Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001)
ISSN: 1530-5686
COMMENTARY ON RACE IN SOUTH AFRICA
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Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2001) ISSN: 1530-5686 COMMENTARY ON RACE IN SOUTH AFRICA |
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Given the history of the Boers, the Broederbond, and the Nationalist Party’s institution of an apartheid structure of governance, the conference call on the Burden of Race by the University of Witwatersrand’s Wits History Workshop and the newly created Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) prompts the following questions: Are these people for real? What planet have they been living on for the past thirty years? More pertinently, what is the object and goal of this myth-making?
Conference on:
The Burden of Race: ‘Whiteness’ and
‘Blackness’ in Modern South Africa.
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
5 July - 8 July 2001
Largely as a result of the interventions of the Human Rights Commission, the issue of race—historically shrouded in silence—has rapidly acquired an unusual salience and topicality. The conference we propose to hold is an intervention in this growing public debate about race in South Africa, past and present.
A largely academic conference on race can make an important contribution to broader public debates, by generating critical analysis based on original empirical research. This will provide an opportunity to examine popular understandings of racial issues and evaluate the ways in which the current debates are taking shape.
Within this academic framework, we will also create spaces for debate involving various “public intellectuals” from the trade union movement, the women’s movement, erstwhile anti-apartheid activists, leading political thinkers, journalists and educationists.
For good historical reasons, the issue of race in anti-apartheid circles has seldom been subject to critical analytical scrutiny; the current political moment presents new opportunities to do so, in a constructive and informed spirit.
The questions we wish to pose about race are as much about the past as the present. Clearly the issue of race has a particular salience in contemporary South Africa, and a public debate on the subject will play a crucial role in the country’s efforts to stabilize a non-racial democracy. However, the apartheid past weighs very heavily on the present, particularly in respect of the politicisation of race. So the conference will be as much an historical exploration of the construction of racial categories, as an engagement with the current politics of race.
South African scholars have been slow to focus their research efforts on the subject of race, producing a lag between local academic work and international scholarship. A number of important trends in the global literature on race, such as the critique of racial essentialisms, the hybridity of racial categories in a globalised world, and the character of whiteness, have thus far had remarkably little impact in the South African academy. The aim of this conference, therefore, is twofold: to stimulate and shape a new local research agenda on race, and to bring together a racially and ethnically diverse group of local and international scholars to engage in an open exchange of ideas and research on South Africa’s racial categories.
Although the primary focus of discussion will be on the South African experience, there are instructive comparisons with Other countries which need to be drawn. These include a close look at the dynamics of race in other parts of Africa. Studies of the construction of race in Brazil and other South American countries make for instructive comparisons with the South African case, while the colonial experience in countries like India, Australia and New Zealand also promises to illuminate the South African case in new ways.
We see this as a thoroughly interdisciplinary project, drawing On contributions from sociologists, social anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, economists, literary scholars, media scholars, philosophers and educationists. Also, since ideas of race are as much visual as verbal, the conference will aim to straddle both sorts of inputs. Alongside the more conventional discussion panels, there will be a series of art exhibitions and video screenings. The conference also seeks to go beyond the academy, by encouraging contributions from public intellectuals, journalists, trade unionists and other activists who grapple with the organizational politics of race.
The conference is a collaboration between the Wits History Workshop and the newly created Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). Both organisations are committed to building networks of exchange and collaboration, within the Southern African region, more broadly within the African continent and with other countries in the Southern hemisphere (such as India and Australia), alongside our more established links with colleagues in America and Europe. Previous History Workshop events have been successful in initiating a range of new linkages, which the proposed conference on race will consolidate and extend. The conference organisers will also produce at least one edited book of selected papers, as well as other collections in local and international journals.
The conference will draw primarily on papers based on original empirical research or creative endeavour. The agenda is fairly open and we encourage further suggestions, additions and changes.
In our view, a better title for the conference would be The Arrogance of Whiteness: Effacing Blackness in Modern South Africa. Anyone familiar with the history of South African in the past 30 years would discern that the assumptions of the conference speak more to the realities of whites than to the realities of the exploited blacks who, under apartheid, were pejoratively castigated as African. It is interesting that in the post-Apartheid non-racial society of South Africa, whites still reject the appellation “African.” It is even more interesting to watch some embrace this internally vilified identity in international arenas, as they strategically seek cover their political, economic and social gains under apartheid. Meanwhile, join us in reviewing the literature we have assembled for a concise History 101 lesson.
