Overcoming intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democractic Persuasion
by James L Gibson & Amanda Gouws
(Cambridge University Press)
Political intolerance has been a hallmark of South African society. Since the transition to democracy in 1994 this has not changed very much.
This is the disturbing, yet probably not surprising, finding of Gibson and Gouws, political scientists at Washington University in St Louis and Stellenbosch respectively, based on a wide-ranging and complex study of South Africans’ political opinions in the years following the election of Nelson Mandela as president.
Political tolerance is crucial to democratic culture. Tolerance is understood as the willingness to allow space for one’s enemies to express themselves (and even perhaps to give them a hearing!). It is crucial to the development and sustainability of a democracy. In a multicultural country like South Africa tolerance of difference is, the authors suggest, the most important democratic value of all. Many authors would also say that tolerance is a sign of political maturity and a measure of personal self-confidence.
How does South Africa shape up? Not too well, seems to be the Gibson & Gouws answer. South Africans compare very badly to British, American and European countries. This is partly understandable as a product of our violent political history, where state repression of resistance was intense, where popular rebellion was often violent, where political movements fought each other for position and activists frequently enforced the political line by a process known as ‘liberatory intolerance’.
The Gibson-Gouws survey attempted to see how far tolerance has become part of the post-apartheid scene. Drawing on a substantial representative sample of the population, they asked people whom they most disliked as groups (from races to specific political parties and movements to subcultures, notably the gay community) and then asked them how far they perceived their enemies as a threat. Next they inquired whether such enemies should be allowed to speak publicly, campaign for office, or hold a march through the respondents’ communities. Then Gibson and Gouws tried to see whether the respondents could be persuaded to change their position – the tolerant to intolerance; and the intolerant to tolerance – through the ‘arguments’ of a friend, an opinion leader or President Mandela. Finally, they introduced the factor of the Constitutional Court: if the Court defends the right of your enemies to proceed, do you accept its decision.
Their findings are highly complex but ultimately disturbing. South Africans have high levels of enmity and a strong sense of seeing political opponents as threats, including small hard-line fringe parties (the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging seems to be high on almost everyone’s hate list) but also more disturbingly mainstream political parties. Opposition to allowing one’s political enemies to operate in the community is highest among African respondents. African opinions are more easily swayed by leadership figures like Mandela (whether towards tolerance or intolerance) than are Coloured, Indian and white respondents.
Minority groups are also more likely to accept the ruling of the Constitutional Court on such matters. More accurately, it seems (based on the respondents polled) that if the Court rules in favour of intolerance virtually the entire population accept that viewpoint. If it supported tolerance, the survey casts doubt on whether its decision would be respected and implemented. “Such is the asymmetry of institutional persuasion in South Africa”, conclude our authors. The implications for the rule of law, protection of minority rights and, by implication, the capacity of South Africans to live with the many contradictions of modern democracy is unsettling.
How should one receive these findings? Can one simply brush them off as a case of “lies, damned lies and statistics”? I think not. The authors are serious political scientists who produced a carefully designed and evaluated survey instrument and conducted their research with numerous checks and balances so as not to misinterpret their findings or manipulate their respondents. They have also shown that political intolerance in South Africa has a long history, while clearly arguing that it has never and does not serve the common democratic good. They are also convinced that intolerance does not have to be a permanent feature in the political landscape – with proper education and commitment on the part of elite opinion-formers greater tolerance may be achieved if South Africa “is not to go the way of so many failed African democracies”.
This is a very important book, particularly as we gear ourselves up for another election. It will certainly be interesting to see if greater political tolerance will be shown ‘this time around’. Given the widespread disillusionment with government, the weakness of delivery in many areas and the widening gap between the new (and old) elites and the vast majority of people, will there be less grassroots intolerance of enemies? Or will political leaders whip up intolerance as a means for all parties to pull the masses back into line and gain votes. Forty-eight years of Nat misrule, after all, was backed up by populist demagoguery of ‘swart gevaar’ and ‘Rooi gevaar’. Today, almost ten years after democracy, has much changed? If these surveys conducted in the second half of the Nineties are anything to go by, probably not.