Against my better judgement, I stepped into a discussion on social media. It was one of those discussions that is marked by conversation-stoppers, deflections and presentations of innocence that is so de rigueur in South African society. It was a discussion about actual or perceived marginalisation of the coloured community in South Africa.
This is a country built on decades of racism, but there are no racists. It is a country where citizens compare miseries, where individuals or groups of individuals attempt, constantly, to outmanoeuvre one another in the races to show who is or has been most persecuted, whose persecution matters most, and where the country’s myriad problems are explained by monocausal simplicities and convenience.
None of these is, of course, unique to South Africa. Conversation-stoppers are swung about like a rapier, slashing, and killing conversations, dead.
You may say, for instance, that there may be a reason why people are opposed to your (Caligulan) brutality and cruelty, and the conversation-stopper is that you harbour an ancient hatred of the cruel brute and his people caught in flagrante delicto, so you cannot, possibly be intellectually honest.
You may say that someone is wilfully marginalised through some biblical punishment where the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. The deflection is slipped in; the children have been and will always be guilty, and exploit their intergenerational privileges, which, in some ways, may well be true.
As a former colleague said after I admonished her for abusing a (white) child of about six or seven running through the newsroom: “A snake gives birth to a snake.” This logic – hard to dispute the snake-gives-birth-to-a-snake, or kill them in infancy before they kill you – has been applied to present-day conflicts where innocent children are being killed almost daily.
If I have not made it clear previously, I should do it again, here: I don’t particularly care for identity politics or race-based politics, and I am not a specialist of coloured politics… there are people who, I am sure, are better placed for this purpose.
All of this does not make me blind to the way privileges, powers and influences are handed down to successive generations, and how later generations will conspire to protect such privileges.
It is an empirically verifiable fact that power and influence, privileges and benefits (the various forms of capital, political, financial, social or symbolic) accumulated over more than 300 years do not evaporate within 30 years… it is power and privilege that is vertically segmented.
We speak, in this respect, about the “development thesis” in terms of which powers, material and otherwise (ownership of property, development of technology and knowledge production, in general), tend to develop over time and become more powerful.
When these powers are under threat, or even questioned rhetorically, those who wield the power feel “uncomfortable”, or “fragile”, and egads! they cry persecution, injustice and oppression, conveniently forgetting their (historical) roles and functions in getting us to where we are.
Coloured community concerns and the deflection
Let’s leave all that as a backdrop, and return to my brief foray into the discussion of the coloured community I mentioned above.
First, I should set out those nasty racial classifications, definitions and conceptions of purity and belonging. I refer hereafter to black people to exclude those South Africans who are classified coloured, and considered to be “not black enough” or “non-African”.
Again, my personal identity affiliations or lack thereof (political, racial, ethnic or cultural) are set aside.
The conversation I refer to went something like this: A coloured guy stands up and explains that the coloured community is marginalised, especially in the Western Cape. Also in Panayaza Lesufi’s Gauteng, it should be said, and all of which makes a nonsense of the non-racialism that we fought for in South Africa.
Before the topic of actual or perceived marginalisation is even considered, the host of the discussion deflects and asks why the coloured community persists with their coloured identity.
Absent are the facts that the Afrikaner nationalists created the vile and contemptible racial classification system, and the African nationalists have simply adopted what has always been a vile and contemptible racial classification system. Those are just the facts.
The Afrikaner nationalists may tell us that they meant well. I am absolutely sure that the African nationalists have only the best interests of South Africa in mind.
That’s the thing about oppressive or unjust regimes: Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot did not say they were going to kill millions of people. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler did not say, up front, that they would be responsible for the death of more than 100 million people in Europe. (See this essay by my favourite 20th-century historian, Eric Hobsbawm)
They meant well, no? The National Party (Afrikaner nationalist) and the ANC (African nationalists) would proclaim innocence, to be sure. Julius Malema’s ethno-nationalism of a particular kind, where those people whom he considers to be non-African don’t matter and don’t belong. His staunchest of followers would tell you, I am sure, that he means well…
Coloured community concerns and denials, and counter-accusations
It’s marvellous to behold. Frightening is probably a better word, but never mind. Criminal organisations or unjust regimes have at least one thing in common. Privileged people who are reminded of their ill-begotten status and the forms of capital mentioned above, have the same habit. Deny everything (we are not racist), admit nothing (we worked hard for our money) and make counter-accusations (you’re racist/reverse racist).
Before seriously considering the cries of the coloured community’s leaders, the counter-accusation (a veritable conversation-stopper) is that coloured people are racist, and have always been racist towards black people. It does not help, of course, that very many coloured people have shimmied up to the party of white settlers, the DA, as they did to the National Party with the Tricameral Parliament.
If we accept that more than one thing can be true at the same time – that the coloured community has been left behind in whatever resembles a peace and prosperity dividend of the democratic era, and that coloured people have shimmied up to the illiberal, undemocratic and unjust forces in the country – the least one can do is listen, and look at the evidence.
Instead, when coloured groups raise issues of crime, disproportionate incarceration, unemployment, drug abuse (all social problems that stem from poverty and alienation), the black African response is: well, coloureds are racist, or they (themselves) reproduce myths about being coloured, when the African nationalists actually reinvoked and reapplied the vile and contemptible racial classification system – because the higher you are on the scale of racial superiority, the more money there is to be made.
For instance, when the Dutch, then British, and then Settler Colonialists (during the Afrikaner nationalist era) placed and kept whites on the top rung, they reaped the benefits of everything; from the proceeds of gold and diamonds, to agriculture and education, which helps explain the development thesis referred to above.
The main problem, the way I see it, is that in this great-tjank – everyone is in tears about being persecuted and we’re in a state of national paralysis – claims of eternal innocence give one group a monopoly on persecution (they have been the most persecuted in history), and gives that group a free reign with meting out punishment (everyone else must suffer biblical punishment and, anyway, a snake gives birth to a snake), and nobody can be as innocent as the ones who claim eternal innocence, and nobody can be innocent enough.
As a pessimist, I don’t expect things to get any better for the coloured community. This is quite apart from declinism, although it is profoundly Panglossian to be positive.
I will leave one example. Somewhere in the Northern Cape, somewhere between Springbok and Upington, there is a black man working on a farm. Once he got a job on the farm, he brought his family from Mpumalanga. Now, let me be clear. As much as South Africa belongs to everyone who lives in it, people are free to move around the country as they wish!
Now, that man from Mpumalanga was employed after a coloured man from the area was replaced because black economic empowerment and affirmative action policies (according to the farmer) awards more points for employing a “black African” as opposed to a coloured.
The first problem with this is that the area has been predominantly coloured/Khoi/San for centuries. The ANC has had a policy of converting every corner of the country to reflect the demographics of South Africa; in other words, if, as Jimmy Manyi said when he was still in the ANC and a government spokesperson, coloureds are overconcentrated in any particular region, that had to be changed “to reflect the demographics of South Africa”.
This means that if there happens to be a street in which coloured people are in the majority, as in most of the Northern Cape, that has to change to the point where the street represents the approximately 80% of “black Africans” in the country.
It does not end on the streets of townships. I shan’t complain, but I was told that I should forget about applying for an academic post at UCT as it would be futile, because the institution would rather employ a “real African” from any of the 54 states on the continent than a coloured person.
All told, the great-tjank has made us all wrestle over who has been most persecuted, who faces the most injustice and who has the right to mete out punishment, because, you know, a snake gives birth to a snake and at the extremes you must kill a baby before the baby grows up and kills you.
What reason is there, then, to be optimistic? DM