The race card has been so abused that the word has been denuded of much of its meaning, says James Myburgh
South Africa’s hosting of the World Conference on Racism is seen by most as a fitting reward for this country’s peaceful transition from apartheid. The government of President Thabo Mbeki has, according to one Washington Post columnist, also “worked hard to ease the racial hatreds and fears that once made South Africa an international pariah”.
It is certainly true that Mbeki places extraordinary emphasis on his government’s commitment to the “creation of a non-racial society, as visualised in the Constitution”. Earlier this year Mbeki told one English journalist that if he was woken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, and asked what worried him most, he would say it would be the “failure to create a non-racial society”. Mbeki and the African National Congress have also spent the past two years waging a protected campaign against the “demon of [white] racism” in South Africa.
However, foreign journalists would do well to pause before taking Mbeki at his word on these issues, for he does tend to use such words as “racist” and “non-racial” in a consciously dishonest way. That is, he has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to mean something quite different.
For Mbeki, South Africa’s racial problem lies in the over-representation of whites in the higher echelons of the economy and the professions. This dominant position allows whites to exercise a disproportionate influence over the social life of the country, and particularly the media. It also is, according to Mbeki, the greatest cause of “social tension” in the society that could be ignited at any time, “with disastrous consequences”.
Thus for Mbeki, South Africa’s racial problems can only solved, and a “non-racial” society created, by bringing the “African majority” to leadership in all spheres of economic and social life. The way the ANC seeks to achieve this is through imposing the principle of “demographic representivity” on all institutions and occupations.
Under this principle, constitutional and legal protections against “unfair discrimination” are withheld from minorities (or deemed “not unfair”) until these institutions have been made to reflect at all levels the racial composition of society as a whole. In order to determine the precise extent of over- and under-representation of population groups (and to monitor racial targets) race classification, according to the old apartheid designations, has been reintroduced.
It is a bitter historical irony that Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister who more than any other systematised apartheid, once advocated similar policies as a “possible solution” to the “Jewish question” in South Africa. In 1937 Verwoerd wrote in Die Transvaler that the basic aim of National Party policy in this regard should be to ensure the Afrikaner “will share, proportionally, in all the opportunities and privileges the country has to offer. It does not begrudge any other [white] population group its fair share, proportionate to its size.”
Verwoerd proposed that “legislation must gradually but purposefully ensure that each white section of the population should, as far as practicable, enjoy a share of the major occupations, according to its proportion of the white population”.
In the allocation of trading licences, and loans to businesses, Jews should be discriminated against until all other groups in the white population had achieved “equal privileges in this regard”. In much the same way “an appropriate balance …. may also be sought among the other professions”. Of course, once this had been achieved “the discrimination must disappear”.
Since Verwoerd was never able to implement this astounding proposal, it has been left to the ANC to adopt legislation and policy to gradually but purposefully ensure that each section of the South African population should enjoy a share of the major occupations, as determined by its proportion of the population.
This principle has been slowly extended from one institution to another from the public service, to universities, to the teaching staff of former model C schools. The Ministry of Education has threatened universities with a quota system if its student and staff profiles are not made to “reflect the demographic realities of South African society”. Countless bureaucratic forms now demand “race” to be indicated. Many job advertisements indicate the required race of the applicant. All annual reports by government bodies to Parliament now give intricate breakdowns of the changing racial composition of their decaying institutions.
In institutions where the ANC is in control, particularly in the public service, this principle has been used, at times, to justify outrageous levels of discrimination. One foreign affairs official welcomed the graduates of a training course on the basis that they were “a unique group, in that [they] will go down in the history of this department as being the first graduating class … that is entirely black”.
Many minority South Africans have done their arithmetic and simply do not see a future for themselves in the country. About 60% of Indian and white youths have expressed a desire to emigrate and, according to a recent survey by the South African Institute of Race Relations, 37% of Indians and 42% of white Afrikaans speakers view racial preferences as the most important factor affecting career progress.
For Mbeki though this is very much the one correct policy, the only way a “non-racial” society can be created. In the mid-1990s he tried to shut down debate on these policies by calling for a “national consensus”. Critics of the ANC’s transformation policies were labelled “racists” or “defenders of white privilege”.
Yet as the ANC has become more discriminatory and corrupt, so too has the accusation of “racism” mutated from an attempt to silence individual dissent into the claim that such criticism is merely an expression of an underlying white pathology.
When Tony Leon accused Mbeki of peddling snake-oil remedies, Mbeki responded by accusing “the white politician” of enunciating “an entrenched white racism that is a millennium old”. Criticism of government inaction on crime, rape, farm murders, corruption, Zimbabwe and so on, is all dismissed as an expression of “deeply entrenched [white] racism”. (Black critics of the government are accused of having “absorbed into their consciousness the white stereotype of the black savage”.)
In this way, the accusation works as a bottomless mental dustbin into which Mbeki can throw the concerns and interests of the white minority, with the opinions of all those who disagree with him. For example, opposition criticism of his policy on Zimbabwe merely confirmed for Mbeki “what many of us suspected, that the negative stereotype of black people in many white minds is firmly implanted in these minds”.
The race card has been so abused by Mbeki that the word has been denuded of much of its original meaning. (It is still possible that some of those accused of racism might in fact be racist, just as a stopped clock will give the right time twice a day.) What it does continue to signify though is that the accused is an enemy of the black majority, and because of South Africa’s dismal history, a kind of moral criminal.
After just less than a decade of sanity South Africa has again stepped back through the looking glass. The government justifies unequal treatment of minority and majority on the basis that white over-representation is “racist”. The imposition of demographic proportionality is described as the “deracialisation” of society. When the opposition protest against “reracialisation” it is told that there is a significant moral distinction between the “white beneficiaries of racism” and “the black oppressed” and that this provides adequate grounds for a system of differential rights and privileges. And, most absurdly of all, Thabo Mbeki and the ANC are working ceaselessly to dismantle the legacy of apartheid by implementing the forgotten ideology of the architect of apartheid.
James Myburgh, formerly a researcher for the Democratic Alliance in Parliament, will shortly begin a doctorate in politics at Oxford