GOOD MORNING MS. ZELDA VAN RIEBEECK. WHITE RACISM AND THE RESURGENCE OF THE REVANCHIST PRO-APARTHEID NOSTALGIA IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: ARE WE THERE YET?

"We are racists,
We are racists,
And that's the way we like it".

"We are racists,
We are racists,
And that's the way we like it".
(A profoundly vile ditty chanted, unprovoked, by the white English racist football scumbag yobbos at a Paris, France underground station against a lone black commuter, CNN, 18 February 2015).

"No matter how much respect, no matter how much
recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I'm concerned,
as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this
country, it doesn't exit for me".
Malcolm X, the African American anti-racism Prophet, 1964.
(Quoted by Cornel West, the African American author of Race Matters, 2001, page 53).

INTRODUCTION

It will not surprise observers of South Africa's racial relations in the post-apartheid era if soon a video emerges, or is unearthed, showing either some white primary school pupils, or some white university students, or some inebriated white restaurant patrons performing a cruel, racist dance or Black Face ritual on some unsuspecting blacks, whilst singing along the lyrics of the vile ditty and doing an imitation of their racist English football Neanderthal counterparts quoted above.

What in Europe is passed and fobbed off by the middle and upper classes, with upper lip condescension, as the misdirected misbehavior of some fringe, indigent elements of society, in South Africa that quickly becomes vogue amongst some of the white racist so-called sophisticates of the middle and upper classes and their offsprings.

A recent litany of open white racist incidents against defenseless blacks attests to this truism.

It looks like when Europe and North America sneeze their blatant, despicable various forms of racism, as the racist English Chelsea FC yobbos did few days ago in Paris, parts of white South Africa catches a full-blown influenza of subliminal or crude racism.

The recent blatant, violent incidents of white racism in South Africa, including in Cape Town, Western Cape, against blacks mirror some of the recent vile incidents of crude, open white racism in Europe and North America.

The question therefore is: Why is there this resurgence of white racism in South Africa twenty years after the end of legislated racism as was embodied by Apartheid?

I think that there are four indicators which can assist us to correctly answer this vital question.

The first of these four indicators can be found in the 21 October 2004 The New York Review of Books article by Neal Ascherson headlined ‘Africa: The hard Truth', which was reviewing Howard W. French's book ‘A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa'. In this article, Neal Ascherson wrote the following about South Africa:

"It has to be said that sustained political anger is rare in Africa. Years ago, a white radical working to subvert the apartheid regime in South Africa said to me: ‘The most disastrous trait of ordinary African people is their infinite capacity for forgiveness, their sheer inability to keep up resentment'. He gave a wry smile".

Even a white South African radical working to subvert the apartheid regime observed this "disastrous trait" in us black South Africans?

Is it any wonder that South Africa's president Jacob Zuma during his 2015 State of the Nation (SONA) address today received the loudest applause from the Members of Parliament (MPs) and the parliamentary gallery when he stated that we have forgiven the oppressive deeds of whites under colonialism and Apartheid, just as former president Nelson Mandela did previously, and that we now embrace whites with open arms?

Not few white South Africans must have too given "a wry smile" at this statement of president Zuma. In fact, president Zuma informed the parliament and the nation how he never gets angry, even if he is called (evidently even by white racists) by such an offensive and insulting term as "‘i'nja' in Zulu - a dog", as he colorfully put it today to another boisterous round of applause from the assembled.

The second of the indicators that can help us to answer the question as to why there is a baffling growth of revanchist pro-Apartheid nostalgia in democratic South Africa is located in the premier global mouthpiece of big capital around the world, including in South Africa. In its 12th October 1996 issue, the UK The Economist, under the headline ‘After he's gone', and writing about former president Nelson Mandela, concluded the article with the following of several of its penultimate sentences about Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa, two years after we attained our freedom:

"The aim must be a fair society for all, created by sweeping away the legacies of apartheid as fast as is compatible with nurturing stability and economic growth". ((Page 18).

The admission by president Jacob Zuma in his SONA address today that black South Africans own only 3% of the blue-chip companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is just one of the measures underlining how post-apartheid South Africa has dismally failed to live up to even the barest minimum of expectation put forward by The Economist that we needed to aim for "...a fair society for all, created by sweeping away the legacies of apartheid".

What president Zuma did not even mention is that the top chief executive officers (CEOs), chief operating officers (COOs) and chief financial officers (CFO) of the 97% (by the president's own statistics) white-owned blue -chip companies on the JSE are over 90% manned by white South Africans.

