Let the battle against racism define us -- not nonracialism
Xolela Mangcu calls for a new body that, without denying the historical experience of race, rallies South Africans around the common values that underpin our humanity
SOUTH Africa needs a new, multiracial, anti-racist, nonpartisan, national democratic forum based on a set of common values as a basis for collectively imagining our future.
That is a mouthful indeed. So let me break down what I mean.
I am lately attracted to Chief Albert Luthuli’s vision of “a multiracial society in a nonracial democracy”. However, whereas Luthuli might have conceived of multiracialism in liberal terms, in our present conjuncture the term can be given a more radical, democratic meaning that gestures towards the irreducible plurality and reality of our racialised identities.
Instead of seeing race as biology, we would see it as a historical experience, and multiracialism would mean bringing those diverse historical experiences together.
Of necessity this would require what Harvard University’s Robert Heifetz calls adaptive leadership — that is, leadership geared towards mediating conflicting group interests. Nelson Mandela bequeathed to us a leadership model that was about overcoming group difference. What we now need is leadership able to mediate group difference.
I would proceed to replace Luthuli’s idea of a “nonracial democracy” with an “anti-racist democracy”.
There is a tendency in South Africa to think that there has been a long-standing consensus on the concept of nonracialism. The Unity Movement and the PAC were the first to articulate the concept, but it fell into disuse until it was revived as a mobilising tool by the ANC only in the ’80s. And thousands of people were killed in the black community because of differences over this concept between ANC and black consciousness activists.
The concept has now taken on another dimension as the basis for a new ideology of nonracial inequality. To paraphrase the former Harvard academic Nathan Glazer: “We are all nonracialists now” — former oppressors and oppressed alike.
Anti-racism would clarify the moral struggle of our times. It would be a framework for bringing together like-minded people against this one thing that stands between us and our humanity — racism.
This country is 90% black and is most certainly going to become even more so because of the reality of demographic transformation. Are we really willing to leave behind a society in which our children are strangers and therefore potential enemies of each other?
In addition to anti-racism as a founding value, the people who make up the forum should not be ideologues seeking to proselytise other people into their own view.
What I have in mind are people united simply around the fact that our country is headed south, and reasonable people need to inter- TRAILBLAZER: The vision of Albert Luthuli, seen here receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, of a ’multiracial society in a nonracial democracy’ needs to be radicalised to acknowledge the plurality of South African racial identities, says the writer of this article vene to make their voices heard.
This is why the forum I am calling for would not be a political party. Political parties are short-term by nature — they think in terms of five-year election cycles.
No sooner are leaders elected than they seek to make a quick buck, by hook or by crook. Failing that, they cling to power for dear life. To keep thinking political parties are our salvation is to live in a fool’s paradise.
We need a forum that would think about society in intergenerational terms, and whose members are therefore not interested in any gain. The National Development Plan fell victim to the shenanigans of alliance politics and bickering — and to what US economist William Easterly calls the “tyranny of experts”. We need to create a space for the emergence of new visionaries whose aim is not the accumulation of wealth or power.
That brings me to the question of values. Values are not interests. They are not what we want but what we are willing to give up — during the struggle this was our lives; now it must be the curse of self-interest.
By disavowing gain as the primary motivation of human action, this forum would model another world for our children. They would see us behaving in ways that are befitting of what it means to be a citizen of a democratic country. They would begin to see that we were not always this corrupt and self-seeking.
They would see the meaning of citizenship as the communal purpose one shares with one’s neighbour about what to do about the failing school down the road, or the corrupt police chief or the tenderpreneurs in the community. Our young people need to know that life in the black community did not begin in 1994 and that there are traditions we need to revive.
Aggrey Klaaste, former editor of the Sowetan, articulated this vision long before the magical 1994: “Political kingdoms do not stand up on their own, pristine, exultant as a galvanising abstraction. They are also not the result of politicising and rhetoric. Political kingdoms, to be effective and particularly democratic, need all sorts of power structures to underpin them. They need the back-up of strong people who have clout academically, who have strength to recognise the value of a free press, who have a spiritual or religious foundation. Such kingdoms, sadly, also need a strong defence system, a respectable system of justice and a strong security system.”
And then he said, as if he knew where we might find ourselves today: “In the end we are saying to our brothers and sisters who are actively involved in the struggle, they need to build strong people. A strong following of thinkers and doers. Not simply a vast number of angry and plainly dangerous people. We say the political kingdom will look after itself. It will look after itself particularly if it has strong people behind it.”
The forum I am proposing would crowd in those strong people and stir their imagination towards a higher cause.
But how, you might ask, would such a body have actual impact on the decision-making processes that determine people’s lives?
One of the biggest mistakes the ANC made in taking office in 1994 was to confuse political power with cultural power. It is now learning too rudely that the former is meaningless without the latter. It leads to what ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang called “a cesspit of sleaze” in Nkandla. I am sure there are many men and women of similar integrity where Msimang comes from.
Cultural power is about agendasetting. As Klaaste argued, agendasetting requires strong people.
By failing to invest in the development of a black intellectual cadre over the past 20 years, the ANC government lost the game from the beginning.
The forum I am proposing would be a space for a new generation of thinkers and inventors from across all sectors of our society.
It would not be based on a desire to win political majorities. Such a body would be based on principles of racial justice that are not cynically manipulated to win votes but to create mutual understanding.
In two generations our children would become the agenda-setters, knowing how to infuse power with goodness.
For that to happen we need to make the turn now. Change is possible, if we put our minds to it. At the very least that is the one lesson we should have learnt from Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Chris Hani, Steve Biko. They prepared the path for this moment. They set the precedent for what we need to do now — imagine a world beyond our personal interests, and work towards it.
Mangcu is author of “The Colour of Our Future: Does Race Matter in Post-Apartheid South Africa?”, Wits Press, 2015
What I have in mind are people united simply around the fact that our country is headed south