Sisonke Msimang, The Con
In the past few weeks there has been much consternation about
the de facto existence of the dompas in the Western Cape community of
Worcester. The dreaded dompas was a humiliating fact of life in apartheid South
Africa; my father had one and his memories of it are vivid and painful. The
passbook was arguably the most visible aspect of the system of apartheid. Any
white man could stop a black one on the street and ask to see his pass. In this
way, the pass gave power to petty bureaucrats and ordinary white men. Passbooks
allowed racial authority to be invoked on a pretty random basis, and this of
course instilled fear in the hearts of black families. When black women
resisted the pass in the 1920s and then in the more famous marches of the
1950s, it was because they had seen the effects of the passbook on their
menfolk.
While it served the social purpose of elevating the status of
even the poorest and least educated whites, the dompas played an important
economic role as well. It was created to manage urbanisation and was an
essential regulatory mechanism within the migrant labour system. It was also
critical for the pursuance of the nonsensical homeland strategy. The dompas
operated like a blacks-only passport within the borders of South Africa. It
contained the fingerprints and photo of its bearer, his racial classification
as well as the name and address of his employer. The pass contained information
about how long the native had been employed and even described the
characteristics of the pass holder, for example, ‘honest and courteous,’ or
‘speaks respectfully and always on time.’
The information in passbooks was crucial for determining
whether or not black people were legally allowed to be in a certain town or
suburb. If their employment details did not match up with the area in which
they happened to be walking around, they could be harassed, jailed or have
their permission to work revoked. Needless to say, only white people qualified
as ‘employers’ and only black people required passes. Whites could travel
freely wherever they wished.
So the discovery of the pass system – implemented with the
active involvement of the police in a wealthy Western Cape community – has
rocked the nation. Hands have been wrung and shock has been expressed. ‘How can
this happen in the ‘new’ South Africa?’ many have asked. Fingers have been
pointed. As usual the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance
have traded insults. Both parties have tried to abdicate responsibility for any
part of the mess.
For all their hyped up indignation however it is obvious that
neither the ANC nor the DA are interested in much more than point scoring. The
issue of direct responsibility in this matter is important for stopping the
practice but it is somewhat peripheral to the story of how it is that we come
to have an active dompas system in South Africa in 2015.
When Earl George Macartney introduced, in 1797, the first
pass law seeking to regulate the movement of Africans, the objective of
propertied whites was to keep natives out of the Cape Colony and the role of
the state was to support the wishes of men of means. Today – in spite of the
Constitution – little has changed. If you are poor and black you are subject to
the whims of the wealthy and you often find yourself at the mercy of a state
that continues to see itself as the upholder of laws that serve the interests
of the few.
The dompas was officially repealed in November 1986. Growing
popular resistance had made the country ‘ungovernable’ and in 1985 a state of
emergency had given the government sweeping powers of arrest and detention.
Those in power were well aware that tightening their grip on a society that was
coming apart was not sustainable. In a move to diffuse tension the apartheid
regime eased some of the more overt restrictions on black people. The dompas
was an easy give – it had symbolic meaning, but its repeal would not undo the
architecture of apartheid. With or without it, the Nats knew that blacks would
continue to live on the 13% of the land that had been set aside for them and
would have little access to health, education or full citizenship rights.
Almost thirty years later, the question that all South
Africans should be asking is whether – in a metaphorical sense – the dompas was
ever truly scrapped. Twenty years into the ‘new’ South African project, it is
becoming clear that the apartheid horror show is far from over. Rather than
having halted apartheid, it seems as though we simply pressed a pause button in
1994. This allowed the good people of South Africa to learn the rules of an
inclusive democracy. It also provided breathing space for the old elements of
apartheid to regroup.
In retrospect it is obvious that one of the first mistakes
South Africans made in those heady transitional years was to believe our own
hype. We fell for the language of the ‘new’ South Africa. We thought that
apartheid – l’ancien regime – would die and that a ‘new’ South Africa would
replace it. We were even prepared for apartheid to die a slow death.
