The age of impatience is upon us
Penny Sparrow’s venomous serpent of racism should, in fact, be welcomed – as should its twin, the forgotten issue of land restitution and redistribution, writes Dr Buntu Siwisa
PENNY Sparrow’s cat brought home a live, fat and slithering snake hissing venomous racism, white fears, black anger and frustration. It dropped the snake in the centre of the living room floor and sped out the window, leaving us petrified and angry. And many of us had deluded ourselves into hoping the snake had died. But it is in the nature of cats to drag home creatures from the wild.
We should be glad that this happened, for we know that racism and its will to thrive in post-Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) South Africa has been upon us. For the first time, we are beginning to talk about this matter without constantly looking back over our shoulders for Big Brother Political Correctness (BBPC).
And we should also gladly anticipate, soon, the coming into our homes of the twin snake that is land restitution and redistribution that we’ve been avoiding.
We begin by admitting to the fact that post-TRC South Africa remains structurally and institutionally a white South Africa.
The anti-apartheid revolution did not manage to dislodge “white power”, or change the domination of whiteness in any of its dimensions except politically. Professor Achille Mbembe of the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser) pointed this out most bleakly in his essay, “On the State of South African Political Life”: “This is the only country on Earth in which a revolution took place which resulted in not one single former oppressor losing anything.”
In retaining its space and privilege, he continues, whiteness “has attempted to fence itself off, to re-maximise its privileges through self-enclaving and the logics of privatisation”.
How then does this rigidity of white power and whiteness continue to play itself out on South Africa’s socio-political landscape, and feed into this seething antiblack racism?
White power’s refusal to die has generated two phenomena. The first is white capital power’s reinvention of socio-spatial separateness. The second phenomenon is the deliberate projection and presentation, internally and externally, of a racially skewed South Africa. In this South Africa, blackness finds itself in a corner, struggling to stand tall in a country that it is meant to be a majority in.
While witnessing the grandeur of the truth and reconciliation exercise in the mid-1990s, white capital power began to reinvent socio-spatial separateness in urban South Africa, under the guise of “new urban planning” dynamics.
As democracy began to break down the living and working amenities system of apartheid, it became clear that differ- ent races were bound to live and work together.
New urban planning threw a spanner into the works of the then-emerging greying of spaces by moving the centre of economic power from the city centre and the environs to the suburbs.
They became the new centres of power. And the city centre and its environs are now teeming with black people and low-income foreigners, areas now deemed “low property values” only and exclusively by virtue of their desertion by whiteness.
It is this spirit of socio-spatial separateness, creating laagers, that is testimony to how undead the spirits of white fears and anti-black racism are. The creation and reinvention of space, and how space is fashioned by the dominant force to suit its socio-economic and cultural needs, have always occupied a core variable in the design of colonialism and apartheid. Space; who is in it, producing what, for who, doing what, at whose comfort and discomfort, are questions squatting at the centre of Sparrow’s jibes.
And at a grander, national socio-political space, South Africa is deliberately projected and presented in a racially skewed manner, internally and externally.
It is a South Africa where blackness is dominated by whiteness, in a black Africa. It is a South Africa where blackness struggles to project and present a positive black identity. It is a South Africa in which blackness comes out criminal, diseased and poor. It is a South Africa in which Nomzamo and Palesa are dirty victims with umpteen kids.
It is a South Africa in which Sipho and Tshepo are warned of rape, battering women willy-nilly, burglary, and are constantly educated about safe sex and the scourge of HIV/Aids.
It is a South Africa in which all the beauty and glory in sports, academia, literature, arts and culture are white. And the world continues to be baffled, treating as an anthropological curiosity that one black who comes out to shine now and then. And when you travel outside the country, you are surprisingly the only African designating yourself black among Kenyans, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Ghanaians and Congolese.
The government has moved quickly to announce the soon-to-be-introduced retributive and corrective measures aimed at addressing racism and racists. This is a welcomed measure. But we have been called monkeys and bobbejaan living in a banana republic many times since 1994 by our white compatriots.
And when you report them to the local police station, the black Captain Johannes pats you on the back, heaves out a sigh, and says: “Eish! Uyabazi ukuthi bayadelela, mos – you know that they are disrespectful”. And then he dashes off to answer a call of distress from some white woman whose son’s bicycle has disappeared in some suburb. And Patrick the gardener, and Constance the helper, do not have the gall to lose their jobs, nor spare a taxi fare or two to report a case of racism to him.
“The age of impatience”, as Mbembe is given to call it, is upon us. In a South Africa, 22 years into freedom and democracy, where white power and whiteness continue to be intransigent, all stakeholders have to be tougher in implementing reforms on race and settlement.
This is imperative, lest the more gullible cat of impatience drags home a deadlier snake in a South Africa whose magic of Rainbowism has begun to fade. Dr Buntu Siwisa is an independent research
consultant on conflict resolution and international relations, a Rhodes Scholar, and a member of the South African Brics Academic
Forum on Peace and Security