Jeff Rudin
Ah, HENDRIK VERWOERD, how you must be smiling in your grave. Almost 22 years after the birth of the “new” South Africa, the racial divisions you did so much to develop remain as live as ever. Worse than galloping backwards to 1994, we are back at the racialised polarisations of apartheid at its very worst.
Within days of the 26th anniversary of the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela, we have the “F*** white people” T-shirts worn by students in Johannesburg and the racialised demonstrations at the University of Cape Town. These demonstrations are not against the normalisation of shacks nationally and not even against the shortage of student accommodation, but exclusively against “white” students who are supposedly well housed while the racist university authorities leave “black” students homeless (“UCT hits back on residences”, Cape Times, February 16). The burning of UCT’s art, as symbols of the white coloniser, are a logical extension of this racialised rage and the idea that it isn’t possible to reason with white people, as a student leader claimed on radio SAfm.
I should state that I was proclaimed to be “white” under apartheid and that in a non-racial South Africa I am still officially recorded as being “white”.
Both the Johannesburg and Cape Town students would reject that they are racist. This is because they have crafted a self-serving definition that makes it impossible for blacks to be racist. While this serves their purpose, what matters is whether a definition is helpful in promoting a better understanding of race and racism.
To this end, I offer a definition that begins with the incontrovertible premise of there being no such thing as “race”. This is to say, it has been a scientific truism for some time that, contrary to the previous view, there are no subspecies of homo sapiens. “Race”, in the modern world, is a scientific anachronism; a lazy, prejudiced-saturated social construct based on perceptions of skin colour that, moreover, rarely have anything to do with the assigned colour. “White” people are not white and (especially in South Africa) very few “black” people are black.
Used colloquially, “race” is one of many terms describing the Other – the people who are not only different from ourselves – in terms of appearance, language, religion, nationality, region, culture and tradition – but (implicitly) inferior to ourselves. In order to give some credible meaning to this view of the Other, “they” are deemed to be all the same. The stereotype allows for no deviations; homogeneity is a precondition of the Othering. To allow exceptions to what “they” are supposed to be is to destroy the very purpose of imposing a common label on a large number of people most, if not all of whom, are unknown to the person assigning the label. According to this thinking, Joe Slovo, a major figure in the struggle against apartheid and a leader of the SA Communist Party, is no different from Clive Derby-Lewis, one of the two whites who murdered Chris Hani, who was the then leader of the SACP. To allow for substantial differences between Slovo and Derby-Lewis is to acknowledge that no one is prisoner of their birth or the circumstances of where they live and the physical experiences of their lives.
Prejudice – a preconceived negative opinion without commensurate knowledge, thought or reason – is integral to all such stereotypical labelling. Racism is prejudice based on the presumption of race, in the same way that sexism is a sexually based prejudice.
Ignorance is often parent to prejudice. Everyone knows that apartheid was an attempt to perpetuate white supremacy and that it, like the racialised colonialism that preceded it, was defended by those it privileged. What is hardly known is that, beginning in the latter half of the 19th century with Bishop Colenso, there have always been a small, though significant, number of so-called whites who fully identified themselves with the oppressed black majority. Nelson Mandela often explained how his experience of the protracted Treason Trial that began in 1956 – when he, along with a number of whites, faced the death penalty – helped make him aware that the struggle against apartheid was much more than just a struggle against whites. Nonetheless, not many people know this. Even fewer know that the Freedom Charter was drafted by whites.
Similarly, largely forgotten is that the ANC stood firm in its anti-racist commitments by not giving into the African nationalists who attacked it for being led by whites and Indians; a resolve that led to the formation of the Pan African Congress in 1959. Unlike the origins of the PAC, many more people have heard about the Rivonia Trial of 1963. What is not well known is that whites were amongst the Rivonia accused and that one of them was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Nelson Mandela and several others.
This little dip into our recent history draws attention to the failure of the current leaders of the ANC who do nothing to counter the growing popularity of presenting a monolithic Whiteness as the enemy. The Struggle veterans who are still alive are undoubtedly the people best placed to remind the forgetful and inform the born-frees of our history and of the crudities of those who seek to colour code contemporary conflicts. All of them devoted their lives to the struggle to liberate South Africa. Many of them literally risked their lives; others lost their limbs, sight and arms, while others spent many years in prison or exile. We need to hear from them. Urgently and loudly. They are the most credible of witnesses. As has been said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
A T-shirt proclaiming “F*** white people” would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Equally unthinkable would have been the claim that “whites” are beyond reason. What might lie behind this racist escalation? The answer is complex. I offer the following as starters: The escalation relies on an ignorance of our history fed by the silence of those who know better. These interacting factors have served to embolden those who have a single word for the decay – and disappointments – of South Africa: Whiteness.
It is this silence that feeds a colour-coded binary narrative of an economically unchanged SA: the “whites”, who still own the economy, are rich while the “blacks” still bear all the burdens of poverty. As with all stereotypes, this particular one can’t allow for the many blacks who are anything but poor.
Who benefits from hiding or obfuscating this inconvenient complexity? The first of the two main beneficiaries is the black elite (including students). They are more than happy to hide behind black poverty. The emphasis on blackness makes it easy for them to demand access to privileged resources – including accommodation – mechanistically based on the proportionate size of their race within the total population. (The official Census provides the statistical information, even though it does so without any definition of the apartheid-invented races it assigns to each and every one of us, with or without our consent and with no right of appeal.) The second beneficiary is capitalism. Poverty, unemployment and inequality are all universal hallmarks of the capitalist production of wealth. What could be more convenient for the rich of all colours than for these ills to be attributed to unreformed Whiteness, rather than the conditions inherent in the very system that makes them rich or relatively privileged?
Once upon a time, the ANC and trade unions defined apartheid as “racial capitalism”. One would expect the capitalist side of this couplet to be the hegemonic tool of analysis now that capitalism is in crisis worldwide no less than here. Yet, it is capitalism that has vanished from critical thinking; colour not class shapes consciousness. Verwoerd might think he is having the last laugh. We need to return to proving him wrong.
Students are to be applauded for having raised so many important issues. The only pity is the divisive, racial framing they’ve given a number of these issues, along with some of their methods.
l Rudin is a research associate at the Alternative Information & Development Centre