Some friends advised me not to respond to Malegapuru Makgoba — “it is not a good idea for a white male to reply”. But if a white male academic steeped in African National Congress and Congress of South African Trade Union tenets cannot, then why fight for non-racialism in the first place?
When the article cites Howard Gardner of Harvard as source material any serious academic checks references to ensure a secure footing. Gardner provides little evidence to back up Makgoba as only one page of his quoted book deals with “our primate heritage” to explain human behaviour.
Puzzled, I asked Gardner, who replied he had been taken out of context. Indeed, in his latest book, Changing Minds, he shows his lack of sympathy with socio-biological and evolutionary explanations. Since Gardner is not a conceptual foundation for Makgoba, let me deal with three problematic issues in his argument.
Makgoba says: “Africans who have been victims of racism over centuries and generations understand better than the perpetrators about what racism is, means and feels.” This is a hard line. It is not just that directly experiencing and feeling racism provides knowledge, but that only the victims can understand, analyse and speak of racism. Through this rationale, only workers can understand capitalist exploitation; only Jews can analyse anti-Semitism, yet we know this is not the case.
If such “experiential relativism” is true then Marx, Lenin and Gramsci’s analyses could not help workers understand exploitation and social domination. And in South Africa, the internationally respected words of Joe Slovo, Harold Wolpe and Jeremy Cronin (white and middle class) become doubly problematic. If this line of thought is taken to its logical conclusion, Makgoba should be silent about the “angry mind of white males”, for as a black man, he is not privy to their internal experience. Knowledge cannot function here; universities become reduced to recording victims’ voices.
Secondly, although Makgoba acknowledges cultural diversity, he also argues that only one vision and culture must dominate and all who wish to escape racist labelling must “imitate” it. If white males have not learnt kwaito, to dance like Lebo, eat and nogal enjoy “smiley and walkies”, attend “lekgotla” and socialise in the township taverns, then they cannot be “rehabilitated”.
I wondered: rehabilitated from what, into what, and by whom? What is sufficient imitation? How much must we enjoy? Is it okay just to like the music but not the food? Will there be special cultural police to ensure, in his own words, that “more racist white males are being caught, fingered out and revealed”? What if a black man likes Mozart, ballroom dancing, French cuisine, and Sandton socialising?
There is no one dominant African culture. Cultures grow, develop, incorporate elements, change them, and pull apart. Many in the new black elite have a different concept of culture and value and imitate, and transform, much of Western culture into their daily lives and rituals in different ways — from food to music to status symbols — and what is alien one day is accepted as commonplace the next.
People are not less African because they are steeped in Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Afrikaans, Malay practices inherited and reproduced in local communities. Of course they are also obliged to respect and value African traditions and cultures treated so rudely and crudely by colonialism as this is what makes reconciliation possible.
Finally, what about citizenship? For implicitly this is about who belongs and who does not in this new South Africa. Are we to say that, because in the past some did this but not that, now say this but not that, they are now real South Africans, while others have no right to belong? Are there first- and second-class citizens? To put it crudely, am I an “okay white oke” because I was detained and a unionist?
This cannot be a criterion of citizenship and belonging in this new country.
Nor am I non-African because I am white. True my mother was an Irish-Jewish immigrant. But I was born here, and my upbringing is infected with the stories and accents of Naboomspruit and Cape Town.
We should be careful of a colonial heritage excluding us from being African, because then my union comrade Dumisani may find others, who felt the wrath of Shaka’s Zulu colonising power, now looking askance at him.
Dumisani belongs, as does my friend Imraan, whose ancestors came to Natal in the mid-1800s and whose heritage is infused with the cane-spirit of merchants and indentured labourers.
We will not make a new South Africa if we do not accept that all who live, are born and have heritages here, are all first-class citizens — all belong as Africans. As long as they respect the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law, they have a right to their own South Africanised cultures, a right to hold diverse political viewpoints, indeed even a right to moan and whinge about transformation.
Mike Morris is an associate professor in the school of development studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal