When I was approached at the end of last year to sign the Declaration of Commitment by white South Africans, my immediate response was, why now?
Thirty years ago I would not have hesitated signing a document acknowledging the privileges apartheid had given me as a white. Thirty years ago whites had political power and such a declaration would have made a big difference!
Indeed there were whites of my generation who did actively oppose apartheid and paid the ultimate price for their courage and their convictions.
I am thinking of Richard Turner, assassinated on January 8 1978 by a Durban security policeman and David Webster, assassinated on May 1 1988 by a Johannesburg security policeman. As far back as the early Fifties, whites who supported the African National Congress formed the Congress of Democrats (COD).
This concept was to be revived in the Eighties with the formation by white democrats of organisations affiliated to the United Democratic Front (UDF).
Imagine if the white electorate had, 30 years ago or even 20 years ago, heeded the calls for Nelson Mandela’s release, unbanned the liberation movements and negotiated a settlement with its leaders. What pain, suffering and bitterness would we have saved our country!
Now, six years into a democratic government, when the white community has decisively lost political dominance (although it continues to exercise economic domination), is it not too late for symbolic gestures? Now that the apartheid state has been removed, has the central challenge for progressive whites not shifted from “political society” to “civil society”? Is it not in our shared day-to-day living that we will build a genuine, non-racial society, not in grand gestures of political reconciliation?
Those supporting the declaration argue that a symbolic gesture such as this is necessary to overcome the growing racial polarisation that we are experiencing in political society. They have a point. But will the declaration achieve this laudable objective? From public accounts it seems as if the signatories are largely drawn (with the puzzling exception of the South African rugby team) from prominent anti-apartheid figures.
On the other hand, those who have publicly opposed the declaration are drawn from the old white opposition parties. Are we not simply reproducing the white politics of the past: a few brave anti-apartheid whites, with the bulk of white South Africans remaining hostile to the new South Africa?
The white community is not a homogenous undifferentiated group.The new South Africa is gradually changing the relationship between race and class, creating new winners and new losers. Is it realistic to expect an unemployed white worker who has lost his job through “restructuring” to sign a declaration acknowledging his privileged position?
I believe the time has arrived for a different approach to this political cul-de-sac. The opportunity now exists, in a way that it did not exist in the past, for ordinary South Africans to build genuine non- racial coalitions at the grass-roots level. Let me suggest some guidelines for such an approach. Firstly, social research has shown that people move away from racial and ethnic stereotypes if they work together on a common project. Cross-cutting ties are built around day-to-day interests that rapidly erode stereotypes.
Education on cultural diversity is important but it can be counter- productive if one emphasises “difference” without creating common interests between groups. Secondly, these common projects work best where there is an emphasis on common aspirations and common interests.
In other words, where there is an interdependence between racial groups and where they have a common interest in a project. The trade unions are obvious examples where working people of different racial groups have a common interest in improving their wages and working conditions through collective action and organisation.
Then again, it is important to isolate “racial populists” such as Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe who manipulate racial or ethnic stereotypes, not by ignoring them or simply condemning them, but by addressing the socio-economic conditions that fuel the frustrations of the poor and the landless. Indeed this is the real challenge facing genuine progressives, whatever their social background: how to deal with the problems facing the growing number of losers in the new South Africa the urban and rural poor.
The proposal that the historically privileged contribute to reconstruction either with money or skills is a good example of how to address the socio-economic challenge facing the socially excluded. Notably, grassroots organisations in civil society work best if they are non-sectarian and are not too close to any political party. Political affiliation is still a sharply divisive factor in South Africa and progress is likely to be made in building cross-colour alliances if organisations remain politically non-aligned.
The anti-apartheid struggle was, literally and figuratively, a black and white issue, while divisions within these communities were downplayed in the interests of solidarity in the anti-apartheid struggle. Building organisations and institutions in civil society for reconstruction requires different concepts and skills than mobilising social movements to resist apartheid. But they both require a commitment to a more egalitarian and genuinely non-racial society a commitment I share with the signatories of the declaration.
While it could be argued that it is never too late to say sorry, my feeling is that whites as a “political community” missed that opportunity some time ago. The only political parties that now mobilise whites, as a racially defined political community, are on the very far right fringe. Sadly, the truth and reconciliation process failed to elicit a sincere apology from the political leaders of the white community for the damage done by apartheid to black people.
What is now needed is a new approach to reconciliation and nation- building, one that includes ordinary South Africans. It must be an approach in which we are judged by our personal contribution to building a society in which we are able to realise the full potential of all South Africans as human beings. If the declaration leads to such an approach, then it could mark a turning point for us all.
Eddie Webster is professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was tried in 1976 for a paper he wrote on why whites should respond positively to the black consciousness movement