‘I believe the children are the future.” That’s how the George Benson song goes; clearly he (and Whitney Houston after him) were not averse to stating the obvious. Nor, it seems are South Africa’s talk-show optimists, ever in search of a formula to soothe the cracked skin of national consciousness.
“The real change will come with the next generation,” they say. Or, “I think about the way the kids are growing up today, they just don’t see race.”
Indeed, there is no image of post-apartheid South Africa more widely propagated than the playground full of colour-blind black and white school kids. It is the consoling myth for our anxious time.
We, who grew up under apartheid, will shuffle off to penitent old age, still bent under 350 years of rage and shame. They will romp to power, blithe and free. Of course, that will never happen — nor should we encourage it to.
To be sure, there is much that is appealing in the image of a future without race consciousness, without the hurt and the endless encounter with otherness. It is a vision perhaps most appealing to white people, who are desperate to be free of their carrion past. But it also appeals to all who want to live at peace both with their own identities and with those of others.
Our atrocious past is commemorated not so much in the archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the grand spaces of Freedom Square, as in the persistence of this racial encounter: we are rubbed raw by history, and it is not much fun.
But it is necessary. Most obviously race is still a powerful determinant of the South African child’s prospects in the world. And the whole bureaucratic edifice of empowerment legislation, with its tricked-out, management consultant’s version of race science, will not change that for a long time.
Kids need thoroughly to understand how race works, and why, if they are to navigate their futures. But more importantly, they have to understand the role of race in their own becoming. Generations are not separated by the neat lines drawn on calendars. There may be such a creature as a “born free”, but race still lives with us, in the world we made.
None of this means that we need to inculcate a crude identity politics to fill the space between such shared aspirations as Diesel jeans and the emergence of some notional post-apartheid South African identity. A “multiracial” society is not what most of us fought for, and blunt ethnocentricity, however we try to put a rainbow face on it, remains a dangerous force in our society.
But if we recognise that there is no country “beyond race”, we can begin to think, and experience, race in new and hopefully more constructive ways.
Whether or not the children are the future, they are going to live there. Let them dance among the ghosts with their eyes wide open.
Juicy fruits
One of the fruits of freedom has been the rapid development of the concept of leadership in South Africa.
Under apartheid, leaders in the public and private sectors were almost invariably white and male. After 1994, with the ushering in of a black majority government, the black male became the dominant norm of political leadership. Admittedly, this is not adequately reflected in the business sector, where more than 70% of executives remain white.
After 1999, when President Thabo Mbeki took the helm, he pushed gender consciousness in the government — almost half the members of Cabinet, and the leaders of provinces and key cities, are now women.
A private sector census of women business leaders by the Business-women’s Association, released this week, reveals a domino effect in boardrooms.
The good news is that more companies are putting women on their boards: the census reveals that 11% of the country’s directors are female, up from 7,1% just a year ago. New directors are making their debuts: more than eight in 10 of these directors only sit on a single board, which is better than a monopoly by a few.
The bad news is that executive management positions occupied by women have declined, though the total number of such jobs has grown as the economy has picked up.
Only seven of the 343 companies surveyed — the majority listed on the JSE — had a female CEO. Other trends are that the state-owned enterprises lead the corporate pack, though both South African Airways and Transnet have recently lost key women executives.
It is easy to measure progress in the private and public sectors because of such headcounts, and because the government is compelled to publish regular progress reports. The picture in civil society is less clear, and a census is overdue in a vital sector that should be setting the pace.
In some quarters there is fatigue and impatience over the quota counts that have become such a part of our national debate. There should not be: it is the one way to measure equality, the juiciest fruit of our freedom.