News24 deputy politics editor Bongekile Macupe last week undertook a racial bean-counting exercise in the finest tradition of South Africa’s old census bureaucracy by naming all the new leadership figures and mayoral candidates of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and categorising them by race and gender.
It does not matter to Macupe if these people identify primarily with their levels of melanin or the tools between their legs. Macupe took an executive decision in this regard – just like the Nats did.
The DA “remains largely a party of minorities, with a disproportionately white leadership and public face”, writes Macupe. Attracting black support “will remain little more than a dream” unless the white men are put, proportionally, in their place.
The principle of so-called “representivity” is of course textbook Transformationism, even though we are told by many in the News24 stable that they are not in fact a mouthpiece for the ideology of the African National Congress (ANC).
Academisation
Representivity is a key example of modern-day academic “problematisation”, whereby a neutral or even natural phenomenon is academically critiqued or deconstructed and turned from thin air into a “problem” that needs addressing. This is not just a quirky outcome of academisation, but something that leads to real-world consequences.
The problematisation of representivity, for example, has contributed to some of the worst human rights disasters in human history. A big part of the motivation for the Holocaust and lesser forms of anti-Jewish activity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Godwin can take a hike!) was the “problem” of Jews being “over-represented” in certain fields. Echoes of this are heard today still.
No rule of God, nature, or logic dictates that anyone be represented in a sector, profession, or class in proportion to anything, let alone their relative population. Nothing works this way.
Human societies, markets, and voluntary associations produce clustering and specialisation as natural outcomes of culture, networks, family traditions, comparative advantage, geography, and individual choice.
Korean Americans dominate nail salons and hair salons in New York City not because of exclusionary cabals but through immigrant entrepreneurship, skills transfer within communities, and self-selection. Is this a “problem” that must be “addressed”? But think of the proportions!
Similar patterns are found everywhere: overseas Chinese in Southeast Asian commerce, Lebanese traders in West Africa, Indian merchants in East Africa historically. If you buy koeksusters in South Africa, it was more than likely made by the hands of middle-aged or elderly white tannie or ouma. These are features of open societies, not bugs requiring perpetual state correction.
Of course, historical injustice does play a meaningful role in this. It, like innumerable other phenomena, is a factor in a complex society of individuals, communities, and billions of decisions being made every second of every day over which no politburo could ever hope to have control.
Transformationism
In South Africa, representivity has hardened into something approaching a state religion under Transformationism, which treats the Constitution not as a framework of limited government and civil liberty, but as a vehicle for wholesale social engineering towards a perverse kind of equity. This includes demographic mirroring in institutions, ownership, management, and – clearly – even political parties, justified by a grand academic narrative of pervasive injustice that demands ongoing racial outcome engineering.
The ANC has ingeniously taken the grain of truth that previously closed doors should be opened to black South Africans after the end of Apartheid and morphed it into the totalitarian notion that everything must mirror “national demographics” forever. The Constitution, obviously, requires no such thing.
The ANC and its ideology of Transformationism treat race as a permanent proxy for disadvantage and views statistical deviations as moral failures demanding correction. This collectivism render individuals into avatars of “their” demographic groups, and society a body to be sculpted by the state and media elite.
Insidious logic
This mindset is insidious precisely because it has no anchor in nature, empiricism, common sense, or even God’s law.
It is a political contrivance that reframes normal human diversity as a problem. Once deviations from proportionality are problematised, the door opens to resentment, exclusion, and worse.
Nazi propaganda fixated on Jewish over-representation in professions, finance, and media (“despite” Jews comprising under 1% of the German population) as evidence of undue influence and threat. This fuel helped legitimise the Nuremberg Laws, Aryanisation, and ultimately genocide.
Ottoman Armenians faced a similar fate for their commercial success. Expulsions of Indians in Uganda, anti-Chinese violence in Southeast Asia, and other ethnic pogroms echo the same precursor: “disproportionality” is a problem, which if not rectified, justifies coercion.
People do not think like this by default. They are always and everywhere agitated into this kind of thinking by agents of radical, extremist ideologies. Totalitarian hellscapes are virtually always premised on self-fulfilling prophesies.
In milder form, South Africa’s version produced several hundred race laws. Most of these laws are straightforwardly concerned with representivity, but others – the more harmful among them – are aimed at economic rentseeking, providing a cover for public sector corruption and mismanagement. They help produce a racialised, high-temperature public discourse where even political parties face racial audits by the so-called “fourth estate”.
News24’s exercise on the DA is symptomatic: not journalism probing policy or competence, but enforcement of the Transformationist catechism.
The sins of liberals
Liberals are by no means exempt.
Many in the DA have told me to my face that the party cannot hope to grow unless it changes its (supposedly “white”) face. This means, according to them, that there is a large contingent of crypto-liberal black voters in South Africa who would love to vote DA but cannot do so because they do not “see themselves” in the leadership of the party.
This is, of course, nonsense of a high quality. Not only does it successfully hide base racism under layers of sophistry, but it ultimately insults the collective intelligence of voters and shows how far many in the DA’s upper echelons have progressed down the path of accepting ANC ideology as default.
Millions of white Americans voted for Barack Obama for his two-term presidency. Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans vote for the DA as it is. Millions of whites around the world are eager fans of black actors like Denzel Washington, and millions of blacks are eager followers of white Spanish and British soccer stars. Are these people somehow “broken” deviations from what is “normal” – must we remind them that they need to “see themselves” in the supposed “representatives” in politics and entertainment?
No, of course not.
Helen Zille’s remarks on this are very strong and commendable. She says the DA sees individuals “irrespective of their race, and people who want to build a joint future based on principle are blue”. But she does not necessarily represent her party in this sentiment.
Even some of the old guard at the Free Market Foundation (my employer) held similar views. They sought to window-dress the institution, premised on the bizarre idea that unless a dominating “black voice” is speaking, the average black South African will not listen. Thankfully this agenda was thwarted and its purveyors made to leave.
Non-racialism
Opposing all this does not deny Apartheid’s wrongs or the value of opening opportunities.
What it does reject is the totalitarian temptation of engineered outcomes as an open-ended duty. Classical constitutionalism – limited government, rule of law, individual liberty – protects against such folly. Transformationism sits in irreconcilable tension with these essentials.
In the centuries-old wisdom of liberalism in South Africa, institutions, parties, and individuals should be judged by performance, choices, and merit, not by whether their demographic make-up satisfies an ideological quota. This mentality has created unparalleled prosperity around the world, and South Africa would be no exception.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/the-flag-of-south-africa-11514758/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily those of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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