Race-based populism
A COUPLE of years ago, I was invited to a symposium on race relations at a Durban community centre.
As is customary on these occasions, the conversations were to conclude with a formal dinner that sounded promising.
Curiously, just before dinner I was discreetly told by a co-participant to “tank up” at an improvised “control room”, with which some readers would be familiar – the car boot.
Apparently, some participants had insisted that they would attend the dinner on two conditions: that only halaal meat would be served and there would be no alcohol.
Rather than create cultural complications, the hosts had graciously acquiesced.
Hosting South Africans of Indian origin – I’ve preferred the shorter version, IndoSouth Africans, in much the same way Americans of African origin are referred to as Afro-Americans – can be a nightmare; there are just too many dietary taboos.
Some are vegetarian. Others don’t eat this or that, while still others insist on halaal.
Some are teetotallers, but there are those who will not accept drinking at the table.
My symposium experience came to mind, while listening to Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema’s repugnant views about Indians at the EFF’s birthday shebang at Durban’s Currie’s Fountain just over a week ago.
Ironically, this was the headquarters of the erstwhile Durban Indian Sports Grounds Association, the Mecca of non-racial football and the birthplace of the South African Council on Sports.
Malema’s irreverent outbursts echoed many of the themes he voiced a few years ago, also against IndoSouth Africans, for which he was made to apologise and undertake not to repeat such disparaging remarks against this community.
This time around, Malema’s speech broke new ground by formally linking ethnic relativism to the treatment of Africans by Afrikaners.
I can’t recall an Indo-South African feeding a person to the lions or one trying to seal a black youth in a coffin or one flinging a doctor out of the top floor of a police station.
Alongside fellow South Africans, including Afrikaners, they fought crimes against humanity.
For starters it is necessary to separate racism and ethnicity from a non-racial, but multi-cultural South Africa of the 21st century.
The post-1994 wave of immigration mainly from Africa has altered the landscape of urban and rural South Africa.
KwaZulu-Natal, in particular, now hosts people from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds.
Far from Indo-South Africans being a political and an economic drag, this spectacular cosmopolitanism or “Rainbow Nation” has actually helped maintain the Republic’s post-apartheid relevance.
Diversity has enriched it culturally and economically.
Multi-cultural South Africa is an irreversible reality, whether Malema and his “ragtag ‘n bobtail rabble” like it or not.
However, in an age of global connectivity it is difficult for the “melting pot” experiment to be easily replicated.
In matters of food, faith and even fashion, the inheritance of the old Natal Colony and of the Republiek will persist for generations although they are already being renewed.
Indian restaurants will continue to thrive on curry; Bollywood films will influence fashion and fads; and the temples, mosques and churches will remain at the epicentres of community life and social certitudes for Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
Indo-South African holders of South African passports will continue to fail the Malema test at King Shaka and OR Tambo International Airports (in February last year, Malema taunted and bullied some journalists that the Guptaowned media such as ANN7 and The New Age would not be welcome at his party’s events).
“Guptas (incidentally in 2016 they were naturalised South African citizens) must leave the country. We are tired of talking about (the) Guptas. We are going to take practical action,” Malema threatened.
Unlike his 6% electoral support, the mainstream political parties – the ANC, DA, IFP, Cope etc. – representing 94% of the population, have accepted foreign implants into a “Rainbow Nation” with grace, generosity and remarkably little social tension.
Yes, South Africa has a race problem but considering the magnitude of the postapartheid redrawing of the ethnic and cultural landscape, it is remarkable that chauvinism and cultural xenophobia have not taken deep roots in mainstream politics as has social cohesion.
Ironically, Malema deserved a hearing regardless of how horrid his views were.
Diversity, after all, cannot be confined to merely a celebration of cultures that originated outside Mzansi.
Minority currents include the angry, under-achieving black and white working classes, particularly in the rust belts of Isithebe and Newcastle in northern KZN; Darling in the Western Cape; Qwa Qwa in the former OFS and the other pre-existing industrial growth points, which provided sustenance for a short while, even to Malema’s followers.
The sense of the EFF’s vulnerability, it would seem, is nominally economic.
In KZN and in pockets elsewhere, Indo-South Africans aren’t comparatively better off – though they have a better record of generating selfemployment.
And in terms of the country’s BEE policies, they are obliged by regulation to empower African partners, while under the Labour Laws they are required to pay a minimum wage and not bread and mealie meals or whatever food items, although this sustained the family of Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo throughout his school days.
At the heart of the Malema’s four-year surge is his despair over the collapse of a once shameful way of life and visceral rage against a new non-racialism that happened too fast and without sensitivity.
Malema may not be a Verwoerd or a Terre Blanche but his race-based populism and his concern for Africanist values conceal a warped mind. He truly belongs to the fringe and one suspects might remain there even after 2019.