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A national audit of South Africa at 32 years suggests a country stuck in neutral, the most dangerous gear for our not-so-young-any-more democracy; it allows the engine of the state to drift while the vehicle itself undergoes slow, structural decay.
The cause of our fragmentation is not that 1994 was a lie – 27 April instead conveyed one of the most profound and inspired truths in recorded history – but that we have embraced an incomplete conception of freedom.
We must look back to 1912 — not with the condescension that we often reserve for those “Victorian gentlemen with clean hands”, but with the respect due to architects whose foundational vision contains keys that will enable us to overcome our present discontents.
Freedom ‘from’ vs freedom ‘to’
The founders of the South African Natives National Congress – John Dube, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, and Sol Plaatje – viewed liberation as “freedom to”, i.e. as liberty. Heavily influenced by Booker T Washington’s “Tuskegee spirit”, their vision was vocational: “Up from Slavery” through grit and sacrifice. Dube’s Ohlange Institute was intended as a monument to technical excellence and self-reliance.
But the segregationist state was determined to kneecap that vision. The 1913 Natives Land Act was the cornerstone of that wilful sabotage, legalising dispossession and stripping away the means of self-reliance to buttress the migrant – i.e. the cheap – labour system. Black South Africans were not meant to flourish and thrive under white supremacy, and their leaders quite correctly concluded that a prerequisite stage was required: “freedom from” a vampire state.
The incomplete suite
But “freedom from” is not enough. An absence of oppression is not liberty. The tragedy of the post-1994 era is that we have mistaken a transitional stage for a destination. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) – a framework documented by scholars like Irina Filatova, one essential for dismantling the apartheid architecture – was a critical tool for overthrowing the old order. But it is insufficient for reconstruction – its conception of the “second stage” is flawed.
Educationally, entrepreneurially and electorally, South Africans have aspired to “freedom from” apartheid and its legacies. But, again, the aspiration to an absence of oppression is a job only half complete. Under that framework – as Rebecca Davis so beautifully put it, you only get to be “RESILIENT”; you don’t get to be “playful, or grumpy, or stingy, or sexy, or any one of a hundred other options for national stereotypes”. Our political culture remains distrustful of those expansive conceptions of freedom, rooted in liberty, that challenge Nkrumah-ist notions of the sufficiency of the political kingdom.
Reclaiming 1912
Overreliance on the one form of freedom has created a fiscal deadlock – it is a cause of poverty. Talk of an “Asian-style developmental state” is belied by the existence of a dependency ratio equivalent to some of the oldest first-world societies, which has eradicated the demographic dividend that was the other pillar of East Asian growth. This is even before we get to the questions of whether we can replicate the technocratic excellence on which the “Tigers” relied.
While Dube sought to create producers of their own prosperity, our current model arguably prioritises the management of poverty (“alleviation” versus “eradication”). If Seme, Plaatje and Dube were to audit our present, I suspect they would point to these limits. They suspected – and little in our experience would persuade them otherwise – that state power is an insufficient prerequisite for the economic kingdom. It can create a foundation for liberty, but cannot replace it. We should be open to taking their ideas seriously.
Towards freedom
This is not a call to “pull up the ladder” or defend existing ownership patterns. On the contrary, it recognises the critically important role the state has in overcoming those legacies. But it emphasises that the state is a ladder, nothing more. To mix metaphors, to think otherwise is to contend that an engine can rev without a motor, or a clock can tick without a spring.
The “how” of our recovery is the distance between the vision of Ohlange and the reality of our contemporary Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges. It remains hard to articulate because the missing ingredient is one of “spirit” more than anything tangible or concrete. Getting out of the present stasis requires cultivating the spirit manifest in the lives and legacies of the founders of our freedom.
That cultivation will require considering the question of freedom both within and without the prism of politics. That vision is not a step backward to an archaic era, but perhaps the only path towards a future where we can celebrate Freedom Day with something more than the melancholic air that has become our norm. DM