Ronald Suresh Roberts: A Second Look
If the dictum that politicians are guilty until proven innocent were applied even- handedly to government and opposition alike, the Democratic Party’s pamphlet, The Death of the Rainbow Nation, could hardly have sailed so smoothly through the Mail & Guardian (”DP takes offensive on race”, February 6 to 12).
The DP’s talk of ”new racism”, suddenly portraying apartheid’s beneficiaries as victims, is hardly new. In 1996, FW de Klerk said: ”The African National Congress sounds more and more like an apartheid party because they talk of race all the time.” So the DP has merely taken up Ken Owen’s suggestion, in 1992, that ”DP members who are enchanted by president De Klerk, as Houghton’s Tony Leon appears to be, should follow president De Klerk”.
Meanwhile, reasonable people long ago swapped the complaint (”reverse racism”) for the exhortation (”reverse racism!”), and embraced corrective action to undo apartheid’s legacy. The absent blacks among DP bosses illustrate the reality underneath what the DP, following American rightwingers, euphemistically calls ”colour- blindness.”
But the clearest symptoms of liberals’ bigotry are their undisguised attacks on ”foreigners” like Graa Machel. The DP’s complaint, that President Nelson Mandela took ”foreigner” Machel on a state visit, reflects deep-rooted xenophobia and ethno- chauvinism. Leading ”liberals” not only divide ”South Africans” from ”foreigners”, but also carve South Africans themselves into racial and ethnic compartments, as in the DP’s almost whites-only Johannesburg megacity mobilisation (disguised as a ”referendum”). ”Liberal” xenophobia and ethno-chauvinism are flip sides of one coin.
Former president of the Institute of Race Relations, Hermann Giliomee, defines the nation as a group ”believed to be a community of people sharing the same descent or ‘blood”’. To him, South Africa is not really one nation (”We are not simply one ‘we’ in South Africa”, Cape Times, April 3 1997). To him, political disputes inherently pit ”one communal ‘we’ against another communal ‘we”’ and these inevitable we- groups should be entrenched in language, culture and education.
Cultural miscegenation, like Bram Fischer’s exemplary non-racialism (which ”we” was he?), terrifies Giliomee. He pretends that he is not prescribing ethno-separatism, merely proposing necessary solutions given the stubborn divisions that ”in fact” already exist. But this is sophistry, since his so-called solutions (like his failed Afrikaans cultural movement) would entrench the very divisions that he supposedly laments. If a hermetic Afrikaner ”we” already exists, why did Giliomee’s movement fail?
Such liberalism embodies the colonial mindset, which Edward Said summarises as ”a proclivity to divide, subdivide, and redivide”. Having worked so hard to render fellow South Africans foreigners unto each other, it is unsurprising that, faced with a genuine ”foreigner” (yours truly), Giliomee’s baroque ethno-chauvinism becomes straightforward xenophobia. For both him and Owen I am apparently a ”foreign West Indian carpet-bagger” in whom Owen additionally diagnoses a ”venomous brand of western hemisphere racial politics”. Owen here betrays what Said calls the ”regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard and fast distinctions as ‘East’ and ‘West’ to channel thought into a West or an East compartment” – the colonial mindset.
The term ”carpet-bagger” was originally hurled at ”foreign” anti-slavery northerners by ”defeated pro-slavery whites in the post- Civil War American South” (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics, 1996). ”Carpet- bagger” belongs to the pro-slavery lexicon, in which a pregnant black was call a ”breeding one”, her children ”foals”.
Anti-apartheid foreigners, like anti-slavery northerners, are Owen’s ”carpet-baggers” today. But Owen also deployed this vocabulary to express intra-white chauvinism during apartheid. He has permanently enriched bigotry’s phrase book.
”The carpet-baggers sow dissension in the liberal camp” was Owen’s 1989 headline when he lectured Afrikaner liberals who, drummed out of Nat institutions and preaching what Owen called ”the exile’s hot-eyed sermon”, invaded what Owen saw as English cultural preserves. ”They represent nobody but their admirable selves and, like poor relations, they carp endlessly about the accommodation among the English.”
In another chauvinistic editorial ”Ethnic carpet-bagger” (Business Day, June 13 1989), Owen explicitly lectured Afrikaner liberal Esther Lategan to stay in Stellenbosch, among her own people, rather than challenge English liberal, Ken Andrew, in Gardens. The argument that members of a political party should canvass exclusively their ”own” racial communities resoundingly failed at the ANC’s December conference. But Owen himself explicitly adopted that logic within Afrikaner-English liberal politics, despite his own mixed Afrikaans-English education.
Again, Owen cannot simply disagree with Afrikaner academic Andre du Toit’s warning, in his University of Cape Town (UCT) inaugural lecture in the Eighties, that certain liberals were potentially apologists for apartheid.
Owen must add chauvinism: ”Stellenbosch [Du Toit’s former home], of course, is miles away from the liberal-left battlefields of Anglo-Saxon politics and Du Toit, in his flight to UCT, may well have stumbled into unfamiliar territory.” The sneering colonial divides, subdivides, redivides.
In criticising Hendrik Verwoerd, Owen irrelevantly called him ”a psychotic immigrant”, as though foreign psychosis explains racism. Given such virulent nativism, what exactly is Owen’s principled objection when black nativists offensively call whites ”settlers”? Nevertheless, DP parliamentarian Dene Smuts said recently that Owen provides liberal ”leadership”. Owen remains chauvinist emeritus in the DP’s corridors of powerlessness.
Seeking to subdivide the liberation movement during the transition, Owen invented ”white ideologues” supposedly exploiting ”black nationalism”. He scoffed when Mandela called Joe Slovo ”a true son of the soil”. To Owen, Slovo was ”doggedly loyal” to Moscow. Owen queried whether Slovo intended ”to serve the best interests of” his ”own people, or the best interests of the foreign government to whom he has given such devotion.” Joe Slovo: red foreign carpet-bagger. With rare exceptions, apartheid bred the liberals it deserved: embodying bigotry, not battling it.
— Ronald Suresh Roberts is co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance