Race; Musings from a Layman

“Why race continues to matter in South Africa when it shouldn’t,” reads Sandile Vabaza’s opinion piece heading on the Daily Friend, online publication of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR). That the article puts forth a sensible argument doesn’t spare the author from the barrage of crude comments – many bordering on racist – that come from the keyboards of the website’s supposedly liberal readership and, I’d wager, Vabaza didn’t even come up with the caption. Especially the suspect when it shouldn’t.

On the contrary, it has the IRR’s signature scribbled all over it. Why, you ask? For one thing, South African liberals (the IRR being no exception) tend to always reach a conveniently straightforward verdict on this matter: “well,” they seem to be saying, “apartheid’s over, blacks are in power, so let’s forget the past and move on”. [Note: here, they don’t make the distinction between political and economic power].

Indulge this premise long enough and a familiar pattern soon emerges: ever since the ANC assumed power, the country has been on an inexorable slide to yet another doomed post-colonial third-world despotism. Criminals wreak havoc, poverty and poor governance are par for the course, this while the economy tanks as millions find themselves jobless, and, with the energy crisis, unable to even put some pap to the boil.

Cadre deployment and B-BBEE – the great enablers of incompetence and corruption – rather than the redress they promised, have apparently wrought more damage on the country than all the centuries of colonialism and apartheid ever did. At least under the Nationalists, unemployment was low, the Rand was on the up, there were fewer criminals or drugs out on the streets and certainly no “black foreigner” issue.

In hushed tones (at least amongst those with an honest bone) they say: “ok, maybe the killings, the sjamboks unleashed on little kids, the slipping on bars of soap and tumbling out of a tenth floor window, the crime against humanity were evil…But we were living in highrise buildings, behind tall hedges and boy did we amass ridiculous wealth on the back of the barbarism, so what could we have known?

“Thank God for the Group Areas Act because no one can reject our excuse that we did not see. Yes, the papers gave us some inkling of what was going on but mostly the carnage was censored, and so our blissful ignorance allowed us peaceful sleep. And in our defence, we could often be counted on to slip wads of cash into the hands of black activists to advance the liberation cause and we even voted ‘yes’ in the referendum. Surely that should tell you something about our moral compass”.

This is how the liberal attitude can be summed up. That they were mostly good-doers who did not see colour, were on the right side of history, and thus cannot understand why we’re still harping on about race when at least one IRR study has shown that black South Africans, “care about jobs, about safety, about their kids having better lives than they have, and not fundamentally about race,” as Vabaza notes.

Were it not so naively shallow, we could call it fair comment. But consider the gridlock of laws that were expressly intended to have black men forever as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. The 1913 Native Land Act, Group Areas Act, Industrial Conciliation Act, Bantu Education…all meticulously crafted to ensure that whites were the apex race; the CEOs, professors, the lahnees with an endless stream of cheap, unionised black labour at their beck and call.

One great Afrikaner scribe writes that with all these favourable conditions, if you were white and didn’t succeed during this windfall, you would’ve been utterly stupid. Yet, for some reason you’d be hard-pressed to find a single white person nowadays who fesses up to the privilege that their skin colour afforded. Today, virtually every successful white person one comes across will have you believe that he’s a self-made man who earned his fortune from the ground-up through nothing but sheer determination and hard work.

Boy, they must’ve worked extremely hard. To date, according to Statistics SA; “black African unemployment rates are between four and five times as high as they are amongst whites”.

By 2016, writes Wits University’s Thanti Mthanti, “whites still constituted 68.9% of top management in all sectors. Yet they are only 9.9% of the economically active population. In contrast black Africans, who constitute 78% of the economically active population, hold only 14.3% of top management positions”.

The State Land Audit of 2017 found that 72% of the land was white-owned, whilst only – wait for it – a hopeless 4% was in African hands.

One could get bogged down on the stats but everyone is all too familiar with them. Unless your head’s been in the sand over the last couple of centuries you’d know that whiteness – a term liberals aren’t entirely comfortable around – enjoys premium. Anecdotal evidence will show that even a rich black man will often be called umlungu (white man) around the neighbourhood for no reason other than his wealth. Success therefore is considered less a by-product of hard work than an inheritance bequeathed from a racial advantage.

But the IRR, as though speaking from the same megaphone as the Democratic Alliance would have us believe that ‘racialism’ perished with apartheid and that the only thing that stands in the way of the country’s progress are the race-based laws that only enrich the connected ‘Afristocracy’. Vociferously, they thump on the message of private property rights ostensibly to challenge the leftist calls for expropriation of land without compensation.

Of course what these stances both miss is how, in the absence of such laws during the years of subjugation, it is unlikely that whites would have so spectacularly ascended the rungs of the socio-economic ladder. They certainly wouldn’t own the vast tracts of land. It goes without saying that although the ANC has demonstrated an insatiable appetite for boondoggle, the white liberal has benefitted handsomely from both the previous regime’s cruelty as well as the incumbent’s greed.

What appears to irk the liberal most (a rather common liberal kink) being the enlightened sorts they fancy themselves to be, is likely that the current dispensation all but pays any attention to their prescriptive, paternalistic narratives. Why would they when at base level the ANC have been nothing but a political organisation whose modus operandi, particularly over the last decade, has been to keep a firm grip on the levers of power ‘until Jesus comes back’. They are probably more shook by Julius Malema than by some think-tank.

What this ultimately all means is that race matters. Not necessarily in the overtly grotesque sense of a Penny Sparrow or racist white farmers ordering a living black man into a coffin, but in the reality that economic prosperity remains skewed along racial lines. Inevitably, this makes it a powerful election technology particularly from the left. Not for nothing that Julius Malema barely says anything without mentioning white people, the mines or the land.

On the face of it, it seems that race is the central issue but in truth, it is nothing but an understanding on his part that the poverty-ravaged slum dwellers yearn to someday live ‘like white people’. They would wish that they were the ones doing the pointing rather than the digging or shovelling or subserviently taking instructions. Vabaza has it spot on. The IRR, whose days as an independent think-tank seem far behind them, have seemingly found in the DA a bedfellow who could afford their work – which likely hardly ever makes it onto the eyes of anyone outside the white middle class – some dissemination.

However, as the two organisations continue to denounce Critical Race Theory and poke holes at wokeness, on the ground real wars are being waged daily. Life-threatening wars of survival, of bread and butter, electricity; of people recycling bottles and scrap for peanuts that go a long way in places where there is usually nothing to begin with.

In and of themselves, these debates amount to little but trendy academic pursuits. Materially, they offer little to nothing to the subjects they are dealing with. Nobody from these spaces will know that the IRR once released a report in which it fell short of determining that SA spaza shop owners were lazy, drunken thieves. They won’t know because for most of them something as accessible as a downloadable PDF costs data and is far beyond their level of education. Perhaps the liberal will realise his privileged position and be grateful that his life has been kinder than the millions on whose behalf he draws such easy conclusions.