I understand why so many people were angry at former president FW De Klerk’s insistence that Apartheid was not a crime against humanity. I don’t think it was even about the semantics per se as it was about minimising people’s pain. The very squabbling over the semantics was a minimising exercise.
Apartheid was a horrific and humanity-destroying system. I have listened to the stories of older people of colour, watched documentaries and read accounts of people who daily faced humiliations at the hands of the apartheid apparatus.
People being dispossessed of their land killed off extended family networks and communities, and many who suffered under the oppressive machinery of Apartheid had their sense of self-worth destroyed and their dreams and potential effectively shattered.
It was criminal.
It diminished the humanity of everyone involved, but especially people of colour.
People are right to be deeply offended by De Klerk for minimising this.
Looking beyond De Klerk
What does bother me, though, is that a lot of people stopped at FW De Klerk, and did not search any deeper. One of the reasons I believe De Klerk’s denialism is so deeply felt is that, while Apartheid may be over in its most pernicious legislative form, it is still very much alive in its economic and psycho-social form.
To understand why, I believe we need to break down Apartheid into its constituent parts and examine the mechanics of what made it so devastating.
First, Apartheid denied many people of colour a sound education, thereby limiting their potential and ability for upward mobility. Today, 26 years into ANC rule, it is difficult to argue that the education system still is not largely Bantu-ised and, more importantly, largely segregated along racial lines.
Outside of former model C schools, this certainly rings true, as many children (mostly black) are consigned to mud schools and schools without proper sanitation facilities and schools with poor infrastructure. This despite the government spending as much as a fifth of the budget on school education. Combine this with spending on higher education, and the sum is more than 6% of GDP, which meets or exceeds all the main international benchmarks.
Even with all these resources being pumped into the system, only about half of all children who enter Grade 1 will complete high school, and only 22% of grade 4 learners are reading at the benchmark level, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
Illiteracy and innumeracy
Our government is failing mostly black and coloured children. Generational poverty and racialised inequality continue to be twin realities of South Africa even after more than a quarter century of ANC rule. The reality is that a large segment of South Africa’s population is functionally illiterate and innumerate. Any prospect of chipping away at the realities of poverty, the psycho-social hangover of Apartheid, and of racialised inequality remains stymied. If you are poor and black, how much has really changed for you in this regard since 1994?
Second, we can look at the failures around land reform and restitution. According to head of policy at the Democratic Alliance (DA) Gwen Ngwenya, more is spent on VIP security and protection than land reform, a figure confirmed by Africa Check. As Africa Check notes, compensation for land has “never in fact been prioritised in national budgets previously”. The legislated mass land dispossession of people of colour by the apartheid regime is clearly still an emotive and painful issue in South Africa today. However, it is difficult to see how weakening property rights through expropriation without compensation (EWC) and even opening the door to a possible future of Economic Freedom Fighter-style state ownership of all land makes sense in light of both mass migration into urban centres from rural areas, and the crippling poverty and unemployment in this country.
Furthermore, many (young) people do not want to be farmers and prefer the excitement of urban life to a rural existence (a global phenomenon). Moreover, land is only useful in the context of its speculative value or if the owner of that land has the capital to develop it. For example, my home province of the Eastern Cape has vast tracts of unused and relatively cheap land.
Urban life is becoming more of a reality in this country, something the National Development Plan acknowledges when it estimates that 70% of South Africans will be living in major urban centres by 2030. It is thus clear that EWC is in reality more of a political chess-move by the ruling party than anything grounded in reality and it will not deal with the emotive reality and hangover of Apartheid, which is the dispossession of land and the destruction of families and communities.
Apartheid-era patterns replicated
The land issue of the present and future is one of land-use policy in major urban areas and how provincial and local governments extend infrastructure, especially sanitation infrastructure. The same people (and their children) who were inhumanely dispossessed in the past and had their property rights stripped from them, now largely face a present and future of slum living in informal settlements where the only spaces for children to play are blighted by garbage, faeces and contaminated water.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has often asserted that EWC will restore the dignity of many South Africans of colour. It is difficult to see how that statement even remotely reflects reality, as more and more poor and formerly dispossessed South Africans are simply replicating apartheid-era economic, spatial and psycho-social realities in their new makeshift homes on the periphery of major urban centres, far from job opportunities.
The third aspect of Apartheid which diminished people of colour was the lack of freedom of movement, where people of colour had to carry passes and be out of the affluent and white areas by nightfall. While this has disappeared legislatively, it is still very much a lived reality in the present because of the absence of an inter-connected transport system in major urban areas and the fact that many of South Africa’s poor live on their periphery. In a continuing Harvard University study (entitled The Impacts of Neighbourhoods on Intergenerational Mobility), Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren show and argue that reliable, efficient, safe and cost-effective transportation is the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty (accessing work opportunities), more important than other factors like crime, how well someone does in primary school, or the percentage of two-parent families in a community.
Should integrated transport networks in urban areas not be at the top of the government’s agenda, then, considering the problems with unemployment and lack of social mobility for many people of colour in our cities?
SA remains a crime scene
To its credit, the City of Cape Town did recognise this when it offered a free bus service to unemployed people who were job-hunting, but, even then, that only truly works in an environment of higher economic growth and job creation. Another factor is that integrated transport networks would also mean that nominally “white spaces” in cities like Cape Town would be more accessible to more people and therefore be more inclusive. This might rattle those with a lingering sense of swart gevaar but it would certainly reverse the spatial apartheid which haunts a lot of our major urban areas, especially Cape Town.
Apartheid, both legally, but specifically semantically, meets the definition of a crime against humanity. The many South Africans who were angry at FW De Klerk were right to be so – but they shouldn’t have stopped there. South Africa itself remains a crime scene and that means that public attention should also turn to those who have been charged with cleaning up the crime scene and have failed to do so, namely the ruling ANC.
The ruling party must not be allowed to continue to deflect attention away from this and fold its arms and blame fictitious actors like white monopoly capital or whiteness. The machinations of Apartheid continue almost unabated under their watch.
[Picture: Paul Weinberg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26756830]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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