Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
In 1961
Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into
“compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of
different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of
people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the
ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force
it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines on which
a decolonized society will be reorganized”.
Almost
twenty years after apartheid our society remains divided into different kinds
of spaces in which people are treated in very different ways and given, whether
in principle or practice, different kinds of rights. The former Bantustans
remain different kinds of spaces to the rest of the country and in the cities
people are treated in very different ways, and their lives ascribed different
value, in the suburbs, townships, shack settlements and transit camps. Some of
this can be ascribed to the general lack of political imagination on the part
of the ANC and most of its critics. And it is always exacerbated by the
seduction of the technocratic ideal and its inevitable displacement of the
political - the collective posing of questions of justice. When the actions of
both the state and its citizens are automatically framed in terms of ‘service
delivery’ even when, say, the issue at hand is a struggle over a land
occupation, the political is eviscerated. And when any struggle that manages to
break out of the ‘service delivery’ straightjacket is likely to be presented as
criminality or conspiracy mere access to the political, which has more or less
been rendered a heretical aspiration, becomes a struggle in itself.
One of the
lines of continuity that stretch from the present back into apartheid, and
indeed before apartheid, is the way in which the lines that mark out these
different spaces are policed, by the state and private power, with violence.
Another is the sheer contempt with which some people’s lives are received and
their aspirations spurned. When people in a shack settlement are beaten by the
police, their children die of diahorrea, their homes burn year after year and
their attempt to participate in the agora is blocked at every turn, and often
by civil society and the media as much as the state, and all this passes as the
unremarked on backdrop to everyday life we are dealing with a society
structured in contempt.
This
contempt extends far beyond the failure to recognise the equal value of each of
us. It extends into the very biology of life. It is a woman in her sixties who
loses an eye to a rubber bullet during an eviction. It is a teenage girl with a
police bullet in the back of her head, or her front teeth knocked out as her
head is smashed into the road by the state. It is an old woman who falls on a
steep muddy path while carrying a bucket of water back to her shack and hears a
bone in her leg crack before she feels the pain. It is a young man, once bright
eyed and excited about life, who sinks into the dull rhythm of addiction, with
its ever tighter circles, after years of frustration and humiliation. It is the
father driven to destroy himself, and the love that has held him for years, in
a drunken paroxysm of defeat. It is the mother of his children, beaten in her
home, broken in her very centre by her inability to keep her son in school and
then, after he is sent to prison, collapsing into stabbing abdominal pain and
crushing headaches that no doctor can make sense of. It is strong people, good
people, driven into madness. It is sickness after sickness. It is death - the
constant ubiquity of death.
In a lecture
given in Paris in 1975 Michele Foucault argued that “the first function of
racism”, which he defined as “primarily a way of introducing a break into the
domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what lives and
what must die” is “to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological
community”.
The
divisions that order our society now, that mark out the enduring lines, lines
of force, between those who count and those who don’t are enabled by a clear
set of continuities with colonial and
apartheid racism. Perhaps most striking is the fact that the people that they
consign to lives made amidst the relentless structural degradation of their
humanity are overwhelmingly black. But although there are aspects of the
current order that merit the designation neo-apartheid it is still not
apartheid. We have to take full measure of the ways in which the enduring
division of society into different kinds of spaces, imagined to be inhabited by
different kinds of people to which radically different value is ascribed,
serves the narrow and predatory interests of a set of constituencies, sometimes
in alliance and sometimes in conflict with each other, that have a direct stake
in the ongoing reinscription of exclusion and domination. These constituencies
certainly include the old enemies – white power and capital. But they also
include the middle classes in general, traditional authority and the political
class as well as the business interests intertwined with the political class.
In Durban it
is not unusual for lifelong ANC activists to refer to the party as ‘not the
real ANC but a mafia’. It has also become routine for people who challenge the
way in which the party has turned the local state into a vehicle for the
private accumulation of wealth and power to fear that their lives are at risk.
This fear is often entirely rational. The same politicians who drone on in
technocratic development jargon in some kinds of space make public threats in
other kinds of spaces. In some kinds of spaces political violence, including
assassination, has become an acknowledged part of the repertoire of political
engagement.
For the
political class, and their allies in what is often all too charitably called
business, the exploitation of both enduring structures of oppression, and
oppressed people, to accumulate political and financial power is often
presented and defended as the redemption of the suffering and struggles of the
past. Critics are often dealt with as if they were a threat to the struggle of
the people as a whole, as if they were traitors to the nation. But while this
politics of the synecdoche is a useful ideological manoeuvre for the predatory
elite that have captured both the state and the right to represent and even
incarnate both the struggle and the nation the allegation of betrayal is made
with increasing frequency and vehemence from below.
Yes despite
this contestation people like Jay Singh and Shawn Mpisane have received
contract after contract from the eThekwini Municipality. In the case of Singh
this is despite his history of bribery, his criminal record, his documented
corruption, the plethora of plainly dubious deals, the millions and millions
that have flowed from the public purse into his private wealth and that of his
family, and despite his litany of failures to turn public money into public
goods – the debacle with the bus service, the thousands of RDP houses that are
simply uninhabitable. This is not an oversight. It is not a technical matter.
It is a political choice. It is a choice that was made and has been remade
again and again. It is a choice that, while it has been lamented from time to
time, has seldom been opposed with serious intent because it is imagined that
its consequences will be borne in that other space, that subordinate space,
that different space, where a different type of person is imagined to live. A
state that produces an Italian sports car in uMhlanga and a leaking, cracked
RDP house in a permanent marsh of sewerage in Phoenix, or an assassination in
Cato Manor, has been deemed not just acceptable but even, in the eyes of some
very powerful people, redemptive. Jay Singh may finally go down with his mall but
there is nothing to suggest that the mode of governance that has generated such
wealth for people like Singh, or Mpisane, from the public purse is going
anywhere.
In 1955, in
his now classic essay Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, the great Martinican
poet and intellectual, argued that colonialism:
based on contempt …. and justified by that contempt inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.
He called
this the “boomerang effect of colonization” and argued that colonisation is
never innocent nor something that can be carried out with impunity. It calls,
he declared, “for its punishment”. Césaire insisted that in Europe “cruelty,
mendacity, baseness, and corruption have sunk deep into the soul” with the
result that the barbarism first practiced in the colonies had returned home in
the horror of Nazism: “they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them ….
they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then,
it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
What is done
to those other kind of people, in that other place, always comes home. The
contempt, the utter contempt, with which poor people are treated in South
Africa is coming soon, to a mall near you.
