By Fezokuhle Mthonti and Ntombizikhona Valela, The Con\
There is a popular refrain that can be heard in the recent
student movements across the country: “Sixole kanjani?” It is an invocation of
words that were said all too often by black people during apartheid. “How can
we possibly forgive this?” “How can we possibly move past this point?” Except
this time, we had to project it into the future tense: where will black people
find the supposedly endless repositories of forgiveness that will help us deal
with this exact moment?
Reports of students being arrested for “sitting while black”
at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, as well as
the threatening of a lone female student activist by what is believed to be two
policemen at Rhodes University, remind us again of this popular dictum. Some of
the scenes of racialised violence from the University of Pretoria, the
University of the Free State and North West University raise questions of where
one can find the divine formulation of forgiveness that was bestowed to us by
Desmond Tutu’s rainbow myth during South Africa’s transitory period.
But where will we find the benevolent capacity to forgive our
institutions for their increased securitisation and brutalisation on campuses
across the country?
This refrain has even more weight in 2016 as this year marks
the 20th anniversary since the beginning of the TRC hearings, and the 40th
anniversary of the 1976 student uprisings. Further to that, the images of
violence across the country in both previously white institutions and
historically black universities have made us think through the ways in which
rainbowism, reconciliation and rugby have had mutually reinforcing effects on
our country’s political climate.
Danielle Bowler makes these parallels clear in a piece
entitled Jansen’s Post-Racial Utopia Laid Bare. Bowler writes that the “image
of Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup
is so often held up as a symbol of post-apartheid unity. It is almost uncanny,
then, that events at a rugby match would point to the discontinuities that
remain. University of the Free State vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen’s mythic
post-Reitz Four racial utopia and the rhetoric that he remains so attached to,
has cracked open, revealing a space just as fractured, splintered and polarised
as every other. Racist utterances on social media, the events on our campuses
and daily violence surface the seething underbelly of a country where the
non-racial centre cannot hold, where it has never truly held.”
As Bowler notes, now more than ever, this moment calls for a
deeper meditation on the limits of rainbowism and its significations. Black
students coming on to the rugby field in the middle of a Varsity Cup fixture in
protest against the untransformed institutional culture at UFS in 2016 disrupts
the mythmaking that has underpinned our post-apartheid national identity: an
identity premised on unequivocal racial harmony.
Nhlanhla Maake reminds us that “myth hides nothing. Its
function is to distort, not to make disappear … the aim of mythmaking is after
all to cause immediate impression, it does not matter if one is later allowed
to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational
explanations which may later belie.”
The myth that was propagated to millions of South Africans in
1995 was that rugby could be seen as a reconciliatory tool. This is not a
contestation of playing of the sport in and of itself, but it is important
think through the ways in which rugby as a ‘formalised’ sport was imbued with
numerous apartheid significations. How do the historical features of the game
disrupt the myth that it could have been an alternative marker for national
identity?
The South African rugby match has always been a symbolic
frontier for the establishment of varying permutations of nationalism. It
served as a tool for reconciliation prior to the 1995 IRB Rugby World Cup. In
1906, rugby built the proverbial ‘bridge of reconciliation’ between Afrikaners
and Britons after the Anglo-Boer War, four years before the Union of South
Africa brought together the four republics (Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange
Free State). Prior to this, rugby, like soccer and cricket, had been part of an
imperial project of assimilation into British culture as advocated for by Canon
George Ogilvie in 1861.
In Beating Them at Their Own Game: Rugby, the Anglo-Boer War
and Afrikaner Nationalism: 1899-1948, Dean Allen notes that rugby was
appropriated by the Afrikaner nation as part of affirming the nationalist
Calvinist narrative of a chosen people who had endured against all odds.
‘Strength’, ‘adaptation’, ‘skill’ and ‘inventiveness’ were assumed to be highly
favourable characteristics of the sport, and by extension, the Afrikaner
people.
By the 1930s, through the Broederbond, Allen further notes
that the appropriation of this sport would serve “to challenge the imperialist
hegemony that had introduced the sport in the first place”. Rugby became a
sport that promoted and affirmed Afrikaner uniqueness outside of the bounds of
British imperialist control. The sport was jealously protected because it was
an integral part of Afrikaner identity. While other racial groups may have
participated in the sport during the apartheid era, rugby ironically remained
an exclusively ‘Afrikaner’ sport.
It was in 1995 that the IRB Rugby World Cup would be
positioned as reconciliatory force in the new South African dispensation. This
time – a mere 99 years later – the reconciliation would not be between former
colonisers, but an attempt to reconcile an entire nation, black and white.