Nor did he have time to mention that whilst over 90% of white South Africans live in our best suburbs, cities, towns and dorpies, almost 100% of the miserable villages, peri-urban settlements, squatter camps ringing our urban centers and our townships, almost all of them which are exclusively poor, highly depressed economically and where practically no inter-racial interaction happens amongst all of our people, are almost 100% populated by black South Africans.

The Economist (UK) would, I believe, agree that this is neither "as fast as possible" a situation towards creating "a fair society for all" in post-apartheid South Africa, two decades after the end of Apartheid.

In the economic power relations and economic ownership spheres, we have, in the last two decades, hardly started "sweeping away the legacies of apartheid", as The Economist (UK) must have expected us to have done by now.

The recent tragic outbreak of black township xenophobic attacks by some of our fellow black South Africans against foreign small traders in some of our black townships is perhaps the saddest but most telling symptom of this failure on our part to create an all-inclusive economic society in our country. It is so unfortunate that president Zuma paid only perfunctory attention to this phenomenon of growing xenophobia in our country. (See my recent Politicsweb article "Xenophobia - ‘the bitch is in heat' again").

A recent report by one of our weekend newspapers (Sunday Times SA, 15 February 2015) showed how white teachers continue to constitute over 80% of the teaching staff at numerous private schools and colleges, as well as formerly white-only Model C schools in our country. And we also know that in our rural villages and depressed township schools, the teaching is done almost exclusively by the black staff. This is so more than twenty years after the advent of our democracy.

For sometime now Xolile Mangcu, author and public intellectual, has been writing numerous articles about how the teaching staff at our elite universities like the University of Cape Town, where Mangcu teaches as an assistant professor, the University of the Witwatersrand (where I post-graduated in 1992 when the teaching staff was still over 80% white, close to 25 years ago), Rhodes University (interestingly a so-called hotbed of some of our so-called white English-speaking radical academics and intellectuals) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, to name only a few, continue to be over-represented by white professors, including foreign ones, in their teaching compliments.

All this unchanged reality is so more than twenty years into our democracy.

I believe that even The Economist (UK) must be surprised that we have not moved as a post-Apartheid society "as fast as is compatible with nurturing stability and economic growth" in creating "a fair society for all", especially in vigorously challenging blatant white hegemony in the country's production of knowledge, culture and hegemonic, ruling ideologies in the post-apartheid era.

21 years into our post-apartheid constitutional democracy, South Africa remains far from the ideal of being "a fair society for all", as I believe The Economist (UK) would readily concede.

The third indicator which may provide us with a reliable source of the answer to the question previously posed is located in Michael MacDonald's book ‘Why Race Matters'. In it, MacDonald wrote the following about the enduring power of white racism worldwide:

"When they established slavery, for example, whites were not motivated by racial prejudices or solidarities. According to Frederickson, ‘Africans and other non-Europeans were initially enslaved not so much because of their color and physical type as because of their legal and cultural vulnerability'. Frederickson's whites, looking for land and labor, directed themselves to those who had them. It happened that those who had what whites wanted were "brown" (and later ‘black') and did not want to give them. To get them, whites required superiority...Until the arrival of Britain in the nineteenth century, Frederickson's whites did not regard their supremacy as superiority, did not insist that their power reflected their worth. Whites took for granted that they were better than browns and blacks, of course. But prior to British intervention they did not regard their supremacy as something that had to be justified by superiority and did not regard superiority as something that originated in color. In fact, they stumbled onto color as a means of organizing rather belatedly ". (2006, pages 34-35).

It is in this paragraph that Michael MacDonald helps us to understand with blinding clarity as to why, as the African National Congress (ANC)'s Morogoro conference in 1969, which adopted its Strategy and Tactics guiding document, was so correct in stating that in the context of South Africa's colonialism of a special type, it will not be enough to replace white oppressors with black oppressors - that a mere change of guard at the levers of political power will not suffice. Anti-racism and non-racism alone in post-apartheid South Africa are not enough to create what The Economist (UK) called in 1996 "the aim" of "a fair society for all".

It is also why 20 years after the legal abolition of legislated white racism in South Africa, some of the white racists, including the ones born after the end of Apartheid, or the so-called ‘Born Frees', as the recent appalling racist rape incident at the Northern Cape Agricultural College involving brutalizing white teens showed, still display such open revanchist pro-Apartheid sentiments, and why many black South African victims of these racist attacks in the main remain the meek victims of such abominable white racism.

It is because many white South Africans do not care much about our skin color anymore as the basis of their sense of racial supremacy, after their successful colonial conquest of the land and wealth of our country; neither do they now insist that their political power reflected their worth, as this is now achieved by their privileged economic position; nor do they now argue as in the past that their racial superiority justifies their supremacy and hegemony over post-apartheid South Africa, other than as a metaphor for their enduring desire to retain that which they conquered from blacks by force, namely the land, all the other wealth and our people's cheap labor that was subsequently created from the colonial conquest of black South Africans.

It is no wonder that the moral outrage of Xolile Mangcu about the patent lack of demographic representativity in the professorial staff at our elite universities will not make the consciences of so-called radical and left-leaning white professors working in these elite universities to commit class suicide in favor of disadvantaged blacks and to shaft themselves aside in favor of new black professorial entrants into our elite universities. Nor will the JSE blue-chip companies and their CEOs, COOs and CFOs on their own do much to change, for the better, apartheid-era inherited legacy which president Jacob Zuma bemoaned today.

In the main black South Africans remain powerless because white South Africans in the main continue to wield enormous, preponderant and demographically unrepresentative economic power in our country. As the government does not tire from reiterating, our democratic government controls only 30% of our gross national product (GNP), whilst the 70% is controlled by the private sector, which, as the JSE statistics quoted above reveals, is controlled overwhelmingly by white South Africans.

This is really the powerful source of post-apartheid white racist arrogance, pro-Apartheid nostalgia and the very basis for the resurgence of revanchist, racist sentiment in certain white circles in our country.

In his book ‘The Master Strategist - Power, Purpose and Principle' Ketan J. Patel, the founder and head of the Strategic Group at Goldman Sachs, wrote the following about what he called "domination":

"Domination results from sustaining one-sided power in relationships;
To dominate, you need to possess a one-off advantage of sufficient scale to create sustainable distance between yourself and others. (NB:Apartheid spatial development? [My own words]);
To dominate you need a renewable advantage and invest to renew that advantage;
To sustain domination, targets must be willing to be dominated;
Domination leads to predatory behavior, because it becomes habitual and steps are taken to sustain the power position beyond its ‘natural' time". (NB: White domination of the economy has outlasted the legislated white racism of Apartheid. [My own words]).

And, most importantly for understanding the latter-day racism and resurgence of pro-apartheid nostalgia in a democratic South Africa:

"Domination can also be achieved through wealth. The basis of strategy then becomes the acquisition of wealth. Wealth can form an effective barrier to prevent others gaining power. Wealth can lead to power. Without an effective strategy to maintain effective barrier to others gaining power, the power will dissolve. With the dissolution of power, the wealth dissolves too." (2005, pages 76-77).

For white South Africans, no doubt, post-apartheid South Africa offers the certainties of domestic and international legitimacy and respectability, as well as their clear consciences which are at ease with themselves. But still, Apartheid offered them the basic non-ambiguities of clarity and simplicity of power hierarchies and the concomitant privileges and comforts such apartheid-era power hierarchies offered.

The fourth indictor is provided by no less a personage than Frederick Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism and Thatcherism (see ‘The Mad Monk' in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's book ‘The Commanding Heights - The Battle for the World Economy, 1998, pages 74-106). In his classic ‘The Road to Serfdom', under the chapter headlined ‘Planning and Democracy', F.A. Hayek wrote:

"When individuals combine in a joint effort to realize ends they have in common, the organisations, like the state, that they form for the purpose, are given their own system of ends and their own means. But any organisation thus formed remains one ‘person' amongst others, in the case of the state much more powerful than any of the others, it is true, yet still with its separate and limited sphere in which alone its ends are supreme. The limits of this sphere are determined by the extent to which the individuals agree on particular ends; and the probability that they will agree on a particular course of action necessarily decreases as the scope of such action extends. There are certain functions of the state on the exercise of which there will be practical unanimity among its citizens; there will be others on which there will be agreement of a substantial majority; and so on, till we come to fields where, although each individual might wish the state to act in some way, there will be almost as many views about what government should do as there are different people". (2005, pages 63-64).

In terms of our domestic situation in the post-apartheid era, I understand Hayek to be pointing to the need for black progressive South Africans to establish a near unanimous consensus on the need for economic justice for all in the next two decades, and that such a consensus should buttress the societal push to make our state and particularly our government to go much further beyond the tired rhetorical-only commitment to radical economic transformation.

Why is post-apartheid societal unanimity about the need to create what The Economist in 1996 defined as "a fair society for all" so elusive, when we can all easily agree that South Africa, in line with the Freedom Charter and our 1996 Constitution, belongs to all who live in it, both black and white? Why is it that we can say that South Africa belongs to all, when in practice we also live the dangerous reality that our national economy is dominated by a white minority?

Why, two decades after the end of Apartheid, is the situation still obtaining where powerful minority interests in the economy still shape the mandate of our transformation agenda towards redress of what The Economist (UK) in 1996 called "apartheid legacies"?

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