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| Siphokazi Magadla |
A
water crisis in South Africa's northwestern town of Bloemhof has led to the
deaths of three infants and scores of children and adults admitted to hospital
for severe diarrhoea. Preliminary results indicate that the area's main
reservoir was contaminated with the E. Coli bacteria which causes diarrhoea due
to a sewage spillage. The town's mayor has since been fired by the ruling
African National Congress (ANC), the municipal manager has resigned, and a task
team composed of members of the provincial executive committee and the water
and sanitation department has been set up to investigate the tragedy.
Anywhere
else, and the public's rage over this terrible incident would be directed at
the local leadership and management under whose watch this crisis happened. But
in South Africa, an isolated event like this has resulted in a leading think
tank making a bizarre national call for the country to scrap race-based
affirmative action which they blame for the deaths in Bloemhof.
The
South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) released a statement titled
"Affirmative action is killing babies and must be scrapped" where it
argues that the inability of the Bloemhof municipality to adequately maintain
its sewer plant is due to the incompetence of the people who are managing it.
At the heart of their claim made by Frans Cronje, the CEO, is that "there
is no doubt that the officials responsible for these deaths were appointed, at
least in part, on grounds of race-based affirmative action and that a direct
causal link therefore exists between the policy and the deaths".
In
short, according to SAIRR, unqualified black people who run this municipality
facilitated the deaths of three black children. It follows then, they argue,
that the actions of these blacks in Bloemhof are indicative of the overall
ineffectiveness of affirmative action in the country as a whole.
Upward
mobility 'killing babies'?
These
incongruous discursive links made by this institute, that the reason black
people are governing in a country where they constitute a 79.2 percent majority
is due to employment-equity policies and not because of competence and numbers.
This is one of the many examples that reveal the extent to which South African
public culture is contaminated with deductive and outright racist logic that
assumes that black people are the barriers to their own development. Based on
this assumption. we are made to believe that institutionalised inequality can
be resolved by placing the "right" blacks in control.
Cronje
and company label affirmative action as an exercise in political correctness, a
policy that seeks to address four centuries of white, violently facilitated and
controlled colonialism and apartheid. This discursive violence that reduces
systemic oppression to individual and political party failure has become the
daily bread of public discourse in this country, where the majority is blamed
for facilitating the conditions of its own dispossession. Nowhere is it
mentioned the extent to which, in spite of affirmative action, the South
African economy continues to rest firmly in white hands.
The
2011 national census showed that white households earn six times more than the
average black African household. It would take up to 50 years to level the
income between whites and blacks. Thus far, in this country of 52 million, the
black middle class comprises a mere three million. One wonders then, whether
this number would have grown on its own from the previous 350,000 without state
intervention in the form of affirmative action.
The
report argues that this black middle class plays the role of the gatekeeper to
"control access to the benefits of the policy [affirmative action] to
perpetuate its own advantage". The image that is evoked here is that of a
nouveau riche bent on protecting its hold on capital to the detriment of the
poor majority. What is missing from this narrative is the fact that many within
the black middle class are the main source of financial support within their
households and often support more than one household. Thus, greater black
mobility will lessen the weight that is shouldered by many among this class whose
access to credit is often the lifeline for their extended families.
As
I lecturer, I am part of this mobile black South African group. Yet unlike my
white and older colleagues whose financial responsibilities do not extend
beyond the needs of their children and spouses, I support two siblings and a
niece through school, and contribute in other ways to my extended family. These
are the realities of growing up in a working class household with only one
parent who worked.
These
personal, financial and emotional responsibilities of mobile blacks are coupled
with professional challenges in white-dominated institutions. There, qualified
black candidates continue to be undermined by white colleagues who use the same
language employed by the SAIRR to question their competence. A recent
controversial article, "South Africa's real ticking time bomb: the black
middle class", by a non-profit news outlet, points to the challenges of
structural racism and classism which dominate the day-to-day relations between
blacks and whites.
'Race
matters'
The
incident of the "Reitz Four" at the University of the Free State,
where five middle-aged black employees were forced by four white male students
to eat food that had been urinated on, is but one of the many examples of the
extent to which white supremacist attitudes remain unchanged and are being
reproduced among the younger generation.
Of
course, debates about affirmative action are not exclusive to South Africa.
Writing in the US context, Cornel West, in his classic book Race Matters made
the point that what is often lost in these debates is that black people, like
everyone, "simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality
of their skills, not the color of their skin".
Yet
the reaction against equitable redress overlooks the fact that
"affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive
refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis".
So
instead of asking how a white minority population has managed, spectacularly,
to keep control of the economy for 20 years, public discourse recycles damaging
stereotypes about black people's "innate incapacity to manage and
govern". This call to scrap affirmative action comes amid another national
scandal following a cartoon by Dr Jack & Curtis "clowns and
poephols" that labels South African President Jacob Zuma's recently
appointed cabinet as a bunch of corrupt and incompetent clowns, voted in by an
unthinking (black) majority. So yet again, the democratic political choices of
the majority are taken as indicative of their approval of patronage politics
without a nuanced engagement and the context in which these choices are being
made.
The
dearth of serious thinking in the national discourse that makes appropriate and
clear links between agents and structure has created a space where it is
actually unsurprising that a think tank such SAIRR would think it apt to make
such strange discursive and empirically incorrect links between the behaviour
of certain individuals and the need for a political response to structural
market discrimination. This conceptual recklessness does not only belittle
black pain, it is tantamount to showing the middle finger to the poor.
