South Africans, mesmerised, watch the unfolding drama in Zimbabwe, often with drastically differing perceptions across the colour divide. In Zimbabwe, the uneasy compromise struck between a white minority regime and the black liberation movements is unravelling after 20 years. What does this mean for us, only six years from our own democratic transition? For like Zimbabwe, we have much unfinished business.
It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who coined the term “rainbow nation” to describe the new South Africa, where black might live calmly alongside white, and all the pigment varieties in between. It is becoming apparent that our protracted history of brutal racial exploitation cannot be wished away with such clerical optimism.
The rainbow allegory, frankly, glosses over continuing racial disparities. “The beneficiaries of rainbowism are by and large the beneficiaries of apartheid, to whom rainbowism has given a fresh lease on life,” charges Professor Mahmood Mamdani, the outspoken director of the Institute of African Studies at New York’s Columbia University. “Rainbowism is too much of an embrace of our inherited inequalities.”
Now, after a remarkably affable interregnum presided over by Mandela and Tutu, hidden racial fault lines are beginning to crack rudely open. The first sign of a new abrasiveness came last year in an ill- tempered row about who qualifies as an African.
The debate was kicked off by the veteran anti-apartheid journalist Max du Preez, who staked a claim in the Johannesburg Star to be “an African and an Afrikaner”. He was harshly slapped down by several black writers who made it clear that it would be no use his pleading in mitigation that the old regime closed down his heroic paper, Vrye Weekblad. In the Star, he was told: “Max, mind your own baas business.” A prominent black commentator took his side but was dismissed as “coconutty”.
This racial divisiveness was a far cry from the “struggle” ethos fostered by the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and mass internal anti-apartheid movements such as the United Democratic Front: all had a rainbow coalition of leaders. It was also bluntly contrary to the clear declaration of the Freedom Charter, adopted by the ANC in 1955, which begins with the magnificently ringing declaration: “We, the people of South Africa, declare for all the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.”
This was the guiding principle of Mandela and the ANC when they formed South Africa’s first democratic government in 1994. Yet we are now seeing, even within the ANC, a more openly Africanist emphasis. In recent months, it is quite apparent that this has taken an increasingly confrontational racial edge.
The tension culminated with the recent claim by Helena Dolny, the widow of the late SACP leader and “struggle hero” Joe Slovo, that she was “ethnically cleansed” as managing director of the Land Bank, after complaints against her by a disaffected black former member of her board. Despite her impeccable struggle credentials, Dolny found that it was her whiteness that was constantly at issue; in media coverage, support and opposition split sharply along racial lines.
The reason for this sudden racial belligerence, I think, is not hard to find. The price of Mandela’s “reconciliation” and Tutu’s “rainbow” is that, all too clearly, whites have retained their privileged status and economic power. As Mamdani alleges, they are the main beneficiaries of “rainbowism”. Meanwhile, those who suffered under apartheid, or even risked their lives to fight it, have gained little or nothing at all.
Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated apartheid crimes, was in many ways cathartic. But its great weakness was that it concentrated on perpetrators – a minority of killers and torturers – rather than on beneficiaries: the majority of white South Africans. Most whites have utterly failed to take on board the size of the crime in which they participated.
But here’s a funny thing: in the welter of racial recrimination that increasingly surfaces in public debate, it tends to be old-fashioned white liberals and anti-apartheid radicals who stand accused.
Pik Botha, the National Party’s long-serving foreign minister, announces his conversion to the government’s cause with scarcely a murmur; 35 prominent Afrikaans businessmen, many of them financiers of the old regime, write an open letter in support of President Mbeki and this raises barely a titter. The excellent Mail & Guardian, a notable anti-apartheid newspaper, is now hauled before the Human Rights Commission, accused of “subliminal racism”. Leon Wessels, a former apartheid minister, sits on the commission, but that has elicited little comment and no outrage. Neither statutory bodies nor Africanist intellectuals take on the difficult targets: real redneck racists, the more genteely prejudiced suburbanites and the white corporate interests.
It is hard not to conclude that a new generation of ambitious black professionals, not imbued with the ideals of the Freedom Charter, are elbowing aside those whites they see as rivals – some of whom are far more committed to a genuine redistribution of wealth.
The debate about “Who is an African?” was long overdue. It will allow festering bitternesses to express themselves. It is also vital if we are to find, within our vast cultural diversity, a sufficiently common consensus that can be acknowledged as the basis of a viable national identity.
South Africa has a nasty history of racial categorisation; it is a habit many here find hard to break. We have also inherited complex definitions.
A professor of history told me recently that, while lecturing on how apartheid manufactured arbitrary identities, one student became extremely agitated. He was “Coloured” he insisted, and wished to be identified as such. Will he, having thus declared himself, be considered African?
What about my friends, a battle-hardened former Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla fighter and his white wife: will their children be considered sufficiently “black” to be called African? Then there is Walter Sisulu, Mandela’s fellow Robben Island prisoner and one of the great icons of the struggle: Sisulu’s father, it has been revealed, was white.
This question of identity is crucial. Apartheid tried to bestow upon different ethnic groups a frozen, essential identity. It will not now help to hark back to such theme-park tribal cliches when the majority of black South Africans, including those in the poorest urban ghettos, lead culturally extremely complex modern lives.
We are still obsessed by pigment. It would be a tragedy if the politics of pigmentation were to triumph again. This would be a huge retreat from the ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle and our crucial political problem: poverty.
President Thabo Mbeki announced what he called the “African renaissance” as a signature theme of his period in office. So far, apart from vague talk about a renewal for the African continent, the outlines of that “renaissance” have been left extremely blurry. The danger is that this void will be filled with hollow rhetoric about exclusivist ethnic traditions, leaving hard political questions of radical social change untouched.
Because, more than just a pigment adjustment among the middle classes, we need, pace Pliny, something new, out of Africa.
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