RACISM
What is the real meaning of being black in South Africa today? Under apartheid, this question was easy to answer because all black people – Africans, coloureds and Indians – were oppressed and exploited by a racist system that privileged whites and whiteness. Black people in general and Africans in particular were terribly oppressed and exploited as cheap labour. They were denied the most basic democratic freedoms and confined to ghettos on the periphery of all our big cities.
This status quo faced by all black people defined their common political situation and their overwhelming socioeconomic homogeneity. In other words, it politically united all black people behind the anti-apartheid struggle, including black businesspeople such as Soweto millionaire Richard Maponya. Everybody had something big to gain by getting rid of apartheid, their common foe. There were black lawyers, teachers and other members of the middle class who wanted apartheid dead.
Two key factors made a big difference after the watershed nonracial elections in 1994: the political enfranchisement of all black people and new opportunities for the growth of a black middle class. But the key levers of the economy, by conscious design, remained in white hands. This reality is essential to understand the recent explosion of race and racism in South Africa.
Even the fees crisis facing poor black students – the children of the black working class – can be understood in terms of a structural analysis of the post-apartheid period. Herein lie the roots of the emergence, too, of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party that has rapidly gained popularity, especially among the most socially alienated and therefore potentially revolutionary stratum of our society: the African youth, who constitute a majority of the electorate and are a very powerful nexus in politics indeed.
The shifts that have occurred in post-apartheid South Africa – even while the economy remained white dominated – have rendered the meaning of blackness more heterogeneous and diffuse than ever before.
Intra-black class shifts, which have seen inequalities among the black population outstripping interracial inequalities, and the political rupture in the ruling ANC at various points have fundamentally reconfigured black social and political identities.
We can see how these processes have altered the political identity and fortunes of the ANC itself, to the extent that a significant decline at the polls in recent years, especially at local level, is apparent. Several political parties have emerged from this rupturing of old ANC loyalties and are now contesting elections – the most serious of which is the EFF. The good old days of overwhelming, dogged black loyalty to the ANC, as the party enjoyed in the first decade of our democracy, have gone and will never return.
Whereas apartheid drove the aggregation of black oppression and pain that facilitated political unity, post-apartheid South Africa has seen a disaggregation. Today, blackness has many faces, forms and agendas, which will probably make our political, social and economic future much more interesting, dynamic, complex, competitive and unpredictable.
Under apartheid, blackness was a concentrated political weapon; today it is fragmented and dispersed by new class forces and in the course of the neoliberal reorganisation of work and society.
At the same time as our constitutional democracy matures, the political and revolutionary utility of blackness is shrinking. This is a result, in part, of the often opportunistic posturing that comes with it, as well as the pitfalls of its commodification by means of the emergence and growth of a new, acquisitive black middle class, which has been integral to post-apartheid deracialised capitalism and its maintenance. This explosive pursuit of black acquisition is the centrifugal factor driving black social and political disaggregation.
The split in labour federation Cosatu and other similar developments have divided the organised black working class further. The old, largely homogenous black working class of the apartheid days is not just itself any more.
The governing party can also no longer take for granted members’ support for whatever project or programme it promulgates. Its own internal struggles, a changed working environment and shifting political interests mean that the ANC is diffused and fragmented.
Any new black-led political formation, such as the United Front developed by the Cosatu breakaway unions, will have its work cut out for it – to put it mildly.
Black identity – blackness – is no longer in itself a passport to automatic acceptance and political or revolutionary success. In its search for wider black working-class support, the United Front will have to confront tough questions, especially in terms of what it offers that is different from what others have offered before – and have often failed to deliver on.
We are moving into a future that will render blackness more opaque, questionable, complex and potentially contradictory than ever before – even though its dominant public face remains that of poverty, unemployment and the rest of the social miseries.
This contrasts sharply with the image of the acquisitive black middle class, which explains the conspicuous and growing intra-black class inequalities.
A disturbing trend in the recent and ongoing racism furore has been an increasingly inward turning among many black Africans. Whereas, during the anti-apartheid struggle, coloured and Indian people were seen as black and oppressed, today much of that unified blackness has dissipated.
In fact, a regression has occurred: many, even most, don’t regard coloured and Indian people as fellow black South Africans but as “minorities”. That is, arguably, itself a separatist, racist notion – especially because coloured and Indian people were historically an organic part of the oppressed and exploited people of this country.
One thing is abundantly clear: in general, and in more specific political, social and labour terms, black identity as we understood it is no more. The meanings of blackness have ruptured and shifted; they can no longer be taken for granted. The agendas, role and future of blackness, as with everything today, is up for grabs across various sites of contestation and struggle.
Ebrahim Harvey is writing a new book on racism in post-apartheid South Africa.