Quota quandary
THE REACH of apartheid into our present and future is ironically assured not only by the lasting deleterious effects of the policy itself, but the pervasive acceptance of its labels as their definitive identity by so many South Africans.
This is the problem confronting contemporary society in its conviction that post-apartheid transformation is at once desirable and necessary.
If there isn’t transformation, a neoapartheid setting, with all its inequities and imbalances, will persist; to succeed, transformation must – so the orthodoxy goes – rely on the narrow racialistic identities contrived by ideologues the advocates of change mean to discredit and whose outdated schemes they hope to annul.
It is a circular argument that will continue to generate controversy, dissatisfaction and ill-feeling.
It can, however, produce positive results: the more that South Africans of “different” identities mix and interact, whether under the coercion of affirmative action or not, the less dogged they become about the nonsense notion that they really are what they look like, as the Nationalists pretended was true.
This is the most optimistic – and not unreasonable – view that rugby players and fans might adopt towards the news that South African rugby, off its own bat, is to reintroduce racial quotas at Vodacom Cup level to stimulate “transformation”.
RUGBY Union president Oregan Hoskins’s persuasive argument is that transformation “will never work if it’s based on people telling us what to do – be it government, business, banks, sponsors or anyone else. This is about rugby taking the lead ourselves”.
It’s a strategy endorsed by former WP and Springbok captain Corné Krige, who called it “a great initiative” which could help right the wrongs of the past.
A salutary objection is from former socalled quota player Breyton Paulse, an expressly deserving candidate in his team, who, today, believes that “quotas are out… we have progressed well beyond that point”.
Tellingly, he has. In time, there is hope that we all will.