Whereas rugby was initially about uniting white South Africa, this time, the
project would require recognising a group of people rendered invisible by the
reconciliatory action after the Anglo-Boer War and prior to the formation of
the Union – a country of former colonisers.
Whereas 1995 saw the rugby match being encircled by
post-apartheid rainbowism, 1998 saw the real power of Afrikaner nationalism.
This was when the South African government sought to investigate claims of
racism against the Rugby Union. The investigation was challenged by then
president of the Rugby Union, Louis Luyt, who was also president of the union
when the Springboks won the 1995 World Cup. President Mandela was subpoenaed by
the court to give his own testimony and ended up denying any claims of racism,
which resulted in the case being thrown out. It is difficult to say if the
president did not recognise the institutional and historical implications of
the sport, but one can certainly see how black South Africans might have felt
betrayed by that moment. In an attempt to curry favour with the likes of Luyt,
Mandela kept quiet.
The image of a black president walking on to a site of
Afrikaner nationalist practice invoked a sense that black people could have a
stake in a nation that never quite belonged to them. Yet 21 years later – when
black students entered that same site – their non-belonging was communicated
viscerally. Violence was used against those who threatened the sacred space of
Afrikaner power. It is no wonder that some students at UFS have recently
renamed it “Un-Free State University”.
Popular notions of forgiveness and reconciliation were undone
by those who had allegedly not been tainted by the scourge of apartheid. The
born-free generation, which is often imagined as naive to the brutality of
apartheid, re-enacted the same racial violence that had now become out of sync
with the post-apartheid narrative. It is instructive that this contestation of
power happened on the field, because it shows us that conversation about
transformation should not be relegated only to institutions of higher learning,
but should also start to run across our sporting institutions.
The UFS campus is where Jansen styled himself as a vanguard
of peace and reconciliation, preaching a politics of post-racialism and
rainbowism. He, like Tutu and Mandela, has developed a personal brand that is
underpinned by reconciliation. As the ‘fathers’ of concepts such as
‘forgiveness’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’, these men have inadvertently
made South Africa’s transitional period about themselves and their own public personas.
The making of this contemporary South Africa has been infused
with varying Christian idioms: calls for repentance and forgiveness, andthe
creation of modern messiahs who would provide our new nation with salvation.
Tutu, both a religious and political figure, called on God and ubuntu to heal
the country’s people. His conception of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
tried to elicit confessions out of that which was truly unspeakable, despite
the fact that the horrors of apartheid could not fit into any existing
linguistic or spiritual paradigm. The spoken word would be insisted upon so
that a collective memory could be hastily stitched together and the country
could start rehearsing national catchphrases such as “rainbow nation” and “born
free”. The testimonies offered in the TRC would lay the foundation for an
unequivocally triumphant story reminiscent of the miraculous tale of
resurrection.
Rugby’s role in the post-1994 moment was to entrench a new
form of nationalism also rooted in Christian spirituality. Mandela’s inaugural
speech reminds us of the covenant made by God to Noah never to flood the earth
again. We are told that God made good on his promise by setting a rainbow in
the clouds, and this was the rainbow that Mandela and Tutu called on when
‘making’ this new South Africa.
A reading of Steve Biko’s classical essay, The Church as Seen
by a Young Layman, is perhaps appropriate here, displaying resonances with the
critiques we have of the TRC proceedings.
Biko writes:
In a country teeming with injustice and fanatically committed
to the practice of oppression, intolerance and blatant cruelty because of
racial bigotry; in a country where all men are made to feel the unwanted
stepchildren of a God whose presence they cannot feel; in a country where
father and son, mother and daughter alike develop daily into neurotics through
sheer inability to relate the present to the future because of a completely
engulfing sense of destitution, the church further adds to their insecurity by
its inward-directed definition of the concept of sin and its encouragement of
the mea culpa attitude.
The Latin phrase “mea culpa” is ordinarily used as a Catholic
expression to denote the acknowledgement of one’s fault. In this instance, we
can read mea culpa as the position that has been foisted upon black South
Africans by the rhetoric of forgiveness and healing. Mea culpa is the turn of
phrase that ensures white South Africans can utter a brief apology for their
involvement and maintenance of apartheid and systemic oppression. Black South
Africans, on the other hand, need to disproportionately admit to their own
complicity in their own poverty and alienation from the rainbow.
The pronouncements made at the TRC no longer allow black
people to lament over their pain in the post-apartheid period. This is the same
of Jansen’s UFS. Once Jansen had called for “forgiveness” and “healing” after
Reitz Four, black students were no longer allowed to publicly rehearse the pain
that they felt by being in that institution. The agenda of reconciliation was
made abstract and became an ill-conceived story of an imagined nation and its
messianic men.
