ADDRESS OF THE PATRON OF THE TMF, THABO MBEKI, AT THE CONFERENCE ON RACISM: SOUTH AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, GALLAGHER ESTATE, 15 MARCH, 2016

Advocate Mushwana, Chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission,
Esteemed Members of the Commission,
Distinguished participants,
Ladies and gentlemen:

The fact that we meet here today to discuss, among others, the issue of racism, and therefore national reconciliation and nation building, constitutes a justifiable acknowledgement that we have still not accomplished the objective stated in our Constitution of building a new South Africa based on the values of non-racialism and non-sexism.

We make this acknowledgement not to deny the sustained efforts that have been made and the progress achieved during the last 22 years of our democracy.

However it would seem to me that over the years, certainly in our public discourse, we have spoken less and less about the fact of the racist legacy whose eradication must surely constitute the heart and focal point of the struggle to create the non-racial society visualised in our Constitution.

Indeed I am persuaded to the view that it was not the tenacity of the racist legacy in terms of our country’s socio-economic structure which has brought the matter forcefully back into the public discourse that we are still confronted by the scourge of racism.

Rather this was prompted by the recent extremely reprehensible comments by one Penny Sparrow about Africans being “monkeys”, whom she said, referring to the Durban beaches, brought “huge dirt and troubles and discomfort to others…From now I shall address the blacks of South Africa as monkeys…”

Nevertheless this should draw our attention to the important distinction we should make between the separate by interconnected elements of what might be characterised as subjective and material racism, and the dialectical relationship between the two.

In this context I am certain that all of us will have taken the trouble to remind ourselves of both our 2000 National Conference on Racism and the 2001 United Nations 3rd World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which was held in Durban.

Like our own National Conference, in its Declaration the UN Conference drew attention to what it described as “the persistence of racist attitudes and practices” and the direct relationship of these attitudes and practices to “poverty, underdevelopment, marginalisation, social exclusion and economic disparities”.

Later I will comment on what we might have to do to combat these two inter-connected expressions of racism, the subjective and the material.

For now I must confess that as I tried to re-examine what democratic South Africa has done over the years to combat racism, I looked at various comments I had made during this period.

There are many things I said, not different from many others in our country, which I believe bear repeating, both because I believe that they remain relevant and because they emphasise the point that as we meet here today we should draw lessons from our past and work to build on what has been achieved in the continuing struggle against racism.

You will therefore pardon me as I cite some of my various statements, which will also impose an obligation on this Conference to assess whether these are of any relevance in terms of our continuing and current challenge to defeat racism.

Many among us will recall that our National Assembly held a Debate on "Reconciliation and Nation Building” on May 29, 1998.

During that Debate I said, in part, and will quote my statement at some length because of my conviction about its continuing relevance. I said:

“The 1993 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa ends with an epilogue entitled "National Unity and Reconciliation".

Among other things, it says:

"This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief of sex."

"The pursuit of national unity," it continues "the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society."

For its part, the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa has a Preamble which, among other things, says:

"We, the people of South Africa, recognise the injustices of our past... (and) believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

"We therefore... adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to heal the divisions of the past.. (and) to improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person."

In its "Founding Provisions", this Constitution also says that our Republic has as one of its values "commitment to promote non-racialism and non-sexism."

I believe that as we discuss the issue of national unity and reconciliation today, we will have to do a number of things.

The first of these, to which I am certain we will all respond in the same manner, is that we should commit ourselves to the pursuit of the objectives contained in these Constitutions for a democratic South Africa.

The second is that we will have to answer the question honestly as to whether we are making the requisite progress:

- to create a non-racial society;

- to build a non-sexist country;

- to heal the divisions of the past;

- to achieve the peaceful coexistence of all our people;

- to create development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex; and

- to improve the quality of life of all citizens.

Thirdly, we will have to answer the question, again as honestly as we can as to:

- whether our actions have been and are based on the recognition of the injustices of the past, and,

- whether our actions have genuinely sought to promote the integrated Constitutional objectives of:
- national unity;

- the well-being of all South Africans;

- peace;

- reconciliation (among) the people of South Africa; and

- the reconstruction of society.

