I recently heard the argument that apartheid was well-intended, but that it had disastrous consequences. This argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
The subject of the discussion was the intent of modern South African race laws, and how they compare to the race laws of the apartheid regime.
According to the South African Constitution’s Bill of Rights, in section 9(2), “To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”
This needs to be read in conjunction with section 9(3), which says the state may not unfairly discriminate (on any of a list of grounds), and section 9(5), which says discrimination on such grounds is unfair unless it is shown to be fair.
In a case brought before it, the Constitutional Court held that the consequences of such measures, though they may appear to constitute unfair discrimination on protected grounds such as race, do not automatically invalidate those measures.
“It is an invariable consequence of enacting measures that advance certain groups that other groups will be disadvantaged in that regard, albeit that this would not be the intention of such measures,” argued the late Justice Yvonne Mokgoro. “More often than not, such disadvantage will be on the basis of one of the listed grounds in section 9(3). The logical consequence of the approach advanced by the respondent is that practically all restitutionary measures would attract a presumption of unfairness. This cannot be what section 9(2) envisages. An interpretation of the Constitution which renders certain provisions redundant should be avoided.”
Intent versus consequences
It requires an advanced degree of sophistry, of course, to reconcile on the one hand the (classical liberal) right not to be discriminated against, with the (rather more modern) obligation on the part of the state to redress the unfair discrimination of the past.
That’s not the point of this column, however, and I’d recommend readers read the judgment in its entirety, if only to appreciate how the learned justices tie themselves in knots to make it make sense.
It does (and this is the relevant part) raise the idea that the intent of a law, rather than its consequences, can be used to justify it.
This, one of the discussants argued, differs from how we judged the race laws of the apartheid dispensation, which were denounced on the basis of their disastrous consequences, rather than their intent.
They then go on to say that “apartheid was well-intended”.
Self-determination
It was “misguided”, and “authoritarian”, but it was primarily about self-determination, and saying that we shouldn’t have one race that dominates another. Such dominance was a consequence, but not an intent, of apartheid laws, they argued.
“As a liberal even that finds resonance with me,” they said.
Like Marxists, and the French Revolutionaries, and indeed the ANC government – and even Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema – the architects of apartheid had good intentions, our interlocutor said.
Now I don’t want to start a witch hunt. I’m not going to name who said this, because I don’t believe this person is racist. I think they are merely mistaken, and made an interesting broader point, badly.
The broader point, that law ought to be judged on its consequences, and not its intent, is hard to dispute.
The proponent of the argument is a self-described classical liberal who finds himself on the more libertarian end of the spectrum. They will therefore agree with Milton Friedman, who once said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
The point that present race law is unjustifiable for the same reasons that apartheid race law was unjustifiable, is much less clear. I would agree that two wrongs don’t make a right, but I certainly wouldn’t put the two wrongs in the same category in this case.
There are good arguments to be made in favour of law intended to redress present disadvantage caused by past discrimination. There are also good arguments to be made that using race as a proxy for present disadvantage caused by past discrimination is simplistic, inaccurate, and often, unfair.
It is also true that most politicians and political movements are well-intended. Many express ostensibly noble goals, such as freedom, or progress, or prosperity, or equality, or ending poverty, or justice, or social justice, or opportunities, or anti-racism, or peace, or free trade, or negotiated settlements, or creating jobs, or rebuilding infrastructure, or universal healthcare, or lower taxes, or higher taxes, or civil rights, or human rights, or economic inclusion, or competitiveness, or solidarity, or worker’s rights, or patriotism, or social morality, or family values.
Most politicians and political movements don’t set out to be evil. Many set out with good intentions, but are simply wrong about how to achieve those intentions, or whether or not their objectives really are desirable.
One might indeed make the argument that the ANC was well-intended in what it set out to achieve, although frankly, I’d have difficulty doing so, given the extent of the graft and self-enrichment we’ve seen. One might make that argument about communists, although I’m not convinced one can make that about many actual communist leaders.
The architects of apartheid, however, certainly do not fall in this category. They were not benevolent rulers who only meant the best for the people they governed, but unfortunately got it horribly wrong.
They had good intentions only for their own people. They had good intentions only for white people, and even among white people, the English could go hang. Their good intentions were centred around Afrikaner identity and Afrikaner welfare.
