Ivor Chipkin (‘Is SA burning in Paris?â€, November 11) speaks the language of the ‘new patriotism†in seeing ‘the South African revolution as a world-historical eventâ€. While Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating, with Flanders and Québec attaining self-rule from, respectively, Belgium and Canada, South Africa went against the international trend and opted for a centralised unitary state with affirmative action and the melting pot as its principal ideals.
The French model of ‘integration†that has literally come under fire over the past few weeks, following the widespread arson in immigrant suburbs called banlieues, was only slightly different in that it assumed that the French state was powerful enough to reprogramme Muslim immigrants into accepting French values.
Evidently, this has not happened. In fact, some of the youths expressly stated that they were burning down schools as they saw in them instruments of humiliation with their insistence on marks, exams, as well as speaking and writing good French. The youths were therefore rejecting universal French citizenship in favour of a specific, own identity that is largely extraneous to and even in conflict with the French one.
The first reaction of the French authorities has been to look at le modèle anglo-saxon with its racial and ethnic tokenism expressed by affirmative action and quotas in films and TV programmes as a possible means of addressing the so-called ‘lack of integration†in France.
Their objective is no longer seamless integration but simply preventing further rioting. Nicolas Sarkozy, the beleaguered Interior Minister who might become France’s next president, favours expelling rioters from France, but also some form of affirmative action to appease restive immigrant youths.
One need not be a post-modernist to realise that ‘the universal citizen†of the French Revolution is a fiction. In an era of global mobility, people speak different languages, have different religions and often espouse conflicting values and ideals.
This is all the more so in South Africa, a radically heterogeneous society with 11 official languages and at least as many ethnic groups uneasily sharing a common territory bequeathed to them by a political settlement in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer South African War. Increasingly, we do not even call cities or towns by the same names and there is a kind of cultural cold war between the authorities and many of its citizens, as borne out by the schism between the Tshwane Metropolitan Council and the inhabitants of Pretoria.
Last weekend 10 000 Pretorians celebrated the 150th anniversary of their city without a cent of council money or the presence of a single municipal official at the celebrations.
With a Gallic sense of mathematical precision, daily tallies of burnt-out cars have been published in France over the past few weeks. Given the number of burnt-out rail carriages in this country during the same period, as well as the soaring rate of dissatisfaction among the minority Afrikaner group (in a recent TV poll, 92% of Afrikaners voted that ‘they were being driven out of their countryâ€), the South African experiment in universal citizenship is hardly a resounding success.
Dan Roodt is an Afrikaans author who used to live in France