Black well-to-do the strongest cards in SA’s electoral pack
Astudy of the Black Middle-Class Report by the University of Cape Town in 2020 shows dramatic growth in the black middle class, eclipsing the white middle class. The study reflects on the segment’s significant and continued rise, the nuanced changes over the years and trends likely to influence and entrench the sector as the foremost market, consumer or otherwise, into the future. While the report focused on the economics of this class, the soft (social, political, and cultural) power issues, which are somewhat underplayed, might be decisive in defining society’s decision about who should govern South Africa.
The black middle class might be the authority to define “the will of the people” and which party best represents that will in the current phase of the country’s political development.
Expanding the middle class has always been the key to realising a modern and prosperous society. It is required to transform the economic growth model and reform templates of generational exclusion in any economy.
The network variability of this class is critical to building and maintaining social harmony, stability, and long-lasting national peace and social cohesion.
Given the general homogeneity of this class across race and gender divides, members of this class have in common their membership and their acceptance of certain rules to hold it together.
Usually the differential character of the economic, political, social, and cultural system and the ambitions of members of this class is sufficient to ensure that society is never uniform. The relative relationship with the right to choose and defence of the freedoms of speech, conscience, association, press and assembly has obligated the middle class to advocate a society where diversity is a keynote of social condition and opinion.
They are, therefore, the most political and opinionated strata of society. They understand what the critical prizes of politics are and know the importance of government as the ultimate prize of politics and somewhat the residue of past politics.
As individuals, they constitute the cognitive elite component of society. Their exposure to the conceptual world makes them capsules of ideological orientation and can thus be easily consumed by society. How they are created as a class creates nodes of influence that can be coordinated through the alums; most belong and interact within their education occurrence.
Given an opportunity and space to influence society, and most of them, through the vocations by which they have enjoyed access to society, can determine the cadence of politics in a society.
Contrary to popular belief, most revolutions were conceptualised, planned, and orchestrated by a middle class that the political, governing, and ruling establishment had ignored. This class is usually the first to point out the inequality of access to political power.
With near certainty, they will use their influence or available mechanisms to challenge and ultimately change the status quo.
The intercorrellated nature of social and political status, which defines the middle class in democracies with gross inequalities such as South Africa, makes members of this class strategic elites who ultimately structure backgrounds as exclusive as those of economic elites. They are the penultimate strata to be in or out of the higher circles of society.
This class’s interests, which embody active diversities in any society, generally become practical politics and thus structure continual tensions with which the unstable equilibrium of power will be managed to be about the will of the people.
In a report to the British colonial office from South Africa before it became a union, Lord Milner explained the late 1800s and early 1900s black middle class as having “emerged from mission schools strongly attached to the ideals of Christianity, wore Victorian attire, adhered to British cultural values, and put much of their faith in what they referred to as a white sense of fair play
… detached from traditional society, they were employed as teachers, church ministers, clerks, interpreters and journalists, and aspired to show how easily Africans could adapt to white civilisation.
“They envisioned a ‘nonracial civilised’ society where merit counted more than colour”.
Theoretically, they could be dubbed the “new black elite”. They embraced modern political thinking and modern (read Western) behaviour and practices. They practised a mainstream, European-derived Christianity and became South Africa’s first generation of African (non-ethnic) nationalists. It is the extent to which colonialism, apartheid, and the liberal order driven by an imperialist Western global order has allowed postcolonial and post-apartheid black middle class to be different to the template of the 1900s, save for new colonial nodal references.
As a self-defined class full of sovereign individuals with an omnipresent demand to be recognised as the bulwark for full economic development and success, they tend to see themselves as an institution to be curated into posterity. The daily decisions they make in their normal day-to-day work have created a belief that beyond those with political power, they embody the rest of the power, not mere opinion.
If durability is the essence of a political, constitutional, and democratic order, they are the background of permanence upon which the power could be sanctified.
The middle class’s ability to on-board and influence rather than coerce society to its programmes, or soft power, is one of the profoundly undermined determinants of electoral outcomes deep into postconflict democratic orders; the 2024 national elections will be no different.
The moral authority of the anti-apartheid struggle was equally a function of the calibre and breed of leaders who executed a global campaign that was rewarded by a worldwide statute declaring apartheid a crime against humanity.
How the early middle class, and notably the cohort of Mandela-Tambo and others, shaped society’s preferences for the freedom they defined, through appeal and attraction, cements the power of the middle class in any society.
What is unfortunate about the upcoming elections is that the depth of discontent within the middle-class points to a condition where those who need opinions of those confirmed by status or otherwise will be reliant on members of this class.
They command access to most platforms where political parties seek to be invited or allowed to address them. They are still teachers, journalists, academics, priests, police officers, clerks, lawyers, and leading members of civil society organisations.
Any conceivable institution that has custody of society, either repeatedly and at determinable intervals, is led, managed, or dominated by the middle class. They operate most social infrastructure gates. Those in the celebrity sector, and the most crowd-pulling, touch society far and near.
It is foolish to think of middle-class interests as not a factor to impinge upon an ideologically undefined diversity of voters. The middle class have knowledge and mastery of the terrains of planting their ideas, which they know will relate to what is going on; political rhetoric and nostalgia wither in the terrains they work within.