Too long dominated and oppressed by the British, the Afrikaner had come to power, and now, it was – to borrow a phrase – their turn to eat.
Apartheid propaganda of the time did talk about “separate development”, and even used the phrase “separate but equal”, but it did not mean to achieve equality by any plausible metric.
In the Apartheid Museum you can hear a cabinet minister circa the 1960s describe black people as savages or barbarians, who cannot be trusted to govern themselves. (I paraphrase: I was last there a couple of decades ago.)
Growing up in apartheid South Africa, we were taught to be proud of our white skin, which made us superior in the eyes of God and the world. The general attitude towards others was one of outright contempt. (There was some quasi-benevolent paternalism, too, which sometimes might have even been honest, though it often sounded like post-hoc rationalisation or propaganda.)
Apartheid was designed not simply to separate the races, but to exclude the non-white population from the majority of South Africa.
“[The Voortrekkers’] task to make South Africa a White man’s land is ten times more your task,” said National Party prime minister D. F. Malan in 1938.
If apartheid had been well-intended, then land would have been allocated to the various tribes and races based on their population.
There was lots of plausible-sounding rhetoric about how white and black communities would develop separately but otherwise equally, but in practice, the white rulers tried to bundle black people into tiny, overpopulated bantustans located in remote rural areas on poor agricultural land. They did so by the simple expedient of declaring all black people citizens of their various homelands, instead of citizens of South Africa.
Map of South Africa’s bantustans, with the remaining territory coloured by racial concentrations of white, coloured, Indian and black South Africans, according to the 1970 census. Image: Wikimedia Commons]
Within “white” South Africa, black people would have to carry passbooks, and their nominal South African citizenship was valid only in respect of international obligations, but did not entitle them to significant political rights in South Africa.
Only a third of black South Africans actually lived in their homelands, and only a quarter lived in the four homelands that were nominally independent (though lacked international recognition). The rest were concentrated in townships located on the periphery of cities and towns, far from work opportunities: foreigners in their own land.
In those townships, they were allowed to operate only a very limited set of businesses. In Soweto in 1976, for example, there were only seven self-employment categories permitted within township boundaries, those being general dealerships, “native” eating-houses, restaurants, milkshops, butcheries, greengrocers, and hawking.
If apartheid had been well-intended, then “bantu education” would have been of the same quality as white education, and Hendrik Verwoerd wouldn’t have said, in 1953, “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?”
Apartheid never had the intention of effective self-determination. It was never intended to be fair. Its intention was segregation, not equality.
Verwoerd wanted to achieve “demographic proportionality”, but only between “the Jew, and the English- and Afrikaans-speakers”.
Even if apartheid had been well-intended, the very fact that it forcibly tried to segregate people should have been anathema to a self-described liberal, instead of “finding resonance” with them.
Voluntary segregation into community groups is perfectly legitimate in a liberal society. People have always done that. Even in the most cosmopolitan cities of the world, you’ll find quarters where particular national or religious groups are concentrated.
Enforced segregation on the basis of race, however, can never be consistent with liberal principles, even if the division of land and resources is ever so fair.
The rock over which our commentator stumbled, in my view, is in viewing the individualism of classical liberalism, and communitarianism of conservatism, as equally respectable approaches to opposing radical socialism or collectivism.
As soon as you legitimise identitarianism as a basis for social organisation, you’re headed for the trap of legitimising the idea that legislating on the basis of identity is okay.
Neat little formulas
“You cannot design society with neat little formulas,” said our discussant. I couldn’t agree more.
That is why individualism trumps communitarianism. The key to liberty is the individual right to be as free as possible from the constraints of government at any level of social organisation. The only legitimate constraints are those that are intended to protect the equal rights of others.
As soon as you cede those rights to collective groupings, whether they’re communities, or cultures, or races, or geographic regions, or nations, or religions, or tribes, you create the means of social engineering and plant the seeds of oppression.
That’s where apartheid went wrong, just as Nazism went wrong, and communism went wrong, and nationalism of all stripes ends up going wrong.
They’re all collectivist approaches to social organisation. The only approach to rights that establishes free people, free thought and free enterprise, however, is individualism.
[Image: Children of Ekuvukene, which is a “resettlement” village in Kwazulu “homeland”, Natal. https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/3311473293/in/photostream/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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