Racism is discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation. In other words one cannot be a racist unless he has the power to subjugate (Steve Bantu Biko, . Write What I Like [Oxford: Heinemann, 1987], 25). Hence the greatest anti-black feeling is to be found amongst the very poor whites whom the Class Theory calls upon to be with black workers in the struggle for emancipation (1987:50).
A quick refresher course in South Africa’s racism is in order given the tacit construction of the South African reality and South African scholars and intellectual as white. By virtue of being place at the receiving end of racist rule, South African blacks have had to constantly engage and theorize the white South Africans’ exploitation of racial categories. Here are a few of such musings that make nonsense of the assertion that “the issue of race (has been)- historically shrouded in silence.”
Chief Albert Luthuli
In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door?
What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all:
no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset, cattle, dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restriction to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.
(Excerpt from the Text of a public statement by Chief Luthuli in November 1952 when the Government dismissed him from his position as Chief for refusing to resign from the African National Congress. (http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/lutuli/lutuli1.html#ITEM1)
Oliver R. Tambo’s Speech at the Second Pan-African Youth Seminar, Dar es Salaam, August 5, 1961
....Causes of Racism
The causes are various. There are psychological causes, some of them are traceable by methods of psychoanalysis. I don’t think we should get embroiled in that sort of thing. Let me enumerate the more obvious and more important ones. These causes are common to the whole phenomenon of racial hostility, racial problems not only in South Africa but throughout the world. The first is the attempt to entrench privilege. There are situations in Africa where the white people have entrenched themselves against Africans, against peoples of races other than their own, and the dividing line is a racial one. Then there are economic considerations. The history of colonialism and imperialism is well known. We discuss it in and out of season. This also has given rise to racial problems because it also happened that it was the people who emanated from Europe who colonised what we call non-white peoples. That was an accident of history, but that is how colonialism and imperialism have expressed themselves. It is the non-white race which has been placed under this subjugation for so long. And it is this subjugation which has brought economic advantages to the imperialists, to the colonialists, to the rulers, to those who at a given time had been in power, and those have been in power all the time.
Another cause is sheer prejudice. Prejudice is interesting because it is something fed into one’s mind. A child grows up prejudiced against another person, not because that person has done anything or a group of persons has done anything to the child, but because the child assumes that those who are older know better and if they have that attitude towards a group of people, that attitude must be correct. That is genuine but mistaken prejudice. But it has created problems. There are other cases of prejudice which are not genuine. A person who operates on a certain assumption, for instance that Africans are inferior, may believe it. It is proved to him in numerous instances, facts are placed before him which contradict any belief in the inferiority of the Africans, and yet he persists. That type of prejudice is not genuine and it also creates problems....
(Excerpt from a Pamphlet published by World Assembly of Youth, 1961
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/or/or61-1.html)
Presidential Address, Nelson R. Mandela to the ANC (Transvaal) Congress, September 21, 1953.
Since 1912 and year after year thereafter, in their homes and local areas, in provincial and national gatherings, on trains and buses, in the factories and on the farms, in cities, villages, shanty towns, schools and prisons, the African people have discussed the shameful misdeeds of those who rule the country. Year after year, they have raised their voices in condemnation of the grinding poverty of the people, the low wages, the acute shortage of land, the inhuman exploitation and the whole policy of white domination. But instead of more freedom repression began to grow in volume and intensity and it seemed that all their sacrifices would end up in smoke and dust. Today the entire country knows that their labours were not in vain for a new spirit and new ideas have gripped our people. Today the people speak the language of action: there is a mighty awakening among the men and women of our country and the year 1952 stands out as the year of this upsurge of national consciousness.
(http:// www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mandela/1950s/sp530921.html)
Petition presented to the Prime Minister, Pretoria, August 9, 19561
We, the women of South Africa, have come here today. We represent and we speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands of women who could not be with us. But all over the country, at this moment, women are watching and thinking of us. Their hearts are with us.
We are women from every part of South Africa. We are women of every race, we come from the cities and the towns, from the reserves and the villages. We come as women united in our purpose to save the African women from the degradation of passes.
For hundreds of years the African people have suffered under the most bitter law of all - the pass law which has brought untold suffering to every African family.
Raids, arrests, loss of pay, long hours at the pass office, weeks in the cells awaiting trial, forced farm labour - this is what the pass laws have brought to African men. Punishment and misery - not for a crime, but for the lack of a pass.
We African women know too well the effect of this law upon our homes, our children. We, who are not African women, know how our sisters suffer.
Your Government proclaims aloud at home and abroad that the pass laws have been abolished, but we women know this is not true, for our husbands, our brothers? our sons are still being arrested, thousands every day, under these very pass laws. It is only the name that has changed. The “reference book” and the pass are one.
