At the end of his recent Mail & Guardian article, “In
the rainbow nation, colour and class still count”, David Smith recalls “a cynic
whispering” in his ear that’s not easy to forget: “The whites are pretending it
didn’t happen; the blacks are pretending to forgive.” As I thought further
about this, I concluded that, in the light of the interracial events Smith
recalls in his article, there may in fact be a positive value to pretence.
Pretence could be a coping mechanism in which one owns up to
the fact that one is unable to respond confidently and appropriately to human
relations conundrums of the kind that race, gender and class tensions can throw
up from time to time. Resorting to pretence may not necessarily be an
indication of hypocrisy, but rather a desire to buy time or a muted cry for
help.
The situation that leads to pretence may work somewhat this
way: if you are a white South African, you may realise the many times you
recognised and acknowledged that you were complicit, willingly or by default,
in social, economic and political practices in the past that resulted in the
extreme pain and suffering of others. You further recognised that although that
past was unsustainable, you have not entirely shaken off the hold that its
emotional and material benefits once had on you. This is a most distressing
realisation. How then do you translate your distress into corrective behaviour?
Until and unless you find answers to this question, you
enter and live in the world of pretence. There, you make no choices; you amble
along from one ethical challenge to the next, doing your best. You may discover
in yourself a tendency to be harsh on fellow whites and to understand blacks
and their demands, until you realise that such behaviour choices are untenable,
if not demeaning. Many whites may, in fact, be in a situation similar to yours.
Your harshness towards them could be a form of self-flagellation; while blacks,
on the other hand, simply hate to be “understood”. You are then locked in a
space of anguish.
If you are black, the world around you confirms your
historical anguish. Much as you may try, you are unable to forget that your
anger and sometimes hatred gave justification and legitimacy to acts of
resistance against the unjust system of apartheid in the past. The moral
imperative of your vision for equality, nonracialism and others enshrined in
the Constitution has enjoined you to look ahead to new and positive
relationships with your fellow white citizens.
However, your wish for such a world is constantly undermined
by the persistence of the landscape of inequality and by recidivist acts of
racism that enrage you. You experience your ethical resolve being eroded, a
condition you feel driving you towards lowest-common-denominator responses that
are easy to make but never fulfilling.
You find yourself then being constantly pushed back to the
alluring hatreds of the past and their call for activism. But then you pause:
is it the whites who are responsible for my anguish or is it a black government
that is not providing the requisite leadership and delivering the heaven it
promised? Protest against a black government could be a form of betrayal.
Protest against whites may be safer, but could really be no more than posturing
when you discover that in lashing out against perceived white racism, all you
are doing is replaying what you were good at in the past: “discovering and
unmasking acts of racism” and then assailing them.
While in the past this may have been seen as a progressive
onslaught against the legitimacy of apartheid, today it can be read as the
failure of the new leadership, predominantly black, to provide an alternative
model of multiracial and multicultural relationships in South Africa. The total
effect is to replay acts of indictment with often predictable conclusions,
which offer only fleeting satisfaction. Meanwhile, the resilient landscape of
inequality continues to wreak havoc on your capacity to hope for a different
future, until the next anti-racism protest. So you move along in an unresolved
situation, hoping for the best: locked in a space of anguish.
It is not improbable that a great number of South Africans
are locked in this space of anguish, leading us to a critical question: on what
basis can we achieve a new social cohesion that enables us to find the most
enabling human environment that can accord us, as South Africans, a sustainable
human capacity to solve our toughest problems in the social domain and in a far
less harsh and more permissive political environment?
First, the existence of such a collective space of anguish
may have to be recognised and acknowledged as the one feature in our public and
private lives that has the potential to bind us. Beyond that it is vital to
recognise that, being in that space, South Africans may not hold the same
quantum of responsibility and accountability. If you are black at this historic
conjuncture you hold the greater share of responsibility, because we told
ourselves that we were at the helm of one of the 20th century’s most inspiring
human transformations; that, in the spirit Paulo Freire captured in his
unforgettable Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we had the mission not only to free
ourselves from oppression, but also to free the oppressor. We deeply believed
in this. What, at this point, is our assessment of how we have carried out this
task and responsibility?
It seems as if instead of setting out to create a new
reality, we worked merely to inherit an old one. Perhaps in retrospect some of
the elements of the negotiated settlement that led to the historic elections of
1994 served to subvert the higher order mission. Redistribution was given
priority over creation and invention. That way we reaffirmed the structures of
inequality by seeking to work within their inherent logic. Perhaps it was in
this way that the promise of the human revolution once dreamed of was
conceptually subverted.
While the new political elites were incorporated into the
structures of corporate reward and incentive cultures, millions of other South
Africans were demobilised by social grants and truth commission reparations,
some aspects of which are difficult not to see as material rewards for
surviving the horrors of apartheid. This may have engendered an unintended
expectation that the world will yield its rewards to me without an attendant
obligation on my part to be engaged in changing my relationship with the world
under the steam of my own leadership.
From time to time I will make demands on that world and this
may include calling on white people to change without a concomitant obligation
on my part to do the same. I may say from time to time that whites are
ungrateful. They still have everything, yet they continue to disrespect me.
When I say so, I may forget that I was part of the agreement that led to the
current state of affairs in which I am intimately implicated and that the
future may require other kinds of agreements for which I am obliged to provide
leadership.
Failure to exercise leadership is dangerous. It may even
take away your right to “good sense”. This happens when the way you react to
events and “good sense” is articulated by others who you now feel compelled to
oppose to reassert your leadership, losing it further in the process. The Zimbabwean
situation illustrates this danger. The Southern African Development Community’s
positions on Zimbabwe should in reality be recognised as a failure of SADC
governments to take leadership and responsibility for their sub-continent. This
happens each time they racialise the Zimbabwean situation as a contest between
the white north and the black south.
