‘Liberation’-era South Africa has reached its ‘apartheid’ moment in what is turning out to be something of a climax in the government’s now three-year drive to give itself far-reaching powers over what people own.
It is not, of course, an apartheid moment in any racial sense.
Ironically, while the government itself might hope to nurture the idea that it is about race and the oppressive past (reversing historical dispossession, achieving redress for ‘our people’, and so on) – and the same narrative is useful to race nationalists on the right – the truth is that the poor will be the most vulnerable to all that is captured in the term, ‘expropriation without compensation’ (EWC). And it hardly needs pointing out that, after two and a half decades of African National Congress (ANC) government, the poor are – still – mostly black.
It might not seem obvious, but the apartheid moment of 2021 is the state’s submitting to the illusion of power, to the idea – despite all evidence to the contrary – that it is and can be the commanding agency, and thus, despite the likely enormous social and economic cost, can author its immunity from the consequences of inevitable failure.
We have been here before.
I turned up a reference this week that I hadn’t looked at for decades; a passage in a 1981 interview with Rand Daily Mail labour correspondent Riaan de Villiers, published in a book called South Africa Speaks.
Reflecting on a visit to the Ciskei (‘I have understood what the homelands mean in terms of economics. It’s just God-awful.’), he sums up his impression of this ‘tiny piece of land, with blacks crammed into it, with the highest population density in South Africa, twice as high as the Transkei’ by saying: ‘The place is a vast ghetto.’
‘Those people are crammed in there and they can’t get out. The only way a man can get out is if he is recruited as a contract worker. The government is bringing in more people all the time, into resettlement camps. I saw those places … they have moved 100 000 people in a decade … you drive through desolate countryside and come to a settlement of tens of thousands of people, a township without a town. There’s nothing, no visible means of life support.’
‘Done a lot of its own bankrupting’
One is reminded, here, of historian Bill Nasson’s memorable observation that ‘(by) the time that apartheid had become bankrupt, it had done a lot of its own bankrupting’.
In all the places where ‘there was no visible means of life support’, the bankrupting that apartheid engineered at mortal cost to itself came at incalculable cost to millions of people the National Party’s most ruthlessly undoubting ideologues considered as beneficiaries of their racial scheming.
We, the people, are once more having to contend with such blinding effects of the illusion of power.
There’s some comfort, however, in what the record reveals.
Remarkably, and certainly counterintuitively, despite all, South Africans – rather, perhaps, than ‘South Africa’ – succeeded over their apartheid half-century in getting on, after a fashion, with scaling the ladder of modernity.
Nasson, again, offers intriguing insights (contained in an absorbing lecture a decade and a half ago).
Considering the task of reformation the country faced in 1994, he reminds us that ‘there is something else to be kept in mind’, which is that the ‘malformed past’ was ‘not completely without what we might think of as the usual rhythms of modern history’.
‘Illuminating’
A ‘brief glance’ at demography or population history, he goes on, ‘can be illuminating’.
‘Predictably, it shows that apartheid has had devastating long-term consequences in areas such as education, as well as in retarding the natural rate of African urbanisation, and in artificially blocking labour mobility, thereby worsening levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality. In mishandling the proper development of the country’s human capital, for decades that manipulative project undermined its modernising growth.
‘Despite that, though, there were progressive historical transitions. From about three million people in 1880, South Africa had some forty-four million in 2000. This period was one of almost continuously rising life expectancy, except for a slight dip in the 1918 influenza epidemic and, obviously, during the most recent years of AIDS attrition. In fact, speaking demographically, the abnormal thing about this country has been the security of human life. Compare it, for instance, to Europe’s war mortality and its various ethnic bloodbaths, from Turkish Armenia in 1915 to Bosnia in recent decades. Alongside that, mortality from warfare and organised mass violence in both the Union and the Republic has been negligible. Even in the most mercilessly repressive stage of the anti-apartheid insurgency, life remained more secure than it had been in much of The Dark Continent, the title of Mark Mazower’s sobering history of bad times in twentieth-century Europe.’
Nasson dwells on ‘another demographic aspect’, showing that South Africa’s ‘long human transitions have been remarkably ordinary’.
‘Over a little more than a century, mortality has declined, fertility has dropped, and households have become smaller. Urbanisation has increased, the proportion of agricultural work in total employment has declined, and the average level of education of the adult population has been rising. In any contemporary historical perspective, this is the standard portrayal of trends in all industrial societies, whether early, as in eighteenth-century Britain, late, as in nineteenth-century Germany, or even later, as in twentieth-century India.’
At its worst
And then there’s the state – at its worst, intrusive, domineering, misguided and invariably blind to the achievements and ambitions of its citizens.
Of course, it would be false to pretend the state has had no role in 20th or 21st century gains.
Consider historian William Beinart’s observation that ‘(a) striking feature of the new [Bantu Education] system was the increase in overall education provision for Africans from about 800 000 school places in 1953 to 1 800 000 in 1963; numbers expanded even more rapidly afterwards’. To be sure, there was ‘gross underfunding’ and ‘inadequate teacher training’, but ‘the consequences of Bantu Education and more widespread literacy were to be far less predictable than either its planners or its opponents expected’.
And the same is true of the post-1994 socio-political landscape. In its The Silver Lining report of February 2017, the Institute of Race Relations said the findings ‘can serve as a reminder that the country has come a long way, and they dispel the dangerous notion that life was better before 1994’.
However, that report underscores the importance of a state disabused of illusion.
‘The gains represent what is at stake,’ the IRR warned in 2017, ‘if we do not address the major challenges of low economic growth and high unemployment. In 2016 the number of South Africans on social grants (17 149 931) exceeded the number of employed (15 545 000), which signals the tide has turned.’
In 2019, there were 17.8 million social grants against 16.3 million people with jobs. The picture is doubtless worse today – and particularly troubling for the indifference shown by the government in its determination to enact the Expropriation Bill.
Baleful continuity
Back in 2007, Nasson identified a baleful continuity in South African life when he observed that ‘arguably, what does mark [South Africa] out as historically unusual in Africa is something more than the apartheid experience’.
For a century, this was ‘the continuous, unbroken strength of its post-1910 central state’.
‘From the very beginning, pushing its nose into even the most remote parts of this large country, it has established an intrusive tradition, an unwholesome preoccupation with extending its repertoire of power. And, as we are discovering, some of those habits survive their former white minority host.’
[Picture: Paul Weinberg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26756830]
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