In a recent contribution to this newspaper (”Change needs self-criticism”, November 21) Saki Macozoma spoke of the role of black intellectuals in fostering a deliberative climate in which the performance of our new society could be assessed. This assessment should be made against the backdrop of the commitments that characterised the liberation struggle and that have, in my view, been captured in the key values of our Constitution.
There is little about the content of Macozoma’s piece with which I wish to take issue. To the contrary, he has made a most important argument about developing a culture of critique in our society, which so rapidly appears to be forgetting its egalitarian aspirations that held the struggle together for so long. But his target, the black intellectual, affords the occasion to ask of the role of the white intellectual in our democratic society.
A few preliminary remarks are necessary. The vision of our society, encapsulated in the document that seeks to set out our future path — the Constitution — would caution against the division of intellectuals on grounds of race.
But adherence to this apparent purity of principle is itself an exercise in social amnesia if it is designed or has the effect of forgetting the divisive history that has left our country with such fractured identities.
In her book A Change of Tongue, Antjie Krog writes of a conversation she had with a person described as ”one of Mandela’s close friends”. After a vigorous exchange, she writes that she was ”not so much embarrassed as deeply aware of the extent to which my perception of being in this world is constantly informed by this African-ness, Black-ness or African-ness, I don’t really know, but it is a way of looking at the world that neither I nor the culture I grew up in, nor the books I have read, are able to come up with. I seem to find it only when I sit opposite a black face.”
Secondly, the question arises as to the nature of any intellectual. The debate is about the role of those who are not simply prepared to accept a pragmatic course of lending intellectual weight to the development of government policy or who use their intellectual gifts to perpetuate shibboleths of the past. This, of course, is what is occurring in South Africa at present. We have cheerleaders, pie-throwers and careerists. The former are those who argue in favour of the new status quo, who have slipped their moral moorings, if they were ever so located, and argue at best about the need for change rather than transformation; the imperative of trickle-down economics; the irrelevance of class and the need for the construction of a mighty black bourgeoisie and, in some cases, even Aids denial.
The second camp consists of those who consistently contend that the country is corrupt, inefficient, has created a gravy train exclusively for groups of black South Africans and, at least subconsciously, contend that a black government cannot organise a booze-up in a brewery let alone run a sophisticated society. The third group, many of whom represented the very best of our struggle for a non-racial democracy, have now become consultants to our government and to foreign governments, mainly in the developing world or any other organisation that will hire services. Not for this group any further engagement in the intellectual life of the country.
My third preliminary point, which flows from the second, is that the role of the intellectual is — as activist and academic Edward Said consistently contended — not to internalise the norms of power, but rather as a product of genuine reflection and analysis, of conscience, to deconstruct the very structures of transient power so that debate can take place without the weight of the ”presently possible” being exerted upon the possibility of the future.
Once Said’s role of the intellectual is accepted, then intellectuals in this country, whatever their race or gender, are tasked with the challenge of rigorous engagement with the present structure and future aspirations for our society. As a start, it would be good if intellectuals could contribute to a debate about the meaning of transformation.
At present, the best that occurs is demographic change — replacing white with black , male (far more slowly, alas) with female. That is clearly a start, but it is not the end as is rapidly threatening to be the case. The challenge is to talk about the (im)possibility of changing the structures of our society away from acquisition by the few, even if that now begins to reflect our demography and the powerless of the many, toward a society that can sustain over the long term, the dignity, equality and freedom of all who live here.
To take an example from my own field, law. We have done relatively well in changing the demographic composition of our key legal institutions, but the basic legal structures and the content of the legal concepts that make up the law remain in a curiously pristine state, save for the eradication of race, gender and sexual orientation as grounds of definition. Important as this development is, the key concepts of our common law and procedure remain untransformed, privileging keenly defined power structures.
But, what then is the different role for the white intellectual from that of his/her black counterpart? In my view, it is to be found in the debate about transformation. White intellectuals need to engage with the problem of the construction of new forms of identity, in which the perspectives of the previously defined ”other” — so long silenced during apartheid and before — are incorporated into that which makes up our identity as South Africans. This is no easy task. It requires modesty to acknowledge that our inherited perspective has no privilege, it demands that we listen more to our fellow black South Africans. But it demands of us that we have the courage to resist those who will cry racism when we seek to hold power to account in terms of the innermost commitments of our country and to confront those who wish for the ”comfort” of the past and who are so mean-spirited about the distance we have already travelled into the future.
If white intellectuals can do but some of these things, our children may yet talk of South African intellectuals rather then continue to employ adjectives saturated in our racial past.
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court in the Western Cape and an honorary professor of law at the University of Cape Town