Wahbie Long
I would like to share a few thoughts about the various student- and staff-led movements that have established themselves on university campuses around the country. As I was on sabbatical in the US for the duration of the last semester, I could observe developments only from afar in the form of colleagues’ e-mails, op-eds, press releases and other news stories.
It was also because of this absence that I chose to keep my thoughts to myself. Having returned to South Africa – and having had an opportunity to speak with UCT academics from a range of disciplines – I feel more able to participate in what has morphed into a national conversation about white privilege, black pain, institutional racism and the decolonisation of the knowledge-making enterprise.
First, I feel obliged to declare the identities of some of my intellectual heroes. In particular, I am inspired by the examples of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Neville Alexander, not because I agree with their social analyses in all respects, but because I am awed by their sacrifices – sacrifices that make them, in my view, ethical beings who deserve, if not the public’s trust, then certainly my own.
But what has trust got to do with the academy? Well, everything, if one concedes that the “facts” do not speak for themselves, that they are almost always open to contestation. Unlike mathematics, for example, there are no algorithms at hand that can guide examinations of the social world. So when intellectuals take it upon themselves to articulate – as they see it – an ethical vision of the world on everyone else’s behalf, one is justified in asking: “Can I trust this person?”
The trouble, unfortunately, is that intellectuals in general cannot be trusted. In a meeting I had with Noam Chomsky last month, two things stood out in our conversation: first, his claim that intellectuals are, as a rule, “cowards”; and second, his advice to a young academic to “just be honest”. Apparently simple advice and yet, if the professor is to be believed, notoriously difficult to heed.
With these two principles in mind, then, I must confess that the tenor of the debate about transformation at the University of Cape Town has been disconcerting. In one corner are the racist taunts of white South Africans – plastered all over social media – who claim that UCT is at risk of becoming a “bush college” and describe black students as “monkeys” and “savages”.
But in the other corner is an intimidatory, anti-intellectual spirit that seems to have descended over black students and academics. When one black professor says to another, “No threat that I am dependent on the university will make me come around to your idea of the university”; when a black activist responds to a request to explain his political actions by saying, “I don’t have to justify anything to a white male or a white institution”; when a black lecturer scoffs at a white one for telling students, “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument”, then no one – black or white – inspires trust.
Which brings me to my own position on transformation, namely, non-racial anti-capitalism. For the sake of clarity, I am not an exponent of the liberal form of non-racialism that declares, “I don’t see race, just human beings”, while fudging the existence of class interests. It is impossible to be race-blind in a country such as ours that has turned the cultivation of a “racial habitus” into a national pastime, just as it is disingenuous – as Fanon long ago observed – to profess one’s humanism in a society that looks on while the dehumanisation of its members proceeds uninterrupted on every street corner.
Nor am I a doctrinaire socialist pretending that the market rationality that dominates us all can simply be disinvented. In the approximate words of an economist colleague of mine, the trouble with capitalism is not the profit motive per se– that much is necessary if businesses are to survive – but the shameless pursuit of super-profits.
Rather, my position – akin to that of Neville Alexander – insists on the interrelatedness of racialism, racism and economic exploitation. Although it is enshrined in our constitution, nonracialism – as distinct from multiracialism and the deception of the “rainbow nation” – does not exist in South Africa. It is, in fact, an ideal to be striven for.
For those who choose to play the race game, it is worth reflecting on its genocidal capacity, which was realised, albeit briefly, in the recent xenophobic attacks against foreign African nationals.
Talk of “strategic essentialism” that views nonracialism as a consideration that belongs to the endgame betrays a naively mechanistic understanding of social change. When one counters the thesis of whiteness with the antithesis of blackness, what one is left with is the synthesis of a race war, not a stalemate that eventuates in the creation of a non-racial society. As Goethe observed in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are not nearly in control of our shared world as we sometimes imagine.
If we are committed, then, to overcoming the racial tensions that plague us all – and which are but the logical counterpart of the shocking levels of inequality in the country – then the two-fold solution that Alexander prescribes in his posthumously published work, Thoughts on the New South Africa, becomes a suitable place to begin. First, we must reform the neoliberal economic policies that confine millions of South Africans to a nightmarish state of being. When the material basis of race privilege – whether black or white – is removed, racialism and, by extension, racism are stripped of their sine qua non.
Second, economic reform cannot solve the race question by itself but must be accompanied by changes to the discursive order. It is a basic social constructionist tenet that the language we use constitutes to some extent the world we inhabit. If we choose, then, to speak to each other – and about each other – respectfully, we can begin to construct ways of being that are affirming and honouring of one another.
The relationship between racialism and economic marginalisation is fairly straightforward; after all, it is no accident that the government’s insistence on perpetuating the racial taxonomy of the apartheid era has matched the ongoing impoverishment of most South Africans.
The undeclared intention is to uplift some – not all – black South Africans to create a stabilising black middle class and to foster in the working class the delusional aspiration for a middle-class existence. That the government relies on race-speak in its various formulations of affirmative action (AA), employment equity (EE) and black economic empowerment (BEE) is precisely because its economic policies are not intended to benefit the average South African, 54 percent of whom survive on less than R25 a day.
AA, EE and BEE policies are of nominal significance to unskilled workers as compared with skilled workers who, since they are the real beneficiaries, will not challenge the established economic order.
Curiously, the UCT debate has paid almost no attention to the question of class. For the most part, the talk has been about decolonisation, Afrocentrism, institutional racism and ad hominem promotion – none of which, I suspect, working class South Africans care very much about.
It would be unfortunate indeed if UCT’s black elite failed to reflect on its own class interest – apart from justifying Alexander’s denunciation of the black middle class for “want[ing] to enrich themselves within the rules of the capitalist game.” If UCT’s academics are serious about transformation, then we shall have to do more than “speak truth to power”, to quote Edward Said’s rendition of the dilemma. We shall have to speak the whole truth – not just a part of it – even if it be against ourselves. And that takes courage.
l Dr Long is a senior lecturer and clinical psychologist at the Department of Psychology at UCT and a Mandela Mellon Fellow, WEB Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.