The UCT academic, Anthony Butler, has recently raised concerns that a split in the African National Congress could well have negative consequences for inter-racial and inter-ethnic accommodation in South Africa. In his column for Business Day last week he wrote, "We may have severely underestimated the moderating and stabilising influence the ANC has exercised in recent years over potential ethnic and racial conflicts. As Zola Skweyiya observed last week, the ANC has not fully succeeded in this project. ‘We have not solved the national question - not just between whites and blacks, but among ourselves as Africans'."
Butler's warnings of looming conflict could prove prescient - but perhaps not for the reasons he presents. In successfully uniting into one party all classes and ethnic groups of the ‘oppressed nation' the ANC was little different to other nationalist movements which came to power after the end of colonial or white rule in Africa. In maintaining a period of ethnic peace, albeit at the expense (and high levels of emigration) of non-black minorities, its successes have not been dissimilar either.
The real question is whether the policies it pursued over the past decade are all that different to those which ultimately led to the nightmare of ethnic conflict from which so much of Africa is still trying to awake.
Here it is necessary to understand the chain of causation. This was well described by the Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff. Commenting on the collapse of the old Yugoslavia into ethnic warfare he noted that the conflict had been preceded first by the collapse of the overarching state and then the institution of ethnic justice. It was only then that nationalist paranoia set in. Nationalist sentiment on the ground," Ignatieff observed, "among common people, is a secondary consequence of political disintegration, a response to the collapse of state order and the interethnic accommodation that it made possible."
South Africa is hopefully a long distance away from the kind of inter ethnic warfare that marked the bloody breakup of the old Yugoslavia. But what is key is Ignatieff's point that it is the decay and collapse of the state - and the end of the neutral application of justice - which leads to an upsurge of ethnic sentiment (rather than the other way round).
The ANC has made a number of the same mistakes other nationalist movements did elsewhere on the continent. One of these was to aggressively politicise the state through cadre deployment, another has been to allow the professionalism of particularly the lower courts of the judiciary to slowly decompose. As Judge Carole Lewis of the Supreme Court of Appeal noted recently a string of weak appointments have resulted in a decline in the quality of justice being meted out in many of the high courts. "There have, in criminal matters, been horrifying convictions and equally horrifying acquittals where judges have simply not understood the fundamental rules of evidence or of criminal law."