In his profiles of the new South African elite, Mark Gevisser has found that race is still at the core of our national identity
William Makgoba and Charles van Onselen. Looking through my profiles of the year, I was struck, over and over again, by their confrontation. Not simply because they are the prime antagonists in the Battle of Wits, but because, at the very moment that our president seems to make racial reconciliation seem as easy as tea with Betsie, they have shown us just how fraught it really is.
Race, once more, has revealed itself to be the determining factor of our society. The euphoria of 1994, the myth of reconciliation, were no more than lines in the sand, lines now retraced every time Nelson Mandela absolves his oppressors. There’s something deeper, more permanent — both more scarring and more revealing — about the tracks made at Wits.
I profiled both Makgoba and Van Onselen. As befitting their status as leading intellectuals of our society, I found them both to be intensely self-reflective and complex individuals — and recorded them as such. How tragic that they have been reduced, by both each other and the prevailing politics of the day, to the blunt instruments of conflicting political aspirations: the one the avatar of reactive nationalism (the coloniser was bad so the colonised is ipso facto good), the other of recalcitrant exclusivism (protection of privilege masquerading as protection of standards).
In a strange way, though, Wits is still playing the traditional role a university should: that of leading society, for it has provided us with a sneak preview of the struggle of our times. My columns have attempted to chart the coming to power of a new elite, with all its aspirations and contradictions. It was exhilarating to touch base with people like Olive Shisana, Dan Mofokeng, Brigitte Mabandla, Thoko Msane, Manne Dipico, Mathews Phosa, Mamphela Ramphele, Thami Mazwai: idealists and visionaries trying to make a dream work. There is no question in my mind that every single one of them is way better than the people they
It was sobering, though, to hear how central race was to their work, whether they saw themselves as Africanists, humanists, communists, conciliators, or any combination thereof. Most of the non-African people I interviewed — progressives and otherwise – — went out of their way to de-emphasise race. Most African people — progressives and otherwise — made it clear that race (the “national question” as the African National Congress called it when still in exile) was still the major issue they needed to confront. Minorities and majorities respectively, both were, in part, talking to their own interests.
In contrast to the “we’re all the same under our skin” universalism rooted in both the dogma of hard lefties and the sentimentality of soft liberals — there is a centrality of race-identity to the new African elite. Their fundamental rationalisation of power is the organic one, an obvious one: the assertion that because they — unlike minority intellectuals — hail from impoverished black communities, they know what’s best for these communities.
Talking about the difference in approach between Joe Slovo and Sankie Mthembi-Nkondo, Gauteng housing MEC Dan Mofokeng told me: “Comrade Sankie is doing a good job. As a political leader she is very gifted and, above all, she has experience on the ground. She grew up in a township like the rest of us. So no one can cheat her about living conditions. She understands that perfectly well.” The implication was clear: Slovo and his director- general, Billy Cobbett, are white: they’ll never get it right.
New Director-General of Health Olive Shisana responded with appropriate indignation to the oft-repeated allegation that she was not up to the job: “Wait a minute! Where do I come from? I come from the very people I’m trying to help! It’s not academic or theoretical for me! I’m talking about my brother, my sister, my mother, my neighbour; I’m talking about the people I grew up with in Mamelodi, in Makotopong. Why do I have to prove anything beyond that?”
It goes without saying that Mofokeng, Nkondo, Shisana and Makgoba have a more organic relationship to the victims of apartheid than Billy Cobbett, Joe Slovo or Charles van Onselen. But it also goes without saying that Shisana has to prove a lot more than that too: she has to prove that she can do the job, and deliver the goods to the people of Mamelodi and Makotopong (in her particular case, it looks as if she may well be able to).
One of my very first profiles was with South African Communist Party ideologue Blade Nzimande. As I met Shisana, Makgoba et al, I had his words ringing in my ears. He had chided the ANC, when I profiled him, for trying to be “more Zulu than Inkatha, a battle we cannot but lose”, when in fact “we should be fighting a class battle against the IFP, which is nothing more than a party of a petty bourgeoisie that fears it will lose economic power in a democratic South Africa”.
There is a basic point to be extrapolated from this and to be retrained upon the ruling class in which Nzimande himself now serves: members of an elite, regardless of where they come from, owe their allegiance first and foremost to their class, even if they sometimes disguise this as an allegiance to their race or ethnicity. Like those of us who were fortunate enough to be economically privileged by apartheid, members of the black elite now also have all those trappings of empowerment: bonds to service, cars to upgrade, children to get through private schools.
Certainly, there are a number of con-men who will take advantage of the new racial politics: when Eugene Nyati’s avarice was uncovered in Mpumalanga, he blamed “this goddamn racism. It’s as if some people believe that certain [money] figures are just not supposed to be associated with a black man.” But most members of the black elite, like most members of the white elite, are not in the slightest bit corrupt — they are simply self-interested.
But that is only part of the tale, for those members of the new elite who are in government in one way or another will live or die by whether they deliver the promises that swept them into power. There may be casualties along the way, but most will remain obligated to make the lives of black people better, today, than they were before 1994.
Hopefully our new rulers will be able to undo what was put into place by the cast-iron race- based system they inherited. There is the grave danger, though, that they will — either by default or by design — become comfortable with the apparatus of power set up for them, and find every way possible to justify their new positions by manufacturing legitimacy on the basis of unquestioned assumptions about race.
For that reason alone the Wits debacle has done us all a favour. It’s time to question our assumptions.