Despite all that can be said for how far South Africa has come from its apartheid past, one issue continues to haunt the present — that of racial injustice. Not that one would readily know it, as it is something which even South Africa’s leading public intellectuals do not seem to see or speak about. Paradoxically, it was concern over this very issue that informed Steve Biko’s prescient vision of bestowing a ”more human face” on South Africa.
At the heart of Biko’s I Write What I Like and the tenets of black consciousness is a recognition of the centrality of the evil of white racism: that under apartheid, the most important political and sociological fact about South Africa was that it was a racially unjust society in which almost all white South Africans gained power and privilege because black South Africans were exploited and excluded. Biko spoke about the many costs — both materially and spiritually — of what it meant to be black and to be poor under apartheid.
Has South Africa moved beyond this? The answer is a resounding ”no”. There continues to be a huge imbalance between the number of poor blacks and rich whites. Even now the income of the average white household is about five times greater than that of black households; the difference in net worth between black and white South Africans at the same income level is even larger.
To point to the emergence of a black middle class is somewhat premature, as it is built on income as opposed to wealth. As Charles W Mills puts it in The Racial Contract, ”wealth is more important than income in determining the likelihood of future racial equalisation, since it has a cumulative effect that is passed down through intergenerational transfer, affecting life chances and opportunities for one’s children”.
Consider too how justice has been served by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is not just that the handling of the case into the murder of Biko made a mockery of the rule of law, but that more broadly the commission’s final report actually offered, as argued by Mahmood Mamdani, a ”diminished truth” that failed ”to open a social debate” about the future. This, it can be argued, is directly attributable to the TRC’s failure to seek racial justice.
It is against such a background that some 10 years into the new South Africa, a Pretoria High Court judge, in handing down a fine of a mere R36 000 to a white farmer who mowed down a black worker with his truck, could in all seriousness maintain that this was not a racist judgement.
In the context of these observations, can one genuinely say that today the lives and life chances of black citizens are equal to those of their white compatriots? That all black South Africans are accorded just treatment? The point here is simple: to the extent that black lives remain less valuable — materially and spiritually — than white lives, racial injustice persists.
Then why have public intellectuals been so silent? It would seem that many public intellectuals have become overly concerned to serve a largely unimaginative technocratic policy-oriented role in the service of state designs rather than to raise questions that might expose the false or incomplete deracialisation of apartheid.
Public intellectuals have not articu-lated a clear conceptualisation of what defines and constitutes racial injustice — let alone proposed how it could best be addressed. And yet liberal democracy, with its commitment to formal equality and neutrality, cannot simply be taken to stand above or apart from systemic racism. Democracy itself actually remains confronted by an unfinished struggle to secure racial justice.
What is needed here is a conceptual point of entry — beyond a discourse that smacks of superficial reconciliation or nonracial pretence — to start talking about the many ways in which race matters, to close the gap between democratic ideals and the reality of continuing racial injustice.
Steve Biko did provide the conceptual tools to come to terms with race and to secure racial justice. Biko provides a powerful critique of white racism that pushes his readers, whatever their background, to confront racial politics consciously and to avoid incorporation into racially loaded Western frameworks that disregard and disrespect black people’s experiential realities. The ends of Biko’s critique are that we all arrive at ”the glittering prize” of a ”true humanity”.
To get there, as was the case when Biko wrote, white South Africans need to rise above a will to innocence concerning the history and continuing presence of white racism, embrace higher personal standards of citizenship tied to recognising racial injustice in their own lives and openly acknowledge that there is not one single institution in this country that is untainted by racism. Black South Africans must fully assert their self-worth, fight against all forms of white superiority and reject any moves towards artificial integration.
More generally, all South Africans need to promote more open debate that will enable mutual respect, genuine reconciliation and space for greater diversity and dissent — forms of engagement that must, in Biko’s words, ”inevitably exhibit African values and be truly African in style”.
If the depth of Biko’s work had been more firmly appreciated and acted upon before now (instead of being parodied as representing a black essentialism or anti-white politics), there is every reason to suppose that South Africa would be a much stronger and more just society today.
When Mamphela Ramphele was vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, she remarked: ”The Black Consciousness Movement after 1976, in my view, stagnated. It lacked the intellectual leadership to take it to the next level, from black solidarity to really being an agent of truly non-racial transformative politics.” There is still a need, 30 years after Biko’s brutal murder, for today’s public intellectuals to provide such leadership.
Rupert Taylor is a professor of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg