In all my years of working in public advocacy, my most well-known and (thus far) consequential initiative has been spearheading the Institute of Race Relations’ Index of Race Law, a public interest and public education achievement that I am immensely proud of.
At the same time, the thing I faced the most backlash for was the related statement (it is not a “claim”) that Apartheid was well-intended.
I stand firmly behind this reflection on reality, despite the backlash from people who, almost to a man, cannot or refuse to distinguish between the subjective intentions of a person doing something on the one hand, and the nature of that thing and the consequences of doing it on the other. If we go out of our way to misunderstand our current and historical ideological and philosophical enemies and opponents, we risk basing our own actions on faulty information and assumptions.
Apartheid was wrong by nature, and it had horrible consequences. This does not detract in any way from the fact that it, like virtually – though not absolutely – every other system of inequity in human history, was motivated by good, though no less paternalistic and patronising, intentions.
The irony is that I made the point about Apartheid’s good intentions precisely because I want the discourse around South Africa’s current race-obsessed dispensation to move away from intent.
We must continue to condemn the nature and consequences of Apartheid and ignore the intentions behind it, just as
today we have to condemn the nature and consequences of transformania and ignore the intentions behind it. If we were to judge transformania by its good intentions alone, my argument went and goes, then we place ourselves in the unsatisfying position of having to judge Apartheid by its good intentions as well.
That is not a position I want to be in, nor do I think anyone else should want to be.
If we now decide that this is our standard for evaluating race-in-law, then our understanding of South African history must fundamentally change in ways most would rightly deem unacceptable.
In other words, if we are to say that the 1998 Employment Equity Act is justified because it is intended to “achieve good things” (as defined in the minds of those who adopted it), then we must similarly say that the 1913 Natives Land Act was justified because it intended to “achieve good things” (as defined in the minds of those who adopted it).
Ill-intended
We have to understand that simply because these laws do not pursue our objectives, broadly, as liberals or democrats – liberty, equality, participation, diversity, or whatever else, on an individual-to-individual basis – does not mean they are ill-intended.
To those who enacted the Employment Equity Act – they tell us – the law is designed to ensure abstractly-defined population groups historically excluded from formal employment are henceforth prioritised, to stop a self-reinforcing cycle of racial exclusion.
To those who enacted the Natives Land Act – they told us – the law was designed to ensure white (Afrikaner) farmers and (English) capital did not continue buying up the historical homelands of abstractly-defined vulnerable population groups, to the end of ensuring no one racial group dominates the other.
We cannot assume good intention with the former Act but impute bad intention to the latter Act just because of vibes. After all, if we are to ignore the nature of the Acts and their consequences, vibes are all that’s left.
If intention is our rubric – which so many desire it to be – then it has to be the stated intention held by those who adopted the Act, not the ulterior motives some might think (often with good reason) that they had. Nobody is inquiring into the potential ulterior motives (like collective punishment and political control of the economy) behind the Employment Equity Act, so it would then be intellectually dishonest to do so for the Natives Land Act (like land accumulation and stunting black development).
It would be pointless for me, at this juncture, to say that I am not equivocating between the Employment Equity Act and the Natives Land Act. We have been relentlessly and persistently told that intention is the primary determinant of the justifiability of race law, not consequence – of which the latter Natives Land Act is clearly the more harmful in my view.
Both the Employment Equity Act and the Natives Land Act are by nature unjustifiable. They reduce individuals to the colour of their skins alone, without reference to actual socio-economic status (in the case of the first Act) or cultural assimilation into Western civilisation (in the case of the second Act).
Both laws fundamentally deny human agency and responsibility, making the deprivation of liberty and property perfectly foreseeable and inevitable. Both laws have had harmful consequences for economic growth, social cohesion, and constitutionalism.
And still, both laws are and were intended to do good.
To me, this does not score any brownie points for the coalition of parties that adopted the 1913 Act led by General Louis Botha called the South African National Party (not to be confused with the National Party founded a year later in 1914). Nor does it score any points for the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela at the time of the Employment Equity Act’s adoption.
Their good intentions were and are utterly worthless.
But it is important to understand that they meant well, because if we errantly convince ourselves that our opponents are always motivated by malice, the effectiveness and focus of our own reactions will suffer in the process. And, perhaps worst of all, we will be selling a false impression of history and how the world truly works to our gullible children.
The (sad) reality is that much too much bad is done in the name of good. This phenomenon has to be recognised and understood, rather than wilfully replaced by what we would prefer reality to be. Our opponents are (almost always) far more formidable than Hollywood villains, because they are buttressed by a sense of sincere righteousness.
After a particularly contentious year in 2025, the Index of Race Law will continue to be maintained and provide the South African and international public with the most practicably up-to-date information about the extent of race law in South Africa. It will under no circumstances qualify anything that it presents, simply on the basis that the originating parties said they meant well.
Meaning well must be assumed. But it is the nature of what is being done that is most important.
[Image: Clay Banks on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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