Former opposition leader Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert’s definition of himself is disarmingly simple: ”I live in Africa; therefore I am an African.”
Slabbert made his intervention in a lecture he delivered recently at the University of the Witwatersrand, titled I Am an African — If Not, Why Not?. It was one of a series of lectures hosted by political analyst and academic Xolela Mangcu, to facilitate and stimulate public debate on the theme of identity in South Africa.
The topic also featured in SAfm’s After Eight Debate this week, after the new Auditor General, Terence Nombembe, was described as the first African to hold this position.
Slabbert criticised the concept of ”Africanness” in the current South African political landscape as ”a value-laden ideological concept of nationality, ethnicity and race”.
Rejecting the idea that race defined an African identity, he argued that to move away from defining ”African” other than by reference to geography was to enter an ideological and judgemental minefield.
At the lecture, Slabbert, who resigned from Parliament in 1986 because he believed it had become politically irrelevant, traded barbs with conservative Afrikaans philosopher Dan Roodt.
Roodt’s view is that Afrikaners should remain a cohesive nation with a specific group identity, who should stand up for their culture. He accused Slabbert and the liberal West of imposing their brand of liberal democracy on countries like South Africa, where they had no guarantee of success.
”You are like the guy who told his followers: ‘You are all individualists, don’t follow me.’ They then bow down in front of him, saying ‘We are all individualists’,” Roodt told Slabbert.
Slabbert said that according to the standard definition of an Afrikaner he had never qualified. ”There were eight criteria [under apartheid] and I failed seven of them.” He told Roodt: ”If you don’t want to define me as an Afrikaner, feel free. I don’t have a hang-up about not being an Afrikaner.”
Slabbert took as his main theme Thabo Mbeki’s 1996 I Am an African speech. The speech, he told delegates, had incorporated all South Africans — black, white, Asian and coloured — into the definition of ”African”.
”If I am asked why I am an African, I say because my president told me so,” he said.
However, 10 years after the speech, the prevailing political climate still maintained that Indians, whites and coloured people could not be African. The fact that Indians and coloured people were not considered African was underlined by Mbeki’s formula that the ANC aimed to liberate ”blacks in general and Africans in particular”.
Slabbert also slammed the continued use of racial categories in, for example, the employment equity database, saying he refused to identify himself by race on application and other forms.
According to such definitions, ”a coloured is someone who looks like a coloured and whose mother was a coloured, and so on. Thus round and round we go and where we’ll end up, no one knows,” he said.
Illustrating South Africa’s preoccupation with race and racial pigeon-holing of individuals, he referred to a Cape family, the Bodensteins, half of whom had been defined under apartheid as coloured and half as white.
”As there were 24 grandchildren each with their own race definition, it presented quite a dilemma to the family come Christmas because of the Group Areas Act,” Slabbert said.
After he had petitioned the government, the Bodensteins had all been classified white. ”But now they don’t qualify for BEE any more,” he grinned.
Questioned about his hesitancy over affirmative action and BEE, Slabbert responded that these could be based on criteria which were not racial.
”What about using terms such as ‘previously disadvantaged’, ‘homeless’ or ‘unemployed’?” he asked. ”There has to be transformation and I am not against affirmative action — but not using race as a criterion.”
Slabbert said South Africa’s struggle past was being selectively used to establish a racially exclusive Africanism as ”the new dominant ideology”. He pleaded with South Africans ”not to fall for an invented history”. This included the myth that Cuban and Angolan forces had defeated the South African Defence Force at the Angolan battle of Cuito Cuanavale, and FW de Klerk’s ”romanticised” claim that he had acted out of conscience in unbanning the ANC.
”A lot of the historians have invented events about the transformation of South Africa, just because it had the right feel and creates a feeling of nationalism,” he said. ”By inventing the past or co-opting it ideologically, it becomes more difficult to avoid repeating mistakes and dealing with the problems of the present.”
Slabbert also spoke about the oppressive stability of the apartheid regime.
”We now have a vibrant civil society, and this translates into a more consensual society,” he said. ”Crime is also a form of civil society participation, a negative one, but riddled with entrepreneurs.”
It might be thought that with profound divisions emerging in the ANC, South Africa was at risk of a military coup or Zimbabwean dictatorship. This was unlikely to happen because of South Africa’s vibrant civil society and the South African habit of questioning government.
”When the minister says ‘trust me on Selebi’, we should ask why? Why should I trust you, what do you know that I don’t know,” he said. ”Why should we reduce ourselves to silent idiots?”