Last week, I wrote a letter to Business Day drawing attention to two themes prevalent in the news. The first was xenophobia, associated with the 30 June protests and the fear that had gripped migrants living in the country. The second was the Islamophobic responses in some quarters to the appointment of Yusuf Cassim as deputy minister of higher education.
This hostility, I argued, was part of a broader current of Manichean division in South African politics. Us versus them, often driven deliberately and as a matter of everyday politics by mainstream actors. My letter, “The danger of politics built on ‘us and them’”, published on 7 July, reads:
Over the past two weeks, there has been considerable discussion about two public expressions of chauvinism: one, about xenophobia associated with the anti-migrant protests, and the other concerning aspersions cast on the new Deputy Minister for Higher Education Yusuf Cassim for his religious identity. These are part of the same socio-political problem.
Political entrepreneurs in South Africa have long trafficked in a currency of “us and them”; it may be comforting to ascribe this to a fringe of the misinformed and bigoted. But it has been intrinsic to the construction of politics both before and after the transition to democracy, and is even now practiced in the country’s highest offices.
This is the politics of “our people” (as opposed, by implication, to “their people”), that retains the vocabulary of “national groups”, that warns about “enemies”, that muses about “the Indian question”, complains of the “oversupply” of Coloured people in the Western Cape, that questions whether Jewish South Africans are loyal to the country, that stigmatises Muslims as terrorists, and that regards commercial farmers as bearers of the country’s original sin. It’s hardly surprising that this mode of politics jumps borders – what begins with political opponents or politically inconvenient minorities is inevitably legitimised for deployment against others.
“We must not be tempted to join those who want us to turn against people who were not born in South Africa and who are in our midst,” President Ramaphosa cautions. This is sage advice; unfortunately, there is no shortage of those wanting to turn “us” against both foreigners and fellow citizens.
In decrying xenophobia and Islamophobia, I had framed my comments around themes that had broad endorsement in the commentariat.
Imagine my surprise
So, imagine my surprise when I saw that Prof Thuli Madonsela, formerly South Africa’s Public Protector and now director of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University, had taken issue with it. Her response, delivered via her X account (#KindnessBuilds), read:
In case you have not had an opportunity to check it out please get a copy of Gareth Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine or for a shortened version the Constitutional Court’s judgement known as Daniels v Scribante or even more simplified, Phylis Jordan’s article titled Black Womanhood in National Liberation in Sechaba article. When you have read these tell us as a rational being how does a labour tenant on a farm positioned like Daniels in Daniels v Scribante, whose ancestors were first dispossessed of their land and converted into tenant farmers from the 1800s, including the Glen Grey Act, then downgraded into labour tenants on a farmland, plus all the other injustices Phylis mentions, magically access opportunities and resources with a descendant of those on whose behalf land dispossession, job reservation and forced removals and the Group Areas Act were done. Tell us how does this work, mathematically.
I’m not clear as to what she is saying in relation to my thoughts. I am familiar with Van Onselen’s work (historian Charles, by the way, not his son, Gareth, who is better known for his formidable prowess in survey analysis), and have looked up Phyllis Jordan’s article. (Madonsela misspells the author’s name, and misnames the article.)
I presume that in presenting this record of past wrongs relating to the experience of black people in South Africa, she intends to convey the idea that irreconcilable divisions exist, that they are inevitable, and that such divisions constitute a legitimate basis for politics. And perhaps also that my views are inherently suspect.
My own remarks did not mention this history, nor would I deny it or its enduring legacy. My concern was with the mode of politics. Perceptive readers will recognise that this is a reworking of an argument I presented in this column on 29 June. It is a warning that one cannot play the politics of stigmatisation and expect it only to apply to those so targeted. Once legitimated as a part of public discourse, it will invariably be taken up against others.
I’m afraid that Prof Madonsela’s remarks are an expression of what I was cautioning against.
Societal traumas – whether historical or current – are real, and they provide fertile material for constructing a politics of enmity. They are also potentially useful resources in the hands of malign or populist actors.
Mental portmanteau
Nor are they unknown to South Africa. We often tend to collapse the period prior to 1994 into the mental portmanteau of “apartheid”. This is an elision: apartheid was an element of the wider Afrikaner nationalist project. This drew on genuine wrongs and historical grievances and the bitterness that they created: the loss of independence in the Boer War, the concentration camps, the attempts by Lord Milner to snuff out the Afrikaners’ language and culture, the proletarianisation, poverty and demoralisation that followed.
Endeavours like these seldom end well. Their dogmatism deprives them of the perspectives needed for self-correction, and their exclusivity deprives them of the allies they need to thrive in the long term.
I would add that it is eminently possible to construct a narrative linking foreigners to South Africans’ immiseration. I have watched interviews where exponents of this line of thinking do so with great eloquence and conviction. Perhaps it is this conviction that I find most troubling.
I fear this for a South Africa that looks to others as an explanation for its misfortunes. I fear it especially as political operators seek to direct animosities to their own benefit.
For one thing, the propensity to seek out others to blame for our circumstances blinds us both to the nature of our problems, and the solutions to them. Crafting solutions can be difficult at the best of times, but when paired with a sense of grievance and certainty about who is responsible for them, it is especially so. The impulse to find someone to blame and the resolution of that condition can easily become (fallaciously) conflated.
This reminds me of a previous encounter with Prof Madonsela’s public commentary. Back in 2019, she had disparaged those “clamouring for race-blind policies”. “If we abandon race as a policy consideration, how do we determine who remains left behind?”
Non-sequitur
I argued back then that this was a non-sequitur. People who are “left behind” can be identified by their circumstances. This may well be correlated with race, with sex or with any other ascriptive or historically contingent factor, but it is not necessarily conterminous with them. In diverse societies, it seldom is. Nor is simply reorienting categories of preferment a sure-fire solution. By the records of comparable societies, this seldom succeeds.
Stigmatisation, by contrast, tends to be monocausal and unidimensional. And it is partly for this reason that I feel we should all be concerned about the vitriol being poured out at foreigners. Migration is a legitimate subject of democratic deliberation. But the impact of foreigners in South Africa on employment opportunities and social services – even by the most extreme estimates – would be a manageable one if the economy was growing at rates comparable to other emerging markets, and if the state’s resources were better managed.
Similarly, while there is no reasonable disagreement about the effects of past discrimination on the present, this tells us very little about how these might be addressed. As I wrote in 2019: “Perhaps the question is not whether race matters, but whether it provides a solution.”
The problem is that the actions required to change present-day realities – to provide for economic growth, employment opportunities, high-quality education, functional administration, entrepreneurship, effective redistributive policy and so on – are hard, and politically complicated. There is no “magical” solution, to appropriate Prof Madonsela’s condescending formulation. (Though #KindnessBuilds might be a starting point…) Damning a supposed enemy is simple, and provides handy political theatre. Believing that doing so will set things right, well, that is magical thinking.
It is a form of politics that will not only retard the crafting of solutions but will compound the crises South Africa confronts. What starts with one group will be turned on others. Stigmatisation, as I have argued on many occasions, jumps borders.
Evolutionary baggage
We will all pay a price for this. In the early 1980s, the American astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, reflected on the state of a world that had developed the tools for its survival, perpetuation and prosperity, but also the means to destroy itself many times over – and the evolutionary baggage that placed its future in doubt. Would the human race walk inexorably and wilfully to its end?
He was, however, hopeful that the world was undergoing a shift in its understanding of itself: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed.”
South Africa today faces much the same challenge.
[Image: by esindeniz]
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