/ 15 April 2008

Apartheid: Dead or alive?

<b>POINT</b>: ''Through the prism of values, opportunities and power relations, South Africa is essentially a white country geographically tagged on to the toe-end of the African continent. The ANC government apes its predecessors in everything from protocol to policy,'' writes Cosmas Desmond.

Also read Ferial Haffajee’s Counterpoint to this article

If apartheid had died, we would have an African country where African values, customs and languages prevail; a country in which the latent talent of black 10- to 15-year-olds is exploited to ensure they represent their provinces and their country at cricket and rugby, ahead of convicted murderers, as happened in Mpumalanga and Limpopo recently.

We would have a country in which women and children exercise their right to freedom of movement without fear of being molested, raped or even killed.

Through the prism of values, opportunities and power relations, South Africa is essentially a white country geographically tagged on to the toe-end of the African continent. The ANC government apes its predecessors in everything from protocol to policy. At the opening of Parliament, we still have a ”Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod”.

We have a president who pays lip service to the African philosophy of ubuntu, which is the polar opposite of Thatcherism. He once invited us to call him a ”Thatcherite”.

Apartheid meant unequal distribution of land and we still have it.

This is despite an early ANC resolution that ”the redistribution of land is the absolute imperative in our condition, the fundamental national demand. It will have to be done, even if it involves some economic cost.”

But there was no sign of that resolve when they entrenched the right to private ownership of property in the Constitution, thus ratifying the existing inequity.

Since 1994, more people (more than one million more people) have been evicted from white farms than have won land claims. And whites, with the support of our ultraliberal Constitution, still lay claim to the ownership of about 60-million hectares of land that was originally stolen from the indigenous population.

At this pace it will take about 200 years before we have a proper and just redistribution of land. And only then will I be happy to concede that apartheid is dead.

Rural people, under apartheid, were dumped where they are because they were ”superfluous” to the needs of the white economy. And they still are. Government’s priority is to support the big corporate farmers, who produce most of what the country needs, and to develop a group of prosperous, black commercial farmers to go with Mbeki’s black, capitalist middle class. So the rural poor are, to all intent and purpose, still the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.

While we focus on racism at inter-personal and social levels, this is short-sighted. Apartheid was always more about economics and class than it was about mental attitudes, prejudice and skin colour. It is deeply institutional and serves the ends of exploitation. The problem (or the ”challenge” in new South Africa-speak) is that it is still so. Policies have reinforced this.

Where, for example, the government has built so-called ”houses”, it has done so in the former black areas. There has been no attempt to intersperse them in the former white areas.

This means apartheid has not died: it has had a makeover and bought some new clothes.

Big business was quite happy to cede political power to the ANC, provided they retained control of the economy. And they won and continue to win. They have yet to stop laughing all the way to the bank — even if it is offshore.

We have bought into the mythology of reconciliation and miracle, that Madiba’s selflessness and policies of reaching out were the right ones. I do not agree.

As the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, writing of the last years of Kwame Nkrumah’s rule, said: ”Those who be our leaders, they also had the white man for their masters, and they also feared the masters, but after the fear, what was at the bottom of their beings was not the hate and anger we knew in our despair.

”What they felt was love. What they felt for their white masters and our white masters was gratitude and faith. There is something so terrible in watching a black man trying at all points to be the dark ghost of a European, and that is what we were seeing in those days.”

After coming to South Africa in 1959 I lived, often illegally, and worked in otherwise exclusively African areas where I experienced ubuntu, as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela has described it, in action: ”The warmth of a people who have little to offer one another materially but the warmth of ordinary kinship — ubuntu.”

Where do we see that now? Instead, we have each man — and the occasional token woman — for himself. Apartheid is not dead and ubuntu is being strangled.

Cosmas Desmond is the author of The Discarded People