For quite some time now, a painful socioeconomic transition has been taking place in black South Africa.
The enforced equality that prevailed under apartheid is giving way to class stratification. In the olden days, the relatively privileged black family sent its children to the same schools and hospitals as its poor neighbours. That family, whatever its latent desires and aspirations, travelled the same dirt roads as everyone else and suffered the same humiliations in its dealings with the white world. There may have been ways for such a family to avoid the worst of the apartheid experience, but to paraphrase rapper Kanye West, even in a Mercedes Benz, a black person was still a kaffir.
This shared experience of marginalisation became embedded into the very fabric of society and manifested itself in a strong sense of community and solidarity. The class stratification process was very gradual and unremarkable in the dying days of apartheid.
It then dramatically picked up pace as the introduction of BEE and affirmative action help black people to create wealth at a rate unprecedented in modern history. It can be argued that very few black people have generated mega-wealth in this manner, yet the mainstreaming of the idea of black success gave many others the credibility to gain access to more modest, albeit life-enhancing, opportunities, including access to credit and career advancement.
As data and insights from the Unilever Institute has shown, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of black people who could be classified as being middle class, if not in actual assets and income, then in terms of values and aspirations.
Today the newly wealthy, perhaps because of the debate surrounding BEE, face far more scrutiny than the Diepkloof Extension and Atteridgeville elites ever endured in the Eighties. There has always been glaring inequality in South Africa, but in the late 2000s material and aspirational divisions are separating people who used to live in physical, economic and emotional solidarity.
This growing intra-racial inequality is also happening against the backdrop of an economy where inter-generational mobility is not assured. If in 1985 it was mainly the descendants of Pax College- and Lovedale-educated parents who started making their way into the white private schools, in 2015 it will be their grandchildren who escape the cruelties of our battered public education system.
It is the breaking down of centuries’ old bonds, amid such uncertainty about the future, which makes the establishment of class in black society so difficult and awkward. Black success is generally lauded, but there are murmurings of betrayal in the background, accusations that people have forgotten where they come from, that they have embraced whiteness.
It is these sentiments that cause a black car guard to refer to a black motorist as mlungu, or that sees people policing each other for signs of coconut-hood. As it happens, the strict conflation of deprivation with blackness and privilege with whiteness suits some black people, but it is becoming less accurate over time and it is losing its usefulness as a guide for public policy.
There have been varied political responses to this emergence of class as a dividing line in black society. There are those who think that our society needs a black elite to lead not only government, but also business and civil society. Our second post-apartheid president appears to fall within this camp. He was seduced by the idea of the Afropolitan; a modern, middle-class and intellectually engaged citizen with pan-Africanist sensibilities. Mbeki’s close allies were completely consumed by this fantasy and found it difficult to acknowledge the realities of crime, frustration, poverty and disease that continue to define the lives of many black men and women.
At the other end of the spectrum, we find those who are sensitive to the continuing challenges of black life in South Africa and are not particularly interested in advancing a ”black middle-class project”.
As Jacob Zuma recently reminded black business, the ANC draws most of its members from the poor and has a bias towards them. The rhetoric coming out of the incoming administration is about survival in the here and now: the creation of labour-intensive jobs, a level of government intervention that can only imply unsustainable public spending, the elimination of private health and private education in favour of ”social solidarity”.
The swelling middle classes are not vocal in questioning this, even though their interests are being casually ignored and their gains being imperilled. The fear of drawing attention to class difference plays a part in silencing many black people who take a different view to the emerging leftist approach to development.
I would like to think that there is a more nuanced position between a blind futurism and a disempowering surrender to circumstance.
As a starting point, we all need to admit that we cannot turn back the clocks and that there is no good reason to do so; the question of class is now a reality for all South Africans. Our society is proving that Setswana proverb: phokoje go tshela yo o dithetsenyana (very loosely translated — it is the wily jackal that survives).
But, in building a future South Africa, we do not have to completely succumb to the law of the jungle. We can build a humane society, with a state that intervenes smartly on behalf of the marginalised, without banishing individual choice and free enterprise. In this way, our society will stand a chance of fairly and effectively balancing the needs and the interests of those whose lives are no longer defined by poverty and those who are yet to escape from its clutches.
Trudi Makhaya, an economist and business strategist, is a director at Intellidex.info. She writes in her personal capacity