The white north tends to come across as holding the moral
high ground on Zimbabwe. This comes from its unambiguous statements about the
sufferings of the people of Zimbabwe and the direct responsibility that Robert
Mugabe bears for this situation. The black south never articulates a clear
position.
Instead, murky statements are made that add up to
inarticulate solidarities. The black south is unable to articulate “good sense”
because it has allowed “good sense” to be appropriated by “the West”. The
promise of northern financial assistance obscures the situation further. The
white north is thus in a position to be resented at the same time as it is
needed. It is in this way that the black south, in failing to exercise
responsibility and provide leadership, has given away “good sense” on a silver
platter to a perceived enemy who is nevertheless needed.
Jean-Paul Sartre captures our condition of anguish so well
in his short reflective piece, The Republic of Silence. “Never were we freer
than under the German Occupation.” According to Sartre, the French during the
occupation existed outside the domain of German law, which they refused to
recognise. Paradoxically, this gave the French an invigorated sense of freedom.
“Because,” writes Sartre, “the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every
accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to
gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. Because we
were wanted, men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.”
For us now in South Africa, 15 years into our freedom, the
sacred space of what I should now call “resuscitative lawlessness” has been
ironically handed over to the proverbial “white racist”, who is then deemed to
display contempt for black people by saying the things black people ought to say
but choose not to say because their “precious declarations of principle” have
been replaced by the uncritical solidarities of the day. Equally so, black
people have given up the space to “triumph” with a rigorous “accuracy of
thought”. The “solemn commitment” that their actions used to signify has been
reduced to the whimper of anti-racist protest. To lead and create a world, or
to protest endlessly, that is the question!
To choose to lead, there is no doubt in my mind, bears the
greater responsibility and is the higher-order challenge of history. It is to
choose to place the shared anguish of coping through pretence within the realm
of responsibility and to use it as a basis for a sensitive attempt to create
ever-expanding circles of social solidarity across the great barriers of race,
ethnicity, gender and class without fudging their impact. It is to choose to
commit to finding an appropriate political instrument that will set a
foundation of trust for South Africans to recover their shared idealism.
This demands that we reconnect with the founding compromises
of the negotiated settlement that led to 1994. When we did so we chose the path
of the rigorous “application of thought” by which we would embrace the
complexities and ambiguities of managing a modern state. We entered a terrain
of no easy answers, which nevertheless demands answers. In this we have to
develop the disposition as a national trait to make complex connections. I
mention only a few which strike me because their resonant connections with the
theme of race defy simplification.
For a start, the whirlwind of capital accumulation is still
blowing. It is a sign of the times and has the real capacity to undermine the
ethical will of government and the body politic. It can be read as a historically
unavoidable redistribution of capital and assets to an ascendant power. That
being the case, this process can be read in two ways. It can be read only as a
movement of wealth from whites to blacks, in which blacks structurally join
whites within the inherited social and economic structures of whiteness and all
its rules and regulations governing rewards and incentives.
Or it can be read as an unavoidable step in the journey
towards the reordering of South African society; an opportunity, albeit a problematic
one, to lay new foundations for social justice. It is easy to see how the first
reading lands us in the anguish of pretence. It is also easy to see how the
second reading imposes enormous leadership and ethical responsibilities of
whatever political movement deems itself as leading South Africa into being a
just, nonracial and prosperous society. How does the movement succeed in
infusing leadership and vision into all aspects of organisational life and
public service and remain linked to civil society? In the first reading race is
a political ball to be kicked in perpetuity in a society structurally retained
as unjust. In the second reading race is a tool for principled long-range
planning.
The relationship between race and leadership shows up in two
more examples. First, for a people traumatised by the dormitory enclaves of
township life, we have not developed a hard-nosed approach to eradicate these
enclaves in time. There is nothing that could demonstrate more to South
Africans and to the world that the new democracy fundamentally values the lives
of its newly enfranchised citizens. Although we have built millions of new
houses, we did not build communities. We merely added to the dormitory. To
transform the dormitory over planned time into coherent, integrated
communities, each with a new tax base in which responsible taxpaying citizens
make local decisions about their livelihood, would be a signal of the greatest
love the country has for itself and its people.
It goes without saying that with the greatest number of
South Africans living in self-referential communities interacting with others
on common objectives, racial consciousness will dwindle in the face of the
predominant self-actualisation of black communities across the land.
I need hardly dwell on the long-term value of a high-quality
schooling system to the eradication of racial thinking in South Africa.
Admirably, we have allocated enormous financial resources to education, and the
schooling system in particular, perhaps in the logic of redistribution or
redress, but have yet to succeed in leading and managing the system as a
“solemn commitment”. A successful schooling system will see the end of
affirmative action, a short-term measure that should never have been allowed to
assume the status of a strategic objective. The development of all should have
been the strategic guide.
The overriding issue is not that race has no role in our
attempts to understand and explain both the history and the contemporary
challenge of South Africa; rather, it is about how much we are willing to
accord it primacy of explanation.
Depending on the choice we make, we either relive the past
to no end or we create the future. The latter is the bigger challenge and
requires that we recommit to our solemn commitment to nonracialism, accompanied
by visionary and ethical leadership.
We must recommit to diversity in solidarity, collaboration,
trust, accountability and civility, all of which have a binding effect that
should allow us to be aware of barriers that could be permissive or inhibitive,
but to learn to think and feel beyond them and across time.
