On reading the searing race debate last week between official opposition leader Tony Leon and President Thabo Mbeki, who rebutted so angrily, I wondered what had become of non-racialism. And a saying of my gran came to mind: it seemed well and truly ”in sy moer in” — buggered, injured, perhaps fatally so.
For what the two gentlemen have done is ratchet up racial temperatures and make their twin allegations of racism central to the national debate, when what it should be about is deracialisation, the rubric under which the twin imperatives (and they are unquestionable imperatives of our time) of employment equity and black economic empowerment must fall. Non-racialism — simply the ability to see beyond race — follows deracialisation. Born in the Sixties, it is the antithesis of apartheid’s ordained primacy of race as that which determined ability and should determine life station, love, abode and outcome.
Or at least, that’s how I understood non-racialism.
Non-racialism is still there, of course, notionally and verbally it remains in our discourse. In Mbeki’s address to Parliament, which sought to assert the primacy of race, he said that, ”there is nobody in our country or anywhere in the world who is going to stop us from confronting the cancer of racism and continuing the struggle to build a non-racial South Africa”.
In other words, this (racial battle) is a fight we must have before non-racialism happens. But must we? Is it not possible to do non-racialism, to work toward it, at the same time as comfortably asserting a new hegemony, one in which black leadership finally takes its place at the helm of politics, the economy, in the places of scholarship, the sciences… ?
It is the epoch South Africa is in: from 1994 laws were passed to deracialise the country. Legislating was the easy part: it was only the architecture, a time when this nation felt little of the pain of change.
Implementing is the doing and the building. As workplaces change, as leadership of all institutions changes hands, as economic empowerment is planned and aided by the state, so power is changed. Inevitably, some are stripped of it; others must share it. Insecurity is rife and powerlessness an inevitable by-product.
You see powerlessness or perceived powerlessness across the national debate: it is there in the strident demands for an end-date to equity before it is even properly started; it is there in the vituperative conclusions that analysts no longer close to power reach about South Africa; it is there in the return to ethnic identity that I see in the community I come from; it is there in the rabid arguments of the Boeremag treason trialists.
Opportunism is another by-product where those with little politics and little long-term commitment to non-racialism become the bland purveyors of a narrow black empowerment.
It is a painful time. This is where we are and the demand on our leadership to guide the country through the maelstrom is great. Last week’s show was not great.
Leon is good at many things, but not at race. ”We need,” said Leon last week, ”to get out of the cul-de-sac of racism and return to the inspiring vision of a rainbow nation.”
This facile rainbowism characterised South Africa post-1994 where, like Mbeki said, the instinct was to quickly put our past behind us, to embrace the ephemeral rainbow but not do the painful transformation.
Besides, Leon is the leader of the official opposition; he is not the leader of the nation. He can’t do non-racialism because the longevity of the Democratic Alliance depends on his playing to the fears of people who perceive themselves to be powerless. Thus, ”Fight Back”, the party’s campaign in 1999, must necessarily be resurrected to claw back the support that has frayed with the New National Party’s flirtation with the African National Congress.
The guide through the racial maze that is South Africa 2003 must be Mbeki. But the president is not being a terribly good guide on race: he shifts uncomfortably between division (the two nations — one black and poor; one white and wealthy) and an assertion of mutual reliance, as he did at the ANC’s national conference last December.
Mbeki is the arbiter of a woolly ”national reconciliation”, defined not only as ”to make friendly again after an estrangement”, but also as ”to make acquiescent or contentedly submissive to [something disagreeable or unwelcome]”. Submission is rarely contented and, arguably, reconciliation is not the optimal outcome for South Africa. Non-racialism is.
If it remains a principle of the ANC government that Mbeki leads (and we’ve never been told that it’s not), then it should be his compass.
There’s little reason to get apoplectic at Leon because it diverts from the path of deracialisation and adds to the disruptive powerlessness. In this epoch, Mbeki needs to be a steward of black ascendancy but he could also stress the objective of redistributive policies — which is to deracialise society.