The recent election and subsequent formation of a government of national unity (GNU) have encouraged South Africa’s race merchants and race baiters to crawl out of the woodwork again.
The ANC’s decision to partner with the DA, particularly, drew much ire. It’s a move seen by some as “selling out” to “white interests.” This is unsurprising, given perceptions in some quarters of the DA as a “white-led” organisation. The ANC, meanwhile, remains a symbol of black liberation.
Opponents of the GNU have predictably framed the two parties as implacable foes in a clash for South Africa. In this expository fable, South Africa’s present is a continuation of her past, and the struggle for liberation continues. Any move to decentralise race, or to put white people in positions of power, is hence regressive.
This story permeates South Africa’s institutions, from most of the media to much legislation. Our numerous race-based laws derive their rationale from this story. Certainly, like all great legends, it is a story which derives from some truths. However, it is a story which is fundamentally failing South Africans – and specifically, black South Africans.
What the story gets right is that South Africans’ economic situations largely correlate with their race. That most black South Africans remain disadvantaged is indisputably true. What the story gets wrong is why this remains the case, and what we should do about it.
For advocates of race-based legislation, accumulated advantage or disadvantage is entrenched and compounded over time. Formal racial equality does not alter this. You might have a theoretical right to bake bread, for example. Without dough or access to an oven, however, your rightful baking endeavours cannot be realised. Some people believe that, for substantive (or actual) equality to be achieved, an artificial levelling is hence required. On this basis, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) was introduced in 2003.
Employment, of course, unlike dough, is not physically delimited. Arguably, in framing economic advantage as something to be redistributed, we place conceptual boundaries around it. Rather than seeing it as something which can grow, we are indeed framing it as finite and delimited. And while advantage and disadvantage do tend to accrue across generations, this process is not inevitable. Nor is it due to a malicious conspiracy on the part of those who are privileged. Again, seeing it in these terms imposes conceptual blinkers.
Stories, of course, precisely do frame reality in certain terms. The stories we tell are not coincidental. The conceptual blinders imposed by our stories are not coincidental, either. These blinders allow those in power an easy explanation for their failures with regard to the poor. If black people remain economically disadvantaged, for example, it is ‘because economic advantages are being monopolised by white people’. Certainly, it cannot be due to a failure to expand economic opportunities. So the story goes. In this way, by framing present challenges as extensions of the past, they are effectively erased from view.
The stories we tell are also self-fulfilling. They can be deadly or lifesaving. Our current story – that the apartheid past contains the inevitable destiny of black South Africans – is deadly. The enemy today is not apartheid, but policies which hinder economic growth. Economic growth, moreover, requires active participants. It requires people to see themselves as agents constructing their own outcomes. When people see themselves as victims of the past, not authors of the future, they will accordingly act in ways which entrench that narrative. They will according engage in a self-perpetuating cycle.
When the likes of analyst and writer Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh maintain that apartheid continues, they are not incorrect. But is not continuing in the way that Mpofu-Walsh would have us believe. Rather, apartheid continues in part because we still accept its terms. When apartheid said advantage is a zero-sum game, we believed it. One race’s success, apartheid told us, could only be at the cost of another’s – and we agreed. If one group holds advantages, that must inherently preclude another gaining the same. These are the limiting assumptions embedded in our race-based legislation.
Of course, the proof of the pudding – or the loaf of bread – is in the eating. It would be trite to point out the failures of race-based legislation. The leader of the Freedom Front Plus, Pieter Groenewald, has pointed out that Black Economic Empowerment merely replaced apartheid based on race with apartheid based on political connectedness. A new black elite has arisen, to be sure, but it excludes most ordinary black people.
Of course, it might be argued that Black Economic Empowerment, like communism, has simply never been “properly” applied yet. But even if that were true, it does not erase the limiting stories embedded in BEE’s essential concept. BEE entrenches the significance attributed to race – just as apartheid did. Either we want a South Africa liberated from the construct of race, or we don’t. But we cannot have our cake and eat it, too.
In a recent interview with Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Ntando Sindane, a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, calls for white people to commit “epistemic and ontological suicide.” [2] He neglects to mention that if whiteness is to die, so, too, must blackness, for these constructs make sense only in relation to each other. Moreover, these constructs are being propped up, not by a shadowy cabal of nefarious white people, but by race-based legislation.
It is my government which defines me as “white” and which treats this as legally pertinent about me. As long as the government does so, it is impossible for me to commit the racial suicide called for by Sindane. Only if we all, simultaneously, cease to be legally racialized, can any change be possible. We must change our laws to begin changing the stories we tell about ourselves and each other.
As South Africa enters a new era under the GNU, it is time to choose between race-based legislation and the economic growth it is crippling. It is time to forge new stories and to ask new questions. The question we have been asking is, how do we redistribute the dough? Perhaps what we should rather ask is, what is required to make the dough rise?
[Photo: Screenshot/Ntando Sindane on Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh show]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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