SA needs News honest discussion about issues not resolved after 1994
In the heady post-Codesa days, when apartheid seemed to breathe its last and democracy was arriving, the rise of Afrikaner agitation against the government might have been inconceivable. Much faith was put in a brand-new constitution that asserted equal rights and opportunities for all.
This weekend’s unveiling of a document called the Joint Afrikaner Declaration, underlines that there is today no universal satisfaction with the new dispensation, and that the utopia of a united South Africa, meeting the needs of all irrespective of race, remains stubbornly beyond our grasp.
The declaration places Afrikaners as among the most dissatisfied of the various national constituencies. But it also highlights starkly contrasting visions of what a democratic South Africa should deliver for all the groups making up the nation.
Broadly, the main grievance of the organisers, the Afrikaner Leadership Network (a conglomeration of Afrikaner groups and individuals), relates to the country’s governance crisis, which has led to the decimation of public services and economic stagnation. Few South Africans of every hue and status whether they live in the suburbs, villages or townships will quibble with the network’s observations and its call for something to be done urgently to turn things about.
The network’s other complaint relates to the role and status of those who self-identify as Afrikaners in post-1994 South Africa, as well as what it describes as the Afrikaners’ 30-year “campaign” to protect their rights and freedoms. This is where its views are bound to diverge from those of most South Africans, and especially black people. For example, while pledging its support for the equality of all, as well as for redress, the group stridently rejects “the perpetuation of racial laws” (read affirmative action), as these “reduce Afrikaners to second-class citizens, leading to unequal citizenship”. Afrikaner children, it argues, “cannot be blamed for what had happened before they were born”.
But the group does not say how historical and current disadvantages faced by black citizens in particular are to be addressed three decades after the supposed end of apartheid. The group’s references to cultural autonomy, focused on Afrikaner “special cultural zones with a geographic base”, will also raise eyebrows.
The network says these spaces such as schools, universities and trade unions are “under constant political attack and are put in jeopardy by legislation and policy”. Any talk of “cultural zones” reserved for a particular racial group will rankle with black South Africans, for whom South Africa itself was made a no-go zone under apartheid, which sought to confine them to impoverished “homelands” under a “separate but equal” system.
The choice of a loose alliance a broad church, as it were instead of a single organisation suggests the objective of mobilising as wide a spectrum of Afrikaner interests as possible, while still allowing for the autonomy of its constituent parts. But it also explains messaging that is at once both conciliatory and confrontational which says Afrikaners are an intrinsic part of South Africa while at the same time a group that needs its own separate schools and other “spaces”. In a similar vein, the document is scathing towards the government while calling for co-operation with it.
The group believes it’s not enough that South Africa is a democracy allowing for free political participation. Afrikaners, who form “a permanent minority”, are “democratically excluded from and (are) without access to government”, leaving them only with the option of using “the courts, the media and public confrontation”.
Curiously, the organisers preferred to position the initiative as a cultural rather than a political one. Yet all the issues they raise, including the cultural ones, are essentially political, and can obviously and ultimately only be resolved through political engagement. Perhaps the issues were framed as culhad tural ones so the group could avoid being accused of being a white organisation opposed to the majority-black government of the day?
The declaration is notable for its stridency in criticising, and even challenging, the ANC government, describing it as “increasingly distant” and “hostile”. In the immediate aftermath of 1994, such a frontal challenge would have been unthinkable, when white people kept their heads below the parapet, on pain of being labelled apartheid apologists.
Could it be that the years that ensued, characterised by a directionless ruling party and a country going to pot in many respects, emboldened the Afrikaner leadership to speak loudly, rather than in hushed tones, away from the powers that be?
Of course, our democracy is better served when every citizen, or their representatives, are free to fearlessly air their grievances and put forward solutions to the country’s problems. But could we now be in an age, not of nation-building and searching for solidarity and common progress, but one of division and polarisation, where, as Afrikaners assert their exclusive group interests, the black majority (most of whom have yet to see many of the fruits promised in 1994) also agitate for their interests, irrespective of how the rest of their compatriots are affected?
The biggest question of all is whether the erosion of South Africa’s political centre, precipitated largely by the ruling ANC’s loss of direction and its apparent abandonment of its mission of unifying South Africans and building a common sense of nationhood, has placed the country on a dangerous precipice? Perhaps, rather than making a fetish of what was achieved at Codesa and sticking our heads in the sand, what the country needs is a new round of honest engagement about its unfinished post-1994 business.