In the light of these prescriptions contained in the two Constitutions to which I have referred, let me declare some of the matters to which (many of us are) committed.

We are interested that, as a people, we move as rapidly and as consistently as possible to transform South Africa into a non-racial country.

We are interested that our country lives up to its constitutional commitment to transform itself into a non-sexist society.

We are interested that together, as South Africans, we adopt the necessary steps that will eradicate poverty in our country as quickly as possible and in all its manifestations, to end the dehumanisation of millions of our people, which inevitably results from the terrible deprivation to which so many, both black and white, are victim.

We are interested that we must deal with our political past, honestly, frankly and without equivocation, so that the purposes for which most of us agreed to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, are achieved.

We are interested that our country responds to the call to rally to a new patriotism, as a result of which we can all agree to a common national agenda, which would include:

- a common fight to eradicate the legacy of apartheid;

- a united offensive against corruption and crime;

- concerted action to advance the interests of those least capable to defend themselves, including children, women, the disabled and the elderly;

- an agreement about how we should protect and advance the interests of all the different cultural, language and religious groups that make up the South African population;

- a commitment to confront the economic challenges facing our country, in a manner that simultaneously addresses issues of high and sustained growth and raising the living standards of especially the black poor;

- an all-embracing effort to build a sense of common nationhood and a shared destiny, as a result of which we can entrench into the minds of all our people the understanding that however varied their skin complexions, cultures and life conditions, the success of each nevertheless depends on the effort the other will make to turn into reality the precept that each is his or her brother's or sister's keeper; and

- a united view of our country's relations with the rest of the world.
We believe that these are the issues we must address when we speak of reconciliation and nation building.

They stand at the centre of the very future of South Africa as the home of a stable democracy, human rights, equality, peace, stability and a shared prosperity.

Accordingly we must attend to the question whether with regard to all these issues and at all times, all of us behave in a manner which promotes the achievement of the goals we have mentioned, and therefore take us forward towards the realisation of the objective of reconciliation and nation building, without which the kind of South Africa visualised in our Constitution will most certainly not come into being.

So must we also pose the questions - what is nation building and is it happening!

With regard to the first of these, our own response would be that nation building is the construction of the reality and the sense of common nationhood which would result from the abolition of disparities in the quality of life among South Africans based on the racial, gender and geographic inequalities we all inherited from the past.

The second question we posed is - are we making the requisite progress towards achieving the objective of nation building, as we have just defined it!

If we elected to answer this question in a polite and reassuring manner, we would answer - yes, we are making the requisite progress.

However, I believe that perhaps we should answer this question honestly and deal with the consequences of an honest response, however discomfiting it may be.

Accordingly, our answer to the question whether we are making that requisite progress, towards achieving the objective of nation building, as we defined it, would be - no!

A major component part of the issue of reconciliation and nation building is defined by and derives from the material conditions in our society which have divided our country into two nations, the one black and the other white.

We therefore make bold to say that South Africa is a country of two nations.

One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

This enables it to argue that, except for the persistence of gender discrimination against women, all members of this nation have the possibility to exercise their right to equal opportunity, the development opportunities to which the Constitution of '93 committed our country.

The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled.

This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

It has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, with that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realisation.

This reality of two nations, underwritten by the perpetuation of the racial, gender and spatial disparities born of a very long period of colonial and apartheid white minority domination, constitutes the material base which reinforces the notion that, indeed, we are not one nation, but two nations.

And neither are we becoming one nation.

Consequently, also, the objective of national reconciliation is not being realised.

This follows as well that the longer this situation persists, in spite of the gift of hope delivered to the people by the birth of democracy, the more entrenched will be the conviction that the concept of nation building is a mere mirage and that no basis exists, or will ever exist, to enable national reconciliation to take place.”

In 2002 one of our politicians said my statement that South Africa was made up of ‘two nations’ was “a mischaracterisation of the South African condition made for entirely self-serving reasons – the ANC figures that the best way to retain the support of black South Africans is to turn other South Africans into the enemy.”

It may very well be that some among the distinguished participants at this Conference agree with this assessment.

