The politics of the dominant group in South Africa (whites before, blacks now) has traditionally been driven to a significant degree by fear. In the 1930s white South African politics was consumed by the fear of miscegenation and race intermixture. Today, black South Africans are kept from voting for the Democratic Alliance by an equally irrational and unfounded fear of that party returning South Africa to apartheid (something the ANC deliberately stokes in their canvassing.)
This does not mean that South Africans don't have anything to worry about, just that their fears have often been wholly misdirected. As Rian Malan noted in the Mail & Guardian last week: "South Africans ought to be obsessed by one question only: what went wrong in the rest of Africa and how do we avoid the same fate?" What South Africans arguably need to most fear in this regard is less some peculiarly African pathology and more a powerful and enduring Western racialism. If South Africa is to escape the fate of the rest of the continent a great deal will depend on whether it has the innate strength to counteract it.
It has not done too well so far. The racial policies implemented by the ANC under the direction of Thabo Mbeki required that all institutions - at all levels - reduce the proportion of white South Africans to their marginal percentage of the population. This project has required racial discrimination against ‘whites' in employment, university admissions, government contracts and tenders, and so on.
Such policies have largely succeeded in driving white South Africans out of the public sector - with disastrous consequences for state capacity - but progress in the private sector has been more uneven. The reason for this disparity is simple. As The Economist's Robert Guest noted back in 2004, "Unlike private companies, the government finds it easy to hire by race rather than merit, because it has no competitors and cannot go bust. This is nice for the blacks it employs, but less good for the much larger number who depend on the state for health care, water, roads and pensions. The state does not even try to deliver these services cost-effectively." Before their defeat at Polokwane the Mbeki-ites were planning to pass an Expropriation Bill the main purpose of which was (again) to reduce ‘white ownership' of the economy and commercial agricultural to that group's proportion of the population.
There were always two powerful grounds for objecting to the Mbeki-ite racial agenda. The first is that there have been many other countries in Africa where such ‘Africanisation' measures have been implemented; and the economic consequences have invariably been disastrous for black and non-black alike. The second is that the principle being applied - that of ‘demographic representivity' - has an impeccably racist European pedigree.
This idea, that it is unacceptable for a racial minority to take up a share of any centre of power or influence greater than its proportion of the population, was central to European anti-Semitism in the 1930s. For a minority to excel beyond the limits of its demographic confines was regarded as abnormal, intolerable, and a product purely of the exploitation of others. This principle was