In March 1952, your Minister of Native Affairs denied in Parliament that a law would be introduced which would force African women to carry passes. But in 1956 your Government is attempting to force passes upon the African women, and we are here today to protest against this insult to all women. For to us an insult to African women is an insult to all women.
We want to tell you what the pass would mean to an African woman, and we want you to know that whether you call it a reference book, an identity book, or by any other disguising name, to us it is a PASS . And it means just this:-
In the name of women of South Africa, we say to you, each one of us, African, European, Indian, Coloured, that we are opposed to the pass system.
We voters and voteless, call upon your Government not to issue passes to African women.
We shall not rest until ALL pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedom have been abolished.
We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental rights of freedom, justice, and security.
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/women/petition560809.html
Shula Marks
...There is much irony in the contemporary historical amnesia. And in the end, of course, such collective amnesia is impossible. There is after all no society that does not have such a sense of its history. Nor is this surprising. History is our collective memory and as the renowned biologist, Professor Steven Rose, who himself works on the neurological base of memory, has remarked ‘memory is the feature that defines every single one of us as an individual. We can contemplate losing a limb, or a sense, or even have a heart or a kidney transplant and still retain a conviction, albeit modified, of our own personhood. Imagine losing memory—or of having a memory transplant à la Manchurian Candidate, and the difference is immediate and apparent. We are our memories.’2 Of course, Steven Rose was talking of individual memory which is not the same thing as History, unless it is made public—heard, seen, interpreted. It is in this sense inescapable.
Yet the reaction is perhaps not wholly reprehensible, for history has long been a battle-ground in South Africa: ten years ago I gave a lecture on South African history- writing in which I remarked that ‘in a society as deeply divided as South Africa, it is doubtful whether even the most conservative historian could harbour the illusion that history is somehow a set of neutrally observed and politely agreed upon facts. For all the contestants in contemporary South Africa there is a quite conscious struggle to control the past in order to legitimate the present and lay claim to the future.’ In the moment of reconciliation, then, it is perhaps understandable that people wish to forget the past, to move beyond it, to let bygones be bygones. To quote Senator George Mitchell on Northern Ireland: “If the focus remains on the past, the past will become the future and that is something no one can desire.”3
This is particularly true in South Africa, where in the past history could at times be quite literally a matter of life and death. Interestingly enough, Professor Rose adds, “forgetting is [also] functional,”, and tells the story of the man who was driven mad by his incapacity to forget. “To remember all the data which passes through one’s senses every day would be impossible; your memory would become a ‘garbage disposal.’” Inevitably history is selective, for crucially it is about meaning and not simply information.
Nevertheless, however politically expedient it may be to try to look to the challenges of the future rather than to dwell interminably on the wrongs of the past, history is not so easily forgotten; letting bygones be bygones is not so easily achieved, and this is of particular moment as South Africa tries to come to terms with the report of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. True reconciliation cannot be based upon ignorance of the past. History may be dangerous and divisive; I believe that ignorance is even more divisive and even more dangerous.
Many of the issues confronting the government in South Africa, many of the social changes which have taken place, that are taking place and that need to take place, can only be understood if we fully grasp the awful legacies—and they are awful, onerous and complex—of nearly half a century of apartheid, and the far longer record of colonialism.
To understand where we are going, we need to understand where we have come from. In part this celebration of the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s forty years is a coming to terms with part of that past and the contribution made by the outside world to the awesome struggles and sacrifices made by those who opposed apartheid from within. We do not approach this in any sense of triumphalism. While we celebrate the forty years, history can never—if it is to be worthy of study—be simply celebratory.
Nor is there any claim that it was only the Anti-Apartheid Movement in its capitalised form—the AAM—which made this contribution: indeed the history of the AAM has to be put into the far wider trajectory of the many- stranded struggles against imperialism and racism not only from within South Africa, not only internationally, but also from within this country itself.
And while the main burden of what I shall go on to say will relate to the international order the Anti-Apartheid Movement confronted in the past forty years, we should recognize that these struggles go back at least to the anti-slavery campaigns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when, for example, Elizabeth Heyrick, a member of the Birmingham Female Society, called for the boycott of Caribbean sugar and cotton in 1824 as ‘the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery’ against the gradualism of the reformists. According to Vron Ware, Heyrick followed this up by personally carrying on a door-to-door survey of households in her hometown of Leicester, finding support for the idea . . . [The power of women] as consumers and housekeepers gave them a vital role in implementing tactics, however symbolic, which helped to arouse public feeling all over the country.4
There was also a dialogue, I think, between those nineteenth-century anti- slavery and later anti-racist activists which Abdul reminded us of last night when he talked of the way in which it was a response to a call from South Africa from Luthuli to engage in boycott that led to the beginnings of the Movement. Thus in the nineteenth century there were links between the old anti-slavery activists and later anti-racist organisations—I think here, for example, of the Quaker, Catherine Impey, who formed an organization in 1893 with the well-known black American Ida B Wells, who visited the UK to campaign against lynching in the USA, called The Society for the Recognition of the Universal Brotherhood of Man, which declared itself fundamentally opposed to the system of race separation by which despised members of a community are cut off from the social, civil and religious life of their fellow man.5
I cite these examples, widely divided although they are, and far away from South Africa though they may be, because I think they help account for the ways in which the Anti-Apartheid Movement resonated with a vital thread in British popular culture which is only too easily portrayed as intrinsically and monolithically racist.
The soil was tilled in more obvious ways: at this moment of remembering the Anti- Apartheid Movement we should not forget all the other organisations, some of which pre- dated it and which complemented its work. I am thinking here of Fenner Brockway’s Movement for Colonial Freedom, of Michael Scott’s Africa Bureau and the invaluable precedent he set in appealing to the United Nations on behalf of the rights of Namibians, of Canon Collins’s Christian Action and the Treason Trial Defence Fund which later became Defence and Aid. There is no time here to detail the enormous contribution each of these made to the cause. But any full account of the AAM in its uncapitalized form of the anti-apartheid movement in this country would have to take their full measure. Nelson Mandela himself made the connections in his wonderful Westminster Hall speech in July 1996: he had come, he said, “to the country of allies like William Wilberforce, Fenner Brockway, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston.” These are the names of the big men of the movement, but I think that there is also a story about the ordinary people who made history in their day-to-day actions and in their day-to-day resistance to racism in this country. I think that at this time when people find it more and more difficult to identify politically, it is those actions of ordinary people that are extremely important for us to understand and to grasp. This is in many ways one of the most important aspects of the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s struggles in this country.
It was the slow change in public opinion as a result of the endeavours of all these organisations, but perhaps especially after 1960 the campaigns of the Anti- Apartheid Movement, which led to the at least half-victory implied in Sir John Maud’s formulation and that explain why, by the 1960s, Britain’s policies were split between the two irreconcilable tendencies embodied in Maud’s words. To understand this we need to remember how entrenched pro-South African feeling was in this country, and how racist some of the feeling was, particularly in the 1950s. Underpinning this was the position of South Africa in the British Empire and Commonwealth in the first half of the twentieth century, and the dominant role South Africa has played in British calculations about Southern Africa for much of the century.
(Excerpt from The Anti-Apartheid Movement: A 40-year Perspective South
Africa House, London 25-26 June 1999 Shula Marks
http://ww w.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/aam/symposium.html#Marks1)
Paul Salopek
Tribune, Foreign Correspondent, January 8, 2001
Johannesburg -- The apology, barely eight paragraphs, was as unflinching as it was short.
White South Africans were sorry. They were sorry for supporting apartheid, the pernicious system of white rule that was swept away only seven years ago with this country’s first multiracial elections. They were sorry that so few whites had fought against the institutionalized bigotry that once made South Africa a pariah state. They admitted, contritely, that whites still reaped the economic benefits of apartheid at the expense of the nation’s impoverished black majority. And they wanted to make amends.
“Sounds simple, no?” said Paul Graham, a political analyst and one of about 450 prominent whites who last month signed an unprecedented public apology for apartheid.
“When it comes to race, though, nothing is simple in this place,” Graham added wearily. “Hence the noise.”
The noise, as Graham puts it, is the latest fracas over race and politics in South Africa, where experts say the process of racial healing has stalled in recent years as blacks look on with growing skepticism at the aloof, privileged lifestyles of many whites, and where whites feel increasingly alienated by black rule. This time, however, the acrimony isn’t across the usual black-white divide.
Instead, a high-profile apology for the evils of apartheid published in December by a group of white intellectuals and civic leaders has sparked a loud and bitter debate among South Africa’s whites themselves, with an avalanche of radio call-in shows, sputtering politicians and editorials smothering the airwaves and newspapers with questions of white denial, forgiveness and collective guilt.
Organizers of the Declaration of Commitment, as the apology is known, say they intended only to help defuse the growing racial polarization of South African life and politics in the decade since then-Presidents Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk began negotiating the transfer of power from 5 million whites to some 35 million blacks, Asians and mixed-race citizens.
