In a year when students rose up against colonialism on campuses, when racial tension spilled over into open hatred on all media, Eusebius McKaiser explores race and racism in South Africa in his latest book: Run, Racist, Run
We are violent because of a combination of factors: living in the shadows of a police state (which was one of the inherent features of the apartheid state); violent notions of masculinity that South African men, myself included, have internalised and act out daily; deep inequality that breeds resentment, self-hate and a toxic sense of despair among the worst-off; state-sponsored violence that makes us use violence with each other, domestically; state-sponsored violence during peaceful, democratic times like the Marikana massacre and police brutality showing the rupture from the apartheid state has not been completed fully; and so on.
The trickier question is one we avoid like the plague because it is genuinely hard to answer: How do we unlearn violence? How do we habituate ourselves to live differently? Or are we doomed to be perpetually violent until the second coming of the Lord?
How do we recover parts of our humanity that we lost in the war against colonialism and apartheid, a struggle that is ongoing and making work on the damaged black self difficult to prioritise?
Often, of course, “humanity” is a word, a term, that can be rather wistfully thrown around to skewer someone morally if they lack humanity, or to lavish someone with praise for showing it off in abundance. It is important to be clear what one means by this important word.
By humanity I am trying to capture, in part, an ability to feel for others and project yourself into their body. In addition, humanity is about having due regard for the interests of others in your reasoning about how to act in the world.
Humanity, in this sense, does not require sophisticated education or even a complex linguistic skill set. We have an innate capacity for empathy, but different life narratives may affect the likelihood of any particular person’s moral compass functioning. Colonialism and apartheid have tragically damaged the moral compasses of many black South Africans.
This is why we show a reduced humanity towards fellow Africans. We have learnt to hate, like Verwoerd hated us, and we have learnt how not to project ourselves into the bodies of people who are different from ourselves.
We have learnt not to give due regard to the interests of foreigners, an entitlement that flows simply from them being human. Instead, when we do reason morally (if at all), we uncritically rank people from the region into categories of different levels of entitlement to respect, just like the apartheid government ranked us with legislated arbitrary criteria. This is itself a legacy of racism.
Racism, sadly, runs in our blood. White people do not have a monopoly on racism. Xenophobia and Afrophobia (a fear of, deep disdain for, and even hatred towards, fellow Africans) are intimately connected to the legacies of colonialism and racism. And it’s not just our democratic state showing these deep stains of racism with our initial refusal to call xenophobia exactly what it is: xenophobia.
The same applies to us citizens. It is troubling how many fellow South Africans have tried to walk the fine line, unsuccessfully, between making sense of xenophobia and excusing it. Poverty is not a justification for hating foreigners. And economic injustice, as a result of your own government and fellow South Africans not sharing the spoils of freedom with you, does not give you justified reason to kill foreigners.
Not even a politically and morally incendiary speech by a monarch – call him, for the sake of argument, King Goodwill Zwelithini – justifies lashing out against people who look different from us. And yet a number of middle-class, self-styled allies of the poor have engaged in moral relativism sold to critics as a search for complexity and understanding. There is nothing complex about compromising your own humanity and that of another person in an act of racist, xenophobic violence.
But these class allies of the poor, some of them leaders or members of civil society organisations founded on the promotion of social justice and human rights, tell us not to be too outraged.
We are scolded, the rest of us, for expressing moral outrage on social media platforms, the implication being that critics of xenophobia would get the anger and frustration of the perpetrators of this violence if we lived with them or at least engaged them on why they were turning on foreigners.
But this is nonsense. It is intellectual pussyfooting.
Always be wary of the person who tells you: “It’s more complicated than you think!” Sometimes that will be true, but too often it is a claim that is designed to deny an uncomfortable reading of plain truth. In this case, there is no moral complexity. Just a plain, uncomfortable truth that the illegal and immoral attacks on foreigners cannot be justified.
This precarious straddling of the explanation-justification divide is actually all about making middle-class people feel better about themselves.
If middle-class South Africans really cared for the indigent we would see more cross-class solidarity on a daily basis and during peaceful times when violence doesn’t flare up. How many of these allies of the xenophobes think long and hard about their personal responsibility to help reduce the inequities and poverty in society that ripen the atmosphere for xenophobia?
Very few of us, if we are honest.
This means that the attempt to “understand” why poor South Africans are doing this to foreigners living among us is an attempt, on the part of allies of the poor, to evade personal responsibility for gross and unjust levels of inequality in our country that set up conditions conducive to violence.
If you can rationalise why the worst-off in your society are behaving like the animals from my nightmare, and your explanation leaves your own agency out of the picture, then you can switch off the news for a little while and enjoy your glass of wine on your balcony in the suburbs feeling you are above the fray.
Ultimately, this attempt to “complicate” xenophobia is itself xenophobic: we, as middle-class South Africans, are so anti-foreigner ourselves that we become allies of the most violent xenophobes in our midst.
We prioritise an explanation of violence over the immediate and more urgent expression of unequivocal moral disapproval of the violence. Just because we’ve done little or nothing to help poor South Africans live more flourishing lives does not mean we should prop up xenophobes.
Poverty is an injustice. But that doesn’t mean the poor are immune to criticism for acts of injustice. And explanations of xenophobia that in effect render victims of xenophobia as dispensable in the expression of poor people’s outrage, themselves count as evidence that many of us wealthier South Africans are as xenophobic as many poor South Africans.
We just use wayward moral reasoning that doesn’t leave a corpse in the road or a gash on a back. But we are no different from poor black South Africans
Xenophobia is not disconnected from racism. One of the most unspoken-about consequences of anti-black racism is that we ourselves as black people have memory of how to be racist and we are capable of mimicking colonisers.
This means that even if white people disappeared in a puff of magic, and all statues of colonialists were toppled, we would still not be free of the consequences of racism’s history, a history we cannot undo.
That is a profoundly disturbing reality that many fellow black South Africans do not want to own up to.
But, I’m afraid, victims of racism, like victims of sexual abuse, can become the next generation of racists, and the next generation of sexual predators. The bad news for the state, for middle-class South Africans, and for the poor is that, not only are we xenophobic, but we also seem to have become clones of the racists who taught us how to hate on the basis of arbitrary differences between us.
In the end, however, we can’t be let off the hook morally. My nightmare of killers in country X turning into dogs might be disturbing imagery, but it is only a nightmare.
Dogs act from instinct. They are beasts. They cannot be held legally or morally accountable. They do not have the ability to step back from their actions, contemplate, and reason morally, let alone be influenced by their non-existent capacity for moral reasoning.
We are not dogs. We are not beasts. We are not robots. We remain persons, even with the deep scars of racism’s past all around us and in us. That means we have the capacity to behave differently from how we behaved yesterday.
It is entirely up to each one of us whether or not we confront and eliminate our ingrained racism handed down from colonial and apartheid architects and foot soldiers. And it is up to as a community to call each other out. A question that haunts me is this: will racism’s architects always have the last laugh?
* This is an extract from Run, Racist, Run by Eusebius McKaiser published by Bookstorm at a recommended retail price of R240.