberately in denial about the historical reality thereof.”
Dumisa said he did not criticise nor begrudge some Indian South Africans for being rich. “It is their right to do so, if they know how to create opportunities for themselves. The historical fact, though, is that you are bound to find fewer black African chartered accountants, fewer black African senior counsel (silks), fewer black African engineers etc, to create those opportunities (for themselves), because they started last in the race and they still have ‘the handicap’ in this income race.
“I work very closely with many very successful Indian professionals, who are very successful because they deserve it. Some of them are my personal friends. But does this mean I must be muzzled from honestly and objectively commenting on some of the structural economic challenges our country faces? How do we improve the economic superstructure if we are in denial about the factual historical foundations?”
Economist Dawie Roodt, who recently completed his own research on empowerment, had reportedly said there was no reason for Indian people to be included in economic reform.“Indians have relatively few kids and old people.
“The number with qualifications has sky-rocketed and unemployment is falling. It is a sweet time for Indians,” he was quoted as saying.
This week, Roodt told POST he had conducted objective calculations and believed one should empower those who needed it the most and these were black and coloured women.
“Indians as a group are in a better position as compared to blacks as a group and coloureds as a group, and as compared to black and coloured women. To be honest, I don’t think anyone should be part of BEE. We need to support people who need to be supported at this point in time.”
ON AUGUST 10, Standard Bank released a report assessing, among other things, how incomes of South Africans have changed in the recent past using mostly publicly available information. The study also looked at how income is distributed across provinces, municipalities/ regions, race, and across individuals.
Relevant for the purpose of this note, the study showed that since 1996 the gap between Indians/Asians and whites is narrowing at the fastest pace relative to both blacks and coloureds, a finding previously reported by Stats SA (see for example Poverty Trends in South Africa, 2014).
We showed that, in the aggregate, for every R1 earned by white South Africans in 2014, Indians/Asians earned 51 cents. Comparatively, blacks and coloureds earned 13 cents and 20 cents, respectively, in 2014.
This finding has attracted incorrect inferences from third parties not related to the report.
For example, The Sunday Tribune quotes economist Professor Bonke Dumisa as putting this down to Indian South Africans “being less oppressed during apartheid”.
Another economist, Dawie Roodt, reportedly said that “there were no grounds for Indians to remain beneficiaries of black economic empowerment policies”.
We set out below why we strongly disagree with this third party interpretation of the above-mentioned report.
At no point does the report refer or analyse income pre1994 (apartheid-era), and as such no comparisons were made between apartheid and post-apartheid income distribution.
Further, it should be easily understood that aggregation naturally masks important details in the data, such as South Africa’s proportionately large black population, which implies that collective income gains are likely to be slower. In 2014, the black population accounted for 80% of society, against 2.5% Indians, 9% coloureds and 8% whites.
Constructively, our report noted that the aggregate personal income for blacks and coloureds increased by 385% and 439% in the period 1996 to 2014, even exceeding that of the white community (383%).
However, our challenges to the misplaced inferences to our report are less technical, and relate more to the insidious suggestions that Indians harnessed gains from apartheid.
Apartheid was, by its definition, a ruthlesslyenforced regime of race-based exclusion and segregation. And the line that determined those who gained, and those who were structurally undermined were both crude, and simple: whites, particularly men (professionally), benefited – and all others were undermined.
Though there were undeniably degrees of exclusion – and none can legitimately contest that black African South Africans were the most grossly suppressed of all by the apartheid state – this reality should not deflect attention from the base reality outlined above.
Indian children growing up under apartheid found that their futures and prospects were deeply constrained by apartheid’s structural impositions: more often than not they grew up in areas deemed by the state to be suitable for their race – their mobility constrained as a means of shifting them out of zones of white commercial and suburban control.
Indian children received inferior education; their parents were exposed to the brutal and dehumanising controls that concretised the apartheid order; and their futures were fundamentally undermined by a system bent on benefiting one group at the expense of all others.
When the state offered a degree of compromise to Indian South Africans (as with the Tricameral Parliament in 1983) it did so with inherent condescension, and without relinquishing the vice-like grip on power and influence that was held by the white minority.
As such, the statement that Indians “benefited” from apartheid is in defiance of history and conscience. Indeed, it is defiance of the very principles of exclusion that Mahatma Gandhi railed against following his arrival in the country in 1893. Gandhi, like all Indians at the time, was forced to carry a pass, and in 1896 was witness to legislation in which Indian voting rights in what was then Natal were restricted.
A decade prior to Gandhi’s arrival in the country, the infamous Law 3 of 1885 was passed in the area then named the Transvaal, which aimed to demarcate areas to Indian families, and ensure that they were unable to own fixed property outside of these imposed zones of exclusion.
To state that Indians benefited from apartheid is also to deny that Indians were barred from employment in the mining industry, and were blocked – together with all “non-Europeans” – from walking on the sidewalks in what was then the Transvaal; from living in any area of the “Boer republic” (which to this day explains the limited size of the Indian population in the Free State); and from exercising the basic dignities which the “new” South Africa has enabled since 1994. It is to ignore the reality that the piecemeal approach by the apartheid state to offer compromise to the Indian community in the early 1980s came after a century of distinct and crushing oppression.
It is also in defiance of the words of South African writer Fatima Meer – a towering figure throughout the anti-apartheid struggle – who wrote in 2000 that “South African Indians participated fully in the drawing up of the new constitution and are today fullyfledged citizens of the country. They earned their right to this through their tremendous input into the economic and political life of the country and above all through their moral contribution in laying the basis for a just and humane society”.
These words were included in an article titled “Indian South Africans – the Struggle to be South African”, where Meer speaks about the challenge of countering the ideas which lie at the heart of the misguided sense that Indians were preferentially promoted by a system that severely undermined them and limited their potential for success.
Fatima Meer was one of many South African Indians who played a decisive role in ending apartheid. After Gandhi returned to India, having spent two decades in South Africa, his work was picked up by some of the anti-apartheid struggle’s most venerated individuals: Yusuf Dadoo, Farouk Meer, Ahmed Kathrada and Billy Nair. Meanwhile, others, such as Mac Maharaj, Laloo Chiba and Indres Naidoo, joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, placing their lives at risk to forge a future that would be commensurate with the ANC’s stated ideal of non-racialism.
Indeed, in commemorating the arrival of the first indentured labourers from India, who arrived in South Africa in 1860, former president Kgalema Motlanthe implored us to reach a “point of maturity in our national consciousness” where the country’s diversity is a point of intrinsic strength, rather than the locus of division and friction.
The ascent of the South African Indian community since the shackles of apartheid’s restrictions were lifted provides evidence not of the manner in which this community was disproportionately promoted under apartheid itself (as some have ludicrously contended), but rather of just how severe the curtailment of promise and prosper was for the Indian community under apartheid itself.
Stats SA, in its Poverty Trends Report 2014, shows that although poverty levels are declining in the Indian community, a large number still live below the poverty line. As the Standard Bank LSM study has shown, the Indian community has benefited from freedom – not from apartheid.
This is a source of inspiration, rather than a moment for regress and discrimination.