In our letters pages this week, we record a rather different reaction to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s complaint about South Africa’s white community — different, that is, from the standard howls of outrage and furious protestations that whites are “good citizens”. Jillian Carman concedes what should be obvious to any impartial observer: that whites, and their children, have benefited from the racial privilege entrenched in every sphere of life by apartheid; and that they should have the humility to acknowledge this and thank their lucky stars that their way of life has been so little changed by democracy.
What Tutu was highlighting was the sad lack of historical consciousness among many whites, the fact that they have glossed over their collective responsibility for electing successive governments that not only denied black people the basic rights of citizenship but jailed, exiled and murdered opponents. The view is that whites should be praised for magnanimously ceding power, thereby earning the right to racial reconciliation. Racial privilege and injustice are seen as ending in 1994, with little need for further redress. Only slightly caricatured, this is the public position of the Democratic Alliance.
A proper fix on contemporary South Africa demands an understanding of where we have come from. The National Party came to the negotiating table not out of the goodness of its heart, but in response to mounting internal disorder, economic meltdown and international isolation. It was forced to parley, or retreat further down the blind alley of military dictatorship. All that one can really say in its favour is that it finally came to understand what was in its constituency’s best interests.
Some responses to Tutu’s complaint merely confirm its truth. What do whites mean by protesting that they are “hard-working” — that other races are not? Of course they pay a large share of the nation’s taxes — the tax base is a profoundly political and fiscal expression of past privilege.
Cocooned in boomed housing estates and four-wheel-drive vehicles, mixing and working only with their own kind, many whites clearly regard themselves as being in South Africa, not of it. Yes, the crime and corruption they incessantly complain of exist, but South Africa is not a Third World basket case. Broadly speaking, it works, and is a far less violent and fractured society than it was in the twilight of apartheid, with its assassinations, security force crackdowns, chronic industrial unrest and city centre bomb blasts. It is a relatively stable, functioning democracy under generally sensible economic stewardship, open to the outside world.
White citizens have no need to continue thinking of themselves as victims, and lamenting the contrast between here and elsewhere. Neither do they have to live forever in permanent gratitude, for that too can blunt the edges of a healthy, questioning citizenship. But what is desperately necessary is a South African consciousness that acknowledges that although we have a helluva long way to go, we’ve also come very far.
A nation of thugs
When we get the moer in* with late trains, we burn them. When we get the moer in because a chosen mayor did not get into power, we fling chairs at the woman who won. When security guards don’t want to join our strike, we throw them from trains. Or disrupt a Workers Day rally. Or beat up comrades. Or burn the houses of councillors who we thought should not have stood for election.
We get the moer in quite often and make as if we are a people still choked by an illegitimate state and living under the jackboot of oppression.
For all our much-vaunted tolerance and our constitutionally enshrined freedom of association, South Africans can often resemble a nation of thugs.
It is as if freedom has not yet arrived. It is abominable that Cape Town mayor Helen Zille was unable to speak at a Crossroads meeting and was hustled out of a side entrance. It is abominable that workers have died in the course of the security strike and that many have been beaten up because they did not join the protest, or had already returned to work. No matter that the councillors who stood for election in Khutsong may have been politically misguided, there is no justification for the damage to property and the intimidation they have faced. Refuse to work with them by all means, but do them and their families no harm.
In insurrectionary times, puppet councillors’ homes were burnt, workers who crossed strike lines faced intimidation and woe betide the politician who stepped into the stronghold of another. Chairs were flung and much else besides.
But the freedom years demand of us a higher standard of behaviour, of contesting power peacefully and ensuring the primacy of our ideas through the democratic tools of debate.
For trade unionists, it is the hard grind of organising relentlessly and of running strikes so compelling that workers cannot but join.
For politicians and political activists it is about knowing that freedom of association means that anybody can join any political party they want and that the mayor of Cape Town is everybody’s mayor.
As President Thabo Mbeki said this week, intimidation must not masquerade as political participation.
* get furious at