It turns out that everything that was old in the country
wasn’t dying – it was hardening.
In 1994 South Africans began to build new edifices. These
edifices masked the institutions that stood behind them. The obvious ones
bothered us: what had once been the Day of the vow became Reconciliation Day.
For those of you who may have forgotten your history, let me refresh your
memories.
Beginning in 1838 the Day of the Vow marked the solemn
religious pact that the Voortrekkers made with God. They asked Him to deliver
them victory against the Zulu nation, which stood in their way as they sought
to make it to safety in the interior of the land. Three thousand Zulus were
killed and the river ran red with their blood.
The less obvious ones were folded in corporate branding and
we forgot about them entirely: Volksas People’s Bank was renamed ABSA and today
ABSA has been gobbled up by Barclays. What was once the Argus Newspaper Group
is now the ideologically contested Independent Newspaper Group. In it’s
submission to the TRC, the Argus Group conceded, “The company applied the
government’s petty apartheid laws on its premises, and this was broken down in
some cases only by black disobedience action in the face of abuse from other
company employees.”
South Africa was so busy racing towards the future that once
the TRC had done its work, we told ourselves that we had no further need to
look back. The work of the Commission was ground-breaking and crucial. It only
began to scratch the surface but it gave us any clues. We did not fully
understand at that time that there are some processes that cannot be rushed.
Dismantling cultures, attitudes, systems and institutions of oppression takes
time and energy: we poured all of ours into new things, rather than into the
undoing of old ones.
It is clear now that much of our busyness has had the effect
of fortifying what was already strong in this country. The new pieces – like
our new education system – are made of cheap materials, slapped together
impatiently rather than crafted with thought and care. No wonder then that the
largest number of complaints of racism that are lodged each year with the Human
rights Commission come from the education sector.
Some of the shiny new-ness of the ‘new’ South Africa starting
to wear off. The notion that South Africa is new is no longer an unassailable
truth. Worse — as events in Worcester reveal – some of us have begun to suspect
that the new South Africa is just a fallacy, a powerful contemporary myth sold
to us by people who needed to make difficult things palatable. Perhaps South
Africans accepted the lie of the new because we needed something to believe in.
In hindsight of course we also believed in the ANC. Even with
all the caveats and the platitudes that our leaders issued about how long the
road ahead would be, many people around the world believed that that if any
movement was capable of re-making the world, it was the ANC.
The ANC has always understood the iconography of freedom and
resistance. Its list of fallen heroes stretches back a century: Pixley ka Seme,
Chief Albert Luthuli, Lillian Ngoyi, J.B. Marks, Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo.
Solomon Mahlangu. Its champions picked up trumpets and played dirges for the
revolution. They sang the Pata Pata and then segued into A Luta continua. The
ANC’s giants make Che Guevara look like a schoolboy and they look Thomas
Jefferson dead in the eye. Their names stand out across the ages; their spirits
watchful. They delivered us to freedom and the ANC wrote their histories and
took their photos and documented it’s own soaring ascent. The ANC had the
presence of mind to plan for nostalgia.
The ANC I remember is a funeral organiser, a sister, a lawyer
and a surgeon. When comrades fall the ANC ensures that the casket is black
green and gold. The ANC knows which cadres to dispatch to keep vigil over the
body through the night. The ANC stands resolute. It fixes our eyes on the
horizon. The ANC sends sophisticated natives to address the United Nations
General Assembly. The ANC I cherish is a tapestry of human endeavour woven from
threads of courage and dignity and intellectual rigour and all the things that
black people have always been even as whites denied that we were fully human.
The ANC of today has fallen from grace. He has stumbled and
is having difficulty standing straight. He sways drunkenly blinking against the
future. The ANC of today is Marie Antoinette’s half sister. She swigs Veuve
straight from the bottle and gives shout-outs to her homies still livin’ in the
hood. We watch her descent in wounded surprise.
The ANC is the daddy who will not countenance dissent: Uncle
Gwede wagging a stubby finger at journalists as he mocks yet another allegation
of corruption. The ANC is a meme; it is Comrade Cronin using his diminishing
intellect to circumscribe the truth. The ANC is a room full of overfed
praise-singers who exalt the man at the helm.
And the man at the helm? Ah, make no mistake that he is a leader.
He understands the ways of men. He knows their frailties and their doubts and
so he is skilled in the art of lording power. When he laughs it is rarely
authentic. This is not a man who is having fun. This is a mirth born of shame.
So is this the new ANC? Because today’s ANC looks so
different from yesterday’s ANC, many of us are tempted to suggest that we are
seeing the emergence of a ‘new’ ANC. We describe it as ‘the post-1994 ANC’.
Mmusi Maimane – with his posh ways and his DA politics – spoilt it for us, but
when he said it we knew he was right; ayisafani iANC.
It may not be entirely the same, but it is not new. We call
the corrupt ANC ‘new’ because we cant accept that our heroes may have been
flawed all along. We struggle to accept that the ANC today is exactly like the
ANC of yesterday, but that the context has changed. We are wedded to the idea
that heroes are sacrosanct: They could not be both liberators and con men; both
intellectual giants and corrupt thieves; both just and unjust.
In an interview about this most recent book, Askari, Jacob
Dlamini points out that our history isn’t only a story of victims and
perpetrators. Dlamini argues, “There were people who were neither; they were
something in between.”
Perhaps this is the key to understanding where we are today.
While South Africa is not new, it would be foolhardy to suggest that it is
completely old. Perhaps Dlamini’s phrasing, his insistence on complication,
helps us here. Perhaps the ANC and South Africa are neither old nor new, but
‘something in-between.’
The racist white on black violence we have witnessed in the
last year has provided a heartbreakingly old-school set of reminders that we
are not yet in a new place. We are very far away from the post-race society that
some people argued we might one day achieve. Sjamboks and dompases, gardeners
and maids; this is humdrum, garden variety racism. There is nothing new or
creative in this. It reeks in the way that it always has. This is how our
grandfathers died. This is how our mothers were shamed: Through petty rules and
random beatings on ordinary days.
If these events were not backed by an economic infrastructure
that is as old as the British Empire, then I might be tempted to believe that
they are simply signs of a dying order. But they cannot be shushed away. They
are evidence of the strength of the old ways. They are not throwbacks. No, they
are harbingers. In the absence of consistent and thoughtful leadership, the old
is re-asserting itself at precisely the same moment in which the new is
beginning to show signs of wear and tear.
It is true however that the faces behind the glass windows at
government departments are now black faces. This was not the case twenty years
ago. The faces on Parliamentary TV are also mainly black. This was also not the
case in the old and ugly past. Both – the government faces and the
parliamentary ones – reflect the demographics of our country and I concede that
they are new and good developments.
But these gains – our black faces in positions of authority
within the sagging state – are soft in the face of the hard power of the
consultants and ‘service providers,’ who build and plan and maintain this
country’s infrastructure. Our muscles are puny in contrast to heft of the
families that have always wielded extraordinary power in our country. The
Ruperts and the Oppenheimers and the Rhodes’ have not been hounded out of the
country. Their mansions remain and their wealth has not been touched.
It is not just that their bank accounts and lifestyles that
have gone unchallenged; I am fascinated that their legacies remain remarkably
untroubled. Until students on the campus of UCT protested this past week, their
monuments have remained standing. South African understand that the barons of
old caused untold misery, but we have also been taught to respect their
contributions to our society. We have not yet broken with them completely,
their names are not thoroughly discredited.
In his will, John Cecil Rhodes stipulated that he was to be
buried at Malindidzimu in the Matobo Hills outside Bulawayo. When he died in
1902, his body was transported as per his wishes and the ceremony duly took
place. Ndebele chiefs attended the funeral – no doubt in part so that they
could confirm that the old codger was truly gone. It is said that when it came
time for the gun salute, the chiefs refused to allow the rifles to be mounted
and fired as had been planned. They insisted that the shots would disturb the
spirits of their dead.
Reading this across the ages, it is tempting to be pleased
with this act of resistance. But read on, for nothing is ever as simple as it
seems.
As he was lowered into the ground, the crowd of thousands
flung a roar to the heavens. “Bayete!” they cried. A chief had passed and
Lobengula’s people were there to bid him farewell. In doing so, they were
offering Rhodes the highest honour, saluting him in a manner befitting royalty.
This is not a story about forgiveness. We have heard so many
stories about forgiveness in the ne South Africa it is as though no other
stories exist. We are nothing but forgivers and sinners. But these tales are
told at the expense of others and so this is a story about dilemmas. It is
about the conundrum of respect. One can hate a man and his deeds and recognize
that he was powerful and therefore worthy of a grudging sort of respect. Those
who witnessed his interment knew that something fearsome was leaving the world.
They also knew that it was unlikely to rest easy.
Today our ambivalence about our colonialist and apartheid
past is just as pronounced. In our contemporary politics, we do a strange sort
of dance with history. Mandela smokes the peace pipe with the generals of the
Broederbond. Tutu weeps. Mbeki intones, ‘I am an African.’ Malema says without
economic transformation he will ‘drive the Boers into the sea’. We cheer for
them all. We are radical but tentatively so. We are the Ndebele chiefs in the
presence of the dead Rhodes. How else can we explain our curious relationship
with the word ‘independence’?
We call ourselves the ‘new’ South Africa but we refuse to
speak about ourselves as an independent African country. Ghana, Zambia,
Tanzania, Cote D’Ivoire, Congo – all of the former colonies that were once
under the thumb of settlers or colonialists or (even better)
settler-colonialists like those who ruled Rhodesia – mark their break from the
past with a celebration on Independence Day. I have always wondered why we do
not call it Independence Day as others do.
Sometimes words are important.
Instead, on the 27th of April, we celebrate Freedom Day. Some
argue that freedom is more powerful a concept than independence. The former is
a state of being whereas the latter is a nod to political autonomy. Freedom
connotes signal moments in in black people’s history; the abolition of slavery,
the Haitian Revolution, the Freedom Rides. Independence on the other hand
describes the end of a colonial system and the beginning of self-government. I
understand the allure of the language of freedom, but these very examples also
speak to the necessity of independence. The American Civil War gave rise to the
Independence that made the abolition of slavery possible. The Haitian
Revolution led to the establishment of a Haitian state that was independent of
France. In other words, freedom and independence are intertwined – whether the
one precedes the other doesn’t matter much. What is most important is that both
exist in the vocabulary of a nation.
Let me concede that there are places and sites of dreaming
and doing and action and progress so that the feeling of South Africa having
taken too many wrong turns is not overwhelming. I have seen with my own eyes
that there are spaces in today’s South Africa that are in fact trying to be
new. It would be wrong – disrespectful even – to deny this.
But let us also agree that on the whole, one of the most
remarkable things about South Africa is the extent to which the rhetorical
device of creating a ‘new’ place has functioned to protect those who have
refused to change. As we enter our third decade of transition, perhaps it is
time for us to address this squarely.
If we accept that we are neither the new nor entirely the old
South Africa, then we can stop being incredulous in the face of evidence that
the old ways persist. The epidemic of shock each time some new racist horror is
revealed stems directly from this idea that the bad old days are over.
This is a naiveté we can scarcely afford. When violence
exceeds what we have come to expect and when moral codes are broken, the response
must of course be anger and outrage and a commitment to doing more and doing
better. But these impulses to act must not be based on the idea that racist and
sexist violence is somehow anomalous in our ‘new’ society. Our outrage must be
predicated on an understanding that what we are often witnessing are
continuities, that the old ways are still the current ways.
Forgive me, for I do not mean to sound cynical. I agree that
there is no place for violence and racism and sexism and pain in the South Africa
we wish to build. In my heart I believe still that we can make strong things
out of broken ones, and like many of those who inhabit the new spaces in our
country, I am convinced clear-eyed assessments are far more useful than myopic
ones. I love sentimentality in my movies and sometimes in my books, but in my
politics, in my country and in my people, I prefer disambiguation.
