The battle between the ideology of whiteness and the existence of black statehood in South Africa

What is uncontestably true is that South Africa is a tacit pigmentocracy that drowns itself in the nation-building mythical narrative of a sociopolitical metaphor – the “rainbow nation”.

This nonracial togetherness is a social construct that was forged for the preservation of white social power and the momentousness of a negotiated liberal democracy.

In a settler society that tells itself so many lies, postcolonial democracy becomes merely another fantasy of Western modernity that fails to put white people on trial; whether they should be forgiven for the crime of apartheid that has destroyed so much.

This failure is not only typical of a settler colonial society that refuses to treat white supremacy as a structural syndrome that causes tremendous pain and torment for the black colonised. It is also typical of the abstract politics of liberal-universality that unmercifully constrains black people in powerlessness, which stems from the historical grievances that were never really resolved.

This social denial of justice is a very dangerous thing, at least in South Africa, where grievances are often revealed as the inexpressible trauma that is symptomatic of institutionalised racism.

The post-apartheid discourse of whiteness stubbornly nurtures boundaries of illusion which continues to favour white people, while preventing radical social transformation, in ways that undermine the wellbeing of black people by reducing them to a bare life, leading to a social condition that does not reflect the future promises of freedom and democracy.

This trajectory not only exacerbates economic inequality but also produces political restlessness that has far-reaching implications for the stability of this country, let alone its image. But more than anything else, such a trajectory is the imminent future event of South Africa’s settler colonial history.

At present, perhaps more than ever, this pathological society is tested to breaking point, as it wrestles openly with the vestiges of its past. Including the false claims that are peddled by unrepentant racists about the targeted genocide against white people in South Africa.

These claims, which are supported by the Trump administration, point to something more sinister about whiteness: they show how the local white supremacist discourse feeds on the contempt harboured by America and Israel against South African foreign policy.

These imperialist and racial-nationalist narratives, themselves steeped in capitalist modernity, are bigger than the romanticised performative unity. They represent a battle between the ideology of whiteness and the existence of black statehood in South Africa. In other words, the potency of this white victimhood poses a threat so great that, if needed, it can collapse the South African state (which was primarily founded on whiteness).

But before you collapse South Africa you would want to avail asylum opportunities to those that you want to spare.

This philosophy of sparing the human (white) while destroying the savage (black) is typical of the American doctrine of imperialism. This philosophy is the example of colonial violence that founded America.

These racist attitudes have sought to shape a white supremacist project that is in the formative stages of returning South Africa to white minority rule. As a groundwork for an anti-black state that does not reflect the material reality of black people, with land reform pushed to the wayside; bringing about a social life that is characterised by backwardness.

The two major problems facing this country, it seems, is the ANC and white people. The former, for its poor leadership that has sustained black oppression; while the latter, for the role of its colonial identity politics in the socioeconomic stagnation.

The relationality of these two entities is that one is the contradictory and compromised image of the other in reverse; that is, both the ANC and white people are what each pretends to oppose. This compromise underscores the fact that there is an ethic of the ANC in white people, and likewise, the ANC is driven by the rationale of whiteness.

No wonder that the ANC is not willing to punish false claims of genocide, even though these claims continue to tarnish the image of South Africa.

In essence they are inseparable. Their pretence not to like each other is nothing but a pretext for their interdependence; because the survival of one has always depended on the other. This relationality is unavoidably defined by a framework of existence that is fixed in self-utility. In a nonracial society it is precisely this framework that produces white despondency which fosters colonial trends and petty discourses of whiteness, where racialised power struggles are an appeal to human agency. DM

Bukelani Mboniswa is an essayist and author of Paint Me White: The Black Man’s Tragedy and Rainbow Nation: The Propaganda of Democracy.