But in recent weeks, the extraordinary outpouring of anger and angst over the declaration revealed that many whites remain ambivalent about their links to apartheid, and how uneasy they still feel about their future in the new South Africa.
De Klerk, for one, declined to sign the declaration, saying he already had apologized.
Afrikaner writer Breyten Breytenbach labeled the campaign a self-indulgent exercise in liberal white guilt and said the declaration made him “want to puke.”
Hundreds of other whites have flooded local newspapers with outraged letters, one writing that he would gladly express remorse for apartheid when the United States apologized for annihilating Native Americans. On the subject of apartheid, another irate letter-writer, an Oprah Winfrey fan, invoked the talk show host’s mantra on other issues to “just get over it.”
Almost inevitably, the declaration has grown into something more than a moral gesture. It has been pounced on and used as a football in South Africa’s increasingly racialized national politics.
The apology was released soon after key municipal elections last month in which President Thabo Mbeki’s predominantly black African National Congress, or ANC, saw its support base eroded by voter apathy and a resurgent opposition led by whites. Unlike peacemaker Mandela, Mbeki has been quick to condemn lingering white racism in South Africa. And the white-dominated opposition has used its recent gains to attack both Mbeki’s Africanist stance and the declaration itself.
“I think this so-called apology was a venal attempt by a few pathetic whites to curry favor with Mbeki’s government,” said Dene Smuts, a member of Parliament with the opposition Democratic Alliance. “It plays right into the ANC’s agenda of demonizing whites. Maybe some of these people honestly believed they were doing good. But most of them just want more government funding for their little think tanks.”
Smuts repeated a charge that threads through countless conversations in South Africa’s affluent white suburbs: that the time for hand-wringing over apartheid is over; that apologies for the past are a smoke screen for the black-led government’s inability to deliver on jobs and fight poverty.
Though Mbeki gets high marks for keeping South Africa’s economy on an even keel, some 500,000 jobs have been lost in the country since the end of apartheid in 1994. The disparity in incomes in South Africa, mainly between whites and blacks, remains gigantic, exceeded only in countries such as Brazil and Guatemala.
“This is a cynical argument,” said Graham, the political analyst who added his signature to the apartheid apology along with hundreds of white former politicians, businessmen, educators and clergy. “It’s a way to deflect blame. The truth is, all whites benefited from apartheid in either gross or subtle ways. And now we’re complaining about the current state of affairs when we don’t even participate in our new government.”
According to a study last year by Graham’s Institute for Democracy in South Africa, only 50 percent of white South Africans have indicated any willingness to participate in building a new nation. The high white turnout in the December elections, he said, only reflected the adversarial politics of the opposition, which has absorbed conservative voters who once voted for apartheid.
In the meantime, South African newspapers that normally would have been brimming with treacly holiday features on black township Santas or New Year’s getaways to Cape Town beaches have been oozing instead with soul-searching.
White South Africans from as far away as New Zealand have been writing letters about the declaration, asking questions that ring familiar from Germany a half- century ago: “Am I--the next generation--to also carry the growing burden of responsibility for this?”
One commentator blamed the injustices of apartheid, including bans on interracial marriages and the forced concentration of blacks into ghettos, not on racism but capitalism. Another insisted that the white referendum that guaranteed the transition to black rule was apology enough. And still another argued that racism was biological “at the cellular level” and there was no way a public apology could change that.
“I don’t care if they call us dupes of the new government, I’m extremely pleased with the outrage,” said Antjie Krog, a leading poet and writer who spearheaded the declaration, which is part of a larger “Home for All” campaign to promote South Africa’s faltering drive for reconciliation.
“This is a debate whose time has come,” Krog said. “It is long overdue because we never had it before, not in 1990 or in 1994.”
She pointed out that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered amnesty to the henchmen of apartheid in exchange for testimony about their crimes, focused only on the “trigger-pullers,” not the vast majority of whites who passively acquiesced to the system.
“Acknowledging the past actually opens some political space for whites to criticize the present,” Krog said.
Xolela Mangcu, a black political analyst and commentator, agreed.
“Whites complain that they’re always being painted as closet racists,” Mangcu said. “Well, here is an opportunity to break that stereotype, to show they’re not this big white monolith.
“Mandela used grand gestures to show whites they had nothing to fear. I think most of us here are still waiting for whites to do the same.”
Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
, (2001). COMMENTARY ON RACE IN SOUTH AFRICA. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 1, 1.