Indulge me in playing devil’s advocate, dear reader. A preposition which seeks to put paid to the nation’s gnawing and uncertain question is increasingly gaining momentum. It has the political elite regularly on the lookout to cross the floor. Business is disappearing assets into offshore accounts, you know, just in case. This whilst some of them are clearly pumping a lot of money into driving manufactured agendas and narratives that are, by default, meant to allay whatever fears that may arise at the prospect of an SA sans ANC. Better governance, more jobs, no pillaging of state resources and definitely no apartheid 2.0.
Said question: when the ANC’s grip on the levers of power has been completely dislodged, to what or whom will we entrust the captaincy? At surface level, it sounds like a lahnee way of simply asking who will be voted to lead the country in the next election. But, pressing an ear to its pulse, it seemingly beats on something not quite so cut and dry.
Nonetheless, the answer, if we are to take some intellectuals – many ‘clever blacks’ amongst them – at their word: bring the very best of white and black minds together, put ideology aside and start working on practically making SA great again. From the get-go, the idea is fraught with hurdles. So much so that those darker-hued pundits who so much as murmur such heresy are metted a distrustful stare-down, trolled on the ether and asked who the hell made them spokespersons of black sentiment. They can – they are accused – only be doing the bidding of white handlers. Just ask Molebatsi Mbeki, Wandile Sihlobo or even Prince Mashele.
This resistance is not one-sided, that is, it’s not only a kink straight out of Nyanga. Indeed, out in the drawn laager forming far from the N2 highway, the sheer idea of multi-racial collaboration might be verboten. Any attempt at this rainbowish kumbaya would not go down well with some okes on this side of the wall. Here, even think-tanks, once courageously liberal in the cause against apartheid are now so disgusted with how the post-liberation cadres have chucked them to the bleachers by way of ignoring their input as well as on policy decisions, as to dedicate strings of disapproving op-eds on their platforms.
What we gather from reading and watching these is that they are anti-redress, rampantly pro-privatisation and consider merit as the cornerstone of new beginnings. All pretty sensible until you begin paying closer attention to the pious, privileged, often ill-informed and out-of-touch mouthpieces who disseminate these views. On this side, redress as a general idea is wrong and should be immediately scrapped. This analysis does not even bother to draw the necessary distinction between the sort of wholesale redress that ought to be aimed at uplifting entire millions of once marginalised people out of poverty and instead gets bogged down at the elitist ANC variant that has spawned both the gluttonous tenderpreneur and the murderous inkabi.
On merit, these views become borderline condescending. Given that white SA, they tell us, has access to some of the best schools, year on year achieves some of the best Matric pass marks, naturally means any dark person who hopes to compete with whites will be seriously up against it. Therefore, although they verbally espouse for a multi-racial chessboard in the running of SA, there will be no prizes for guessing as to whom merit will ensure the most esteemed positions. In this new order, it will not be deployment on the grounds of race but appointment by academic capability that will decide who becomes the baas.
Indeed, in an ideal SA where from 1652 all men were created equal, this would attract massive buy-in. But you and I are both quite well aware of the sins that have taken place since then to at least agree that the victims of the past might find themselves victims of the present if merit without any empathetic leg-up becomes the yardstick of opportunity. Moreover, knowing how said academic advantage might put them in good stead at the expense of their lesser-educated countrymen, can these voices truly be trusted to advance the interests of all South Africans? Do they even abide by their own rules? Not for nothing that the DA’s John Steenhuisen’s academic qualifications are often the subject of intense debate. How could the party let go of the better educated Lindiwe Mazibuko and Mmusi Maimane and yet Steenhuisen remains?
As well-meaning and potentially workable (if you employ a lot of diversity consultants while at it) as the idea might be, its proponents, likely disillusioned by the thirty years of infrastructural regress, economic stagnation and deteriorating race relations are throwing the idea at us hoping we’ll realise that it might just be the ticket out of the bedlam and simply run with it. Except the proponents themselves are, even when they try their best to be agreeable to a, uhm, diverse audience, rather pathetic.
If you’ve been prowling the free-for-all social media channels, you will have picked up that they still carry the attitude of the headmaster who’s not all that into the idea of his school being taken over by ‘them’. He’s a know it all. So petty as to correct mispronounciation, talk over his guests, and quite openly proffer cringeworthy remarks when he doesn’t agree with the Afro-haired chap sitting across from him.
This is just the difficult icebreaker tip of the iceberg, the inability for these racially diverse people to talk to each other as equals. This then leads to shameful utterances about colonialism not being all that bad, that ‘we are not calling for the slaughtering of white people – at least for now’ and other similarly distasteful sprinklings. These then just bring us back to where we started, thirty years ago. And, we haven’t even gotten to the hard business of the shady people who stand to gain tremendously as long as the ANC remains in power. If anything, the Madlanga Commission has shown just how deep the networks penetrate. As for blacks and whites working together? The question is, what will it take for everybody so see everybody else in the context of SA’s chequered history and maybe try to remember that although Bantu Education ended in 1994, its effects survive well into this very day.
Featured image: An image of a chessboard. Source: printable.space