I would humbly suggest that these should freely express their views in this regard without any fear.

As all of us would agree, this is important because it is only when we correctly define the problem and challenge we face that we will be able to elaborate the appropriate responses and solutions.

We can only achieve such correct definition, and therefore the right solutions, through an open debate which allows for the expression of different and contending opinions.

In this context I will take the liberty to quote an important observation made by the Chairperson of our Human Rights Commission in 2000, Professor Barney Pityana, in his Preface to the 2001 Report of our National Conference on Racism.

In reality Prof Barney’s observation is about how our past, defined exactly by the fact of ‘two racially defined nations’, even leads to differences among us with regard to our perceptions of what our objective actually is – put crudely, whether the cat that crossed the road was black or white!

Professor Pityana wrote:

“Reconciliation in South Africa is a big challenge. It is often bedevilled by confrontational politics. It has to transcend the hurdles erected by our past, and the legacy of that past which lives with us today.

More seriously, it is made all the more difficult by a predilection to denial and skewed understandings of democracy and liberalism - an acutely South African brand of conservative liberalism! This suggests also that the past does not matter. We must simply look to the future.

It is also part of this conservativeness which claims that not much needs to be done today to remedy the effects of the past and that transformation is a threat to equality. When such notions persist, it is difficult to believe that we understand each other when we talk about change, and the values enunciated by the Constitution cease to have any meaning.

The result is cynicism about our national efforts. It also leads to indifference about the spectre of racism in our society.”

It may very well be that correctly to assess our current national reality, we would have to moderate the view about those who have “ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure”, specifically to include among these the black middle class, so called, which has emerged as a positive result of the sustained effort during the last two decades to eradicate the legacy of racism.

Obviously this draws attention to the class as against and in addition to the racial divisions.

Nevertheless the questions still remain – whether such progress as we have made in the effort to eradicate the legacy of racism has effectively eroded the racial fault lines we inherited from our past, and whether this has now resulted in giving primacy to the class rather than the national contradiction!

To respond to the question concerning the fundamental restructuring of our society, giving birth to a new South Africa which in its socio-economic profile is essentially different from the one we inherited in 1994, I believe that even for reasons of methodology, it would assist us if we try honestly to answer the various and many questions I posed in 1998, as contained in the extract I have cited.

In the end, our common challenge is to answer the two interconnected questions:

- what must we do to combat subjective racism - the attitudes, prejudices and ideologies which constitute the noxious notion of racial superiority, which result in discriminatory, oppressive and insulting practices; and,

- what must we do to combat material racism - the actual phenomenon of racially defined poverty, underdevelopment, marginalisation, social exclusion and economic disparities?

Earlier I referred to the racist comments made by Penny Sparrow about ‘black monkeys’ only three months ago, to illustrate the subjective racism which still clearly constitutes the mind-set of some of our citizens.

Fifteen years earlier, I drew attention to this very same phenomenon in my State of the Nation Address in 2000, during which I reported that as Government we had requested the Human Rights Commission to convene the National Conference on Racism which did take place.

The racist comment I quoted then was even more offensive than the one made by Penny Sparrow. I quote it again today to highlight the challenge we face, strongly to confront the subjective racism in our society which, I am convinced, some only express in private, which communicates the false impression that we have fewer racists, black and white, than actually populate our society.

During the 2000 State of the Nation Address I quoted a comment which had been made by an engineer who was working in one of our companies, and had been unearthed by FAWU, the Food and Allied Workers Union.

The engineer wrote:

"I would like to summarise what the Kaffirs have done to stuff up this country since they came into power...If a white buys a house, he pays transfer duties. If a kaffir buys a house it is free of duties because he was 'previously disadvantaged'...More than 20% of the GDP is embezzled by the kaffir politicians and corrupt civil servants...The UIF and state pension funds have been embezzled...Our girlfriends/wives are in constant threat of being brutally raped by some AIDS infested Kaffir (or gang of Kaffirs)...Everyday someone you know is either robbed, assaulted, hijacked or murdered...Half these black bastards have bought their (drivers) licences from corrupt traffic cops...AND AND AND AND AND...All I am saying is that AIDS isn't working fast enough!!!"

Contrary to the response of some of our politicians then, that my quotation of these vile comments amounted to nothing more than what was regularly denounced by these politicians as “playing the race card”, the remarks made by Ms Sparrow fifteen (15) years later, supported by others, confirmed the persistence of subjective racism among some of our fellow-citizens.

It would seem obvious that to combat this subjective racism we must, among others:

- strengthen the capacity of our host, the Human Rights Commission, expeditiously to identify, expose publicly and condemn all manifestations of racism, including anti-Semitism;

- strengthen the legal capacity of the State to act against racism, including its punishment as unacceptable hate language, with the necessary respect for the constitutionally protected freedom of speech;

- ensure that our school curricula, from the lowest Grade, and the curricula in higher education inculcate in the young the values of non-racism and non-sexism and the celebration of our common humanity;

- work to cultivate a common patriotism among all our people, based on recognition of the reality that we share a common destiny, that none can truly succeed without the other, and that we are to one another, our brother’s and sister’s keepers;

- strive to ensure that all our national institutions and organised formations, both public and private, properly manifest healthy cooperation within a context representative of our demographic diversity; and,

- insist that especially Government and the Corporate Sector do everything possible within their own structures, and continuously, such that they serve as exemplars of what it means to have a non-racial society, expressive of the values of true national reconciliation, non-racialism and non-sexism.

It is obvious that the strenuous efforts our country has taken over two decades to eradicate the legacy of colonial and apartheid racism, and therefore material racism, have not succeeded as well and as fast as we and the majority of our population expected and hoped for.

The objective truth is that in many of its socio-economic features our country continues to be characterised by racially and gender defined poverty, underdevelopment, marginalisation, social exclusion and economic disparities.

The National Development Plan recognises this reality as when it says in various paragraphs that:

“Despite progress since 1994, South African society remains divided…South Africa remains one of the most unequal economies in the world…The privilege attached to race, class, space and gender has not been fully reversed…For at least the next decade, race should continue to be given the greatest weight in defining historical disadvantage…When opportunity is skewed for centuries, this tends to produce a distribution of financial, human and social capital that continues to reinforce inequality of opportunity even if the legal elements of discrimination have ended…”

It is this reality of material racism which constitutes the principal obstacle to the creation of a non-racial and non-sexist society, which therefore results in the postponement of the realisation of the objectives of national reconciliation and nation building.

I would like to believe that most people will not question the fact that serious and sustained efforts have been made over the 22 years of our democracy to transform our country into the non-racial and non-sexist society our Constitution calls for.

Similarly I am certain that none of us will contest the conclusion that the progress we have made in this regard has not be as speedy and thoroughgoing as the situation demands and as we would wish, which is what explains the statement in the NDP that “For at least the next decade, race should continue to be given the greatest weight in defining historical disadvantage…”

It would therefore seem obvious that given the fact that all of us are keenly interested to accelerate progress towards the creation of a truly non-racial and non-sexist society, we must do at least three things.

The first of these is that we must carry out a comprehensive and critical assessment of our policies and programmes during our years of democracy to try to discover and determine why we have not made greater and more decisive progress in terms of the eradication of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid as this bears on the strategic matter of the creation of a non-racial and non-sexist society.

The second is that we should then engage the challenging question – what are the genuinely new things we must do, treating the matter of the continuing pernicious existence of material racism in our country as truly a national emergency which does not allow for an approach of business as usual!

The third is that we should encourage action on a process which was visualised by the National Planning Commission in the Diagnostic Report it issued in 2001, when it said:

“A national dialogue involving all South Africans is required to arrive at solutions that are credible and implementable…Tackling (the) challenges (facing the country) will require the involvement of all sectors of society.”

I believe that if this important Conference to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the South African Human Rights Commission acts to help ensure that our country takes these three vital initiatives, it will make a major contribution to the national task radically to accelerate the process towards achieving the objectives of non-racialism and non-sexism, and therefore national reconciliation and nation building.

I am honoured to wish the Conference and the Human Rights Commission success.

Thank you.

Issued via the Thabo Mbeki Foundation Facebook page, 15 March 2016