Roger Southall
Martin van Staden reacted to my letter in Business Day by penning a diatribe, describing me inter alia as a ‘transformationist’ and a ‘statist ideologue’ and questions my bona fides.
Well, I am quite happily considerably more to the left than Van Staden, but this particular ‘transformationist’ was a member of the IRR either from the time I arrived to work in South Africa over three decades ago, or perhaps even longer (I cannot remember) – until last week, when I resigned, as I cannot belong to a body which advocates gun rights. Perhaps I should add, to calm his spirits, that I did not contemplate heading off to Nkandla in an attempt to prevent the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma.
My fundamental argument was that in recent years the IRR has moved to the right and has seemingly moved from liberal to conservative. I prefaced this with a couple of paragraphs (in a context where correspondents are limited to 300 words) which summarized IRR history, depicting the organization as primarily engaged in inter-racial dialogue between the wars and highlighting its production of the annual Survey of Race Relations from the 1950s through the dreary years of apartheid. I added that after 1994 the IRR continued to undertake important research and provide insightful assessments of government bills, policies and directions.
However, the thrust of my letter was that more recently the IRR seems to have become increasingly shrill, and, yes, I suggested that it had moved from ‘the defence of the rights of people to those of the rights of property’, and that this is in alignment with a steady shifting from liberal to conservative by the Democratic Alliance. The nub of my letter was that the IRR has chosen to stoke South Africa’s culture wars by launching attacks on critical race theory and defending ‘the gun-owning rights of law-abiding people’.
What are the issues at stake here?
Shift in the Institute’s position
One is about the IRR’s history, Van Staden arguing that if ever there was a shift in the Institute’s position it was in the inter-war years. As Paul Rich has demonstrated in his White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism, 1921-60, this was when a gap opened up between ‘conservative liberal’ and ‘radical liberals’, with the IRR identified with the former.
I am not going to argue with this but need to point out that Van Staden proceeds to simply differentiate liberals (favouring gradual change under apartheid) against ‘leftists’ (who favoured violent means) during the 1950s-1980s.
In fact, this glosses over major divisions among liberals during these years between the Liberal Party and the Progressive Party, these revolving inter alia around the franchise, the former arriving at a position favouring votes for all, the latter continuing to advocate a qualified franchise lest it offend its white support base. If there was a clash between liberal principles and liberal pragmatics, this was it.
There was also a tension between economic and political liberalism. Because of the oppressions of apartheid, it was political liberalism – the defence of human rights and individual liberties – which was at the forefront during the apartheid years. As Van Staden points out, there is no sharp divide between individual rights and property rights in much liberal theory.
However, in practice, it can be a profound division where one category of people owns property and where another category does not. Fundamentally, in apartheid society, that meant that property owners were white while those without property were black.
Despite the many changes that have happened since 1994, we are left with a major legacy of that today. Most economic property worth the name continues to be held by a relatively small proportion of South Africa’s people, and the majority of those are white (even if black property ownership is growing). It is this which gives the whole issue of property rights its political volatility. It is this also which takes us through to Van Staden’s defence of the IRR’s advocacy of ‘the gun rights of law-abiding people’.
Crossed an unforgivable line
This is what I find so thoroughly offensive and where I maintain that the IRR has crossed an unforgivable line if it wants to continue to call itself ‘liberal’.
First, all but right-wing libertarians acknowledge that property rights are not absolute, and that the state has a right to limit them in the public interest.
Second, there is a mountain of research that indicates that private possession of firearms is far more a danger to life and limb of people that own them than it provides for their safety. Van Staden claims that the lack of effective policing justifies the private possession of guns for self-defence – in which case, the obvious answer is to sort out the police. Yes, much more easily said than done, but it’s a far more sensible solution than arming the population.
Third, the uncomfortable fact remains that because the majority of property owners are still white, advocating gun rights for the propertied ends up being the de facto advocacy of guns for whites. This is far less an insight of Critical Race theory (CRT) than just plain common sense.
Fourth, yes, I am aware that the overwhelming majority of guns circulating in South Africa are in the hands of corrupt police, criminal gangs and political extremists, but I would argue that they are only given cover by the grant of gun rights to individuals.
I don’t dispute the thrust of the IRR’s economic liberalism, even if at times I consider it goes way over the top. However, the alarm bells start ringing when the IRR begins to sound and act like the right wing of the American Republican Party.
We are judged by the company we keep.
* Roger Southall is an Emeritus Professor in Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was previously Distinguished Research Fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council (2001-2007) and Professor of Political Studies at Rhodes University (1989-2001). His books include Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (2013) and The New Black Middle Class in South Africa (2016). He has also published extensively on African politics, political economy and labour in leading academic journals, as well as contributing chapters to numerous books.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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