The white apology initiative, launched by Carl Niehaus and Mary Burton in mid-December, has provoked a public debate about moral responsibilities and collective values.
The importance of keeping this kind of discussion open can be illustrated by shifting a little away from the central focus of the particular initiative. We are in the midst of an Aids epidemic that will claim millions of lives over the next decade.
Our response to this epidemic has to address medical issues and the much wider socio-economic disempowerments that drastically affect the problem. We also have to foster the social values needed to deal with the epidemic. Key among these is the call for responsible life-styles abstain, be faithful, condomise.
But on billboards, on the public broadcaster and at the corner shop we are also telling South Africans to throw caution to the winds. “Tata ma chance” in the national lottery. I am told in some places disaffected, unemployed youths now go about chanting, “Tata ma chance, tata ma Aids.”
Clearly, we must take stock of the values we are diversely fostering. The white apology initiative makes a potential contribution to this process, but its entry point is likely to distract from, as much as add to, the debate that we need. It is important to acknowledge, as the signatories do, that all whites, willingly or not, benefited from privileges that were the flip-side of apartheid oppression.
However, as the public debate that has ensued demonstrates, the Niehaus/Burton initiative is prone to being interpreted in a number of problematic ways. The first of these is an assumption about how to build the foundations for a new South Africa.
In his foreword to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report Desmond Tutu wrote: “I still hope that there will be a white leader who will say, ‘We had an evil system with awful consequences. Please forgive us.'” In recent interviews Tutu has said the no-show of such a “white leader” remains his greatest regret.
An unqualified apology from an FW de Klerk to match Nelson Mandela’s magnanimity would, I am sure, have been emotionally satisfying. But is the symmetry of a generous black leader and a contrite white leader not grounded in the same elite-pacting model so much advocated for our country by neo-liberal circles through the 1990s?
I am not saying that Niehaus and Burton are putting themselves forward as “white leaders”, but it is interesting to note how many commentators (including sympathetic and intelligent ones like Zakes Mda) have measured the initiative against this kind of expectation. And, of course, so measured, Niehaus and Burton don’t quite cut the mustard.
This is not because there is something wrong with them. On the contrary, their track records are too honourable for their apologies to carry the weight that would somehow match Mandela’s magnanimity. But doesn’t this begin to expose the suspect nature of the underlying assumptions of a bi-racial moral pact?
The failure of any bad, but now contrite, “white political leader” to apologise is not a matter for regret. It means that white South Africans, who want to go into the future, are not effectively “represented” by any white politician or party. The “failure” of the hoped-for confessing “white leader” emphasises that building a new South Africa requires a radical discontinuity in the ways in which we whites see ourselves, including in how we see ourselves represented.
The second advantage in the no-show of this white leader is that it prevents the illusion of an easy, elite-bestowed closure on the past. This is also the second potential vulnerability of the Niehaus/Burton initiative. Unfairly, but predictably, it has been interpreted in much of the public debate as an attempt to serve up a white apology in order to settle an overdue account.
But there is no easy closure. The race, gender, geographical and class empowerments and disempowerments of our past will continue to be defining features of our society, and of our world, for decades to come. Which is why, with Niehaus and Burton, I believe that whites should be sensitive about the ways in which we still benefit from past advantages.
Being sorry about the origins of these advantages should be, first and foremost, not about seeking black approval, still less black complacency, but about using whatever assets we have to overcome the systemic inequities of our country. Sorry can help, but even for whites, sorry, on its own, is too cramping a moral response.
We need also, black and white, a sense of undiminished anger about the legacy of past inequalities. This includes vigilance about the ways in which a new elite (of which, yes, I am part) might too easily assume that transformation means getting a personal slice of the action, enjoying but perpetuating deep-seated, structural inequalities, in the name of change.