/ 5 May 2003

Living non-racialism

According to a report in the Mail & Guardian two weeks ago, Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang recently attacked Mark Heywood in public as a white man who manipulates Africans to take part in Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) actions.

This is a betrayal of the tradition of non-racialism of the Freedom Charter and the Congress movement. It is not the first time it has happened, nor will it be the last.

Through whisper campaigns, party caucuses and innuendo the TAC leaders have all been denigrated as agents of whites, imperialism, United States and Indian drug companies or as part of a sinister, racially inspired plot against the government.

Ironically, this tactic has been employed before to undermine the struggle of black people. Those of us who lived during that period will remember that every strike, community action or social mobilisation was depicted as “white communist” (or liberal) manipulation. The message of the health minister and those who use the same ploy is an insult to all black people (African, coloured and Indian).

It suggests that black TAC members cannot think or act as equals to white members just as black members of the African National Congress were regarded by the apartheid government as cannon-fodder for white liberals and communists.

The minister herself has a white adviser — Patricia Lambert. Imagine the suggestion that the adviser was really the architect of national health policy?

The end of the apartheid state and institutionalised racial oppression represent an irreversible achievement. But racism and racial and social inequalities remain major stumbling blocks to development and freedom. No person in South Africa is free of racial prejudice, stereotypes or fears.

But these can only be addressed through open discussion, appeals to reason and social solidarity. Censorship, racial innuendo, labeling and crass attacks have no place in achieving equality.

Racism remains alive not only because of discrimination or prejudice against individuals, but because it is systemic. The vast majority of people who live in government-built dormitory housing, use over-burdened public health services, cram into third-rate schools, fail to receive social grants, lose their jobs and who remain insecure in their neighbourhoods are black. They are also poor. So the class dimensions of racism and poverty reinforce each other.

The TAC’s struggle for a treatment and prevention plan (including social upliftment initiatives) and the use of anti-retrovirals in public sector hospitals clearly illustrates this paradox. The vast majority of people who die avoidable and predictable Aids-related deaths are black people who use the public health services.

People who have access to medicines are predominantly (black and white) middle-class people who have access to private health care. The continued denial of anti-retroviral and other essential medicines reinforces the suggestion that black lives have no value to those in power. It suggests that the lives of the majority of people living with HIV/Aids are expendable.

The health minister and those who share her advantageous social position, who have access to private health care at taxpayer’s expense, misapply the oppression of black people to disguise anti-poor and, in effect, anti-black policies. The TAC makes no apology for the fact that the majority of our members are poor, black, African people, particularly women.

We are accused of busing black people to demonstrations. Of course. The people who use these buses do so because they don’t have cars. If we had money, the TAC would use more buses, and more cars. The TAC could bus hundreds of thousands of black (and white) people to our demonstrations. This is not because black people allow white people to think for them, or to write their speeches.

It is simply because our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends and children are dying because of a health policy that reinforces racial prejudice.

We join TAC demonstrations in our thousands to counteract the racial and class hypocrisy of the government’s HIV/Aids treatment policy.

Our campaign has remarkable leaders. Many are black, working class, poor. Others are middle class. There are men and women. Mandla Majola, Thembeka Majali, Vuyiseka Dubula, Terence Crow, Bongiwe Mkhutyukelwa, Theo Steele, Thabo Cele, Zodwa Ndlovu, Pholokgolo Ramothwala, Nonkosi Khumalo, Sharon Ekambaram, Portia Ncgaba, Sipho Mthathi, Edna Bokaba and countless others cannot take seriously the minister of health’s imputations about the quality and nature of our leadership.

Heywood, our comrade, friend and a leader of the TAC, is a white, middle-class, Oxford-educated, Nigerian-born male. These were all elements of his identity when he became an anti-apartheid activist in the early Eighties and when he committed himself to freedom in South Africa. We welcomed him then. He does not hide his racial or class privilege but consciously uses it to challenge racism and social inequality. He leads the ranks of other white people — too few, alas — such as Hermann Reuter, Sue Roberts, Orly Stern, Nathan Geffen and Jonathan Berger, who are dedicated members of the TAC. We welcome all their contributions equally.

The TAC makes no apology for its conscious development of the non-racial traditions of the ANC, the Congress Alliance and the United Democratic Front.

South Africa needs examples of non-racial, cross-class, inter-generational and gender cooperation on the basis of equality. We are not naive. Racism, sexism, homophobia, religious and social prejudice are a part of all our daily lives. In the TAC, we struggle against it together.

Our non-racialism is not an expedient to retain skills or capital — although we unapologetically utilise the privilege, education, skills and resources of our middle-class members, black and white, to develop a strong pro-poor and working-class leadership in the TAC. But these skills are no more important than the organising and social skills that poor, under-educated people bring to our organisation. Genuine non-racialism asserts the equality, dignity and freedom of all people and it is essential to ensure social justice for all.

Zachie Achmat is the TAC’s chairperson