Understand shifting thrust of SA race issue
THE era of nation-building based on the abstract notion of race reconciliation has lost its currency in our imagination. Non-racialism, especially understood narrowly as about the civility of social coexistence, as opposed to a substantive meaning that would conceive race relations in terms of socio-economic equality between races, is no longer effective as a mobilising force that appeals to emotions and reason.
While the initial phase of South Africa’s political transition placed a strong emphasis on the idea of unity and psychic commitment to co-existence of different races as part of a rainbow nation, the present moment demands far more concrete measures to yield genuine economic gains for the black majority.
The stubborn persistence of the social legacy of apartheid and the inability of the state to drive meaningful socio-economic change are some of the major contributing factors to the racialised tone of our public debates.
Conversations on social media about policy, for example land reform, black economic empowerment and the role of the private sector in society, have increasingly assumed a racialised if not intemperate tone. For example, a considerable part of the public inveighing against unethical conduct by a major private sector group has as its target white males in the private sector who are unconscious of their privilege. Incidentally, they dominate the roll call of corporate malfeasance as has been evident with KPMG, SAP, Steinhoff, and executives of major construction firms that colluded to fix bid prices related to 2010 World Cup infrastructure.
Social media has been the theatre through which much of the resentment on race has played out. In some cases, racial animosities have been expressed in tragicomical fashion, such as the organisation of virtual memorial services for Shamba the lion, which was shot after attacking its white owner on a Limpopo game farm. This lion was turned into a totem communicating symbolic violence against whites who are seen as resisting calls for land redistribution.
In another instance the colour of privilege or the privilege of colour came under the spotlight when DA politician Natasha Mazzone claimed it could not be said that she had been privileged as her father was “dark”, arrived from Italy and pulled himself up by his bootstraps – something many read as implying that black South Africans had not held tightly to their bootstraps as an escape route from under-privileged status.
While the fraction that participates in social media, or broadly the media space, is not representative of society – and sometimes social media debates get easily blown out of proportion – the power this segment has in ratcheting up the temperature of public opinion cannot be underestimated.
Those who participate are able to use a powerful instrument of communication to amplify their messages and ideologies.
These voices are, to a greater extent, those of the middle class or the more educated in society, but this does not mean their views are not shared by the underclasses or do not find resonance with them.
Theirs is also a counterweight to the arrogance of privilege.
It is significant that there is a rising cauldron of discontent driven by race politics, however fractional, in the social media. The voices that tend to ignite a powder-keg and drive revolution in societies are seldom those of the masses, who have limited access to instruments of communicative power, but those who are able to wield the pen – or today’s tools of social media, “the app” – people who can communicate their ideas fluently and influence the perception of politicians and other influencers in society.
In any case, historically it has been the middle classes that have been the most visible faces of social revolutions. This was true of the French Revolution in 1789, the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Paris student uprising in 1968, the protests in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in the more recent uprisings in North Africa, dubbed the Arab Spring.
The ideas that drive social revolutions, for good or ill, are those fomented by the educated elite or middle class.
This is true of groups who are standardbearers of progressive thought as well as groups such as AfriForum, which propound right-wing ideas.
There are many reasons that race relations in South Africa are severing today and that our public discourse is friction-prone. We have failed to develop a shared understanding of the past and the means by which a different future should be constructed. There is still a segment of the white community that harbours deep suspicion of the black-dominated government and its economic policies, especially when they lean in a redistributive direction. There is also much denial about the harsh effects of the past on the black majority.
Governance failures, especially during the Jacob Zuma years, have emboldened this segment of society. These folk saw Zuma’s presidency as confirmation of everything they believed about the hopelessness of black rule in Africa.
Yet the major weakness of the ruling party is less about its corrupt proclivities, even though there are reprehensible elements of this, and more about the ANC’s failure to use its political agency to seriously drive the agenda of social transformation in ways that are imaginative, to rescript a new society and to restore dignity to black South Africans who have been on the margins of the economy.
This requires boldness in undertaking programmes aimed at creating advantage for the black majority.
Yet the governing party has not effectively utilised the legislative and policy instruments at its disposal to advance social and economic change that tilts the scale in favour of the majority.
Three years ago, I attended the largest annual agricultural exhibition in the southern hemisphere, organised by Grain SA at NAMPO in Bothaville. Roelf Meyer, the former chief negotiator for the National Party during the transition negotiations, was a keynote speaker. He gave an impassioned speech on the theme of transformation and made the observation that the weakness of the democratic transition was the failure of people such as himself and other negotiators to craft a roadmap for economic transformation.
During his talk he implored the predominantly white dinner guests, most of them the cream of agribusiness groups – and people who would also deny their privileged position – to take seriously the imperative of transformation before it is forced upon them.
Meyer had understood, almost too late, that the major preoccupation of black South Africans is no longer about striving for some non-racial ideal abstracted from concrete economic relations in society. Rather, people want to feel a real sense of significance in a country that also belongs to them.
Democratic South Africa is nearly a generation old – since the 1994 transition, and there are serious concerns that future generations may judge us harshly for bequeathing to them a country just a shade different to what existed under apartheid with respect to patterns of economic ownership. What we have done since 1994 is to tinker on the margins of legislative change without extending the impetus to the economic domains.
How do we move from here? There was a time when dialogue was a necessary tool to explore prospects for socio-economic change. However, those who possess the privilege of cultural and economic power have done everything in their power to defend this privilege.
On matters of transformation, we have chosen to hold a dialogue of the deaf where we are content to listen only to our voices and see reality through our narrow lenses.
What is required, concretely, to drive change is to put pressure on the state to use every policy and legislative tool to achieve outcomes that create a positive difference for black South Africans who are still on the margins of the economy.
The good thing about the fall of Jacob Zuma is that we can now engage in the real battle of ideas and focus on the hard policy choices that the government needs to make to achieve transformation.
It is possible that we may ultimately attain the ideal of non-racialism through the efforts of our grandchildren, but we owe them stepping stones towards reaching that dream by giving them a legacy of economic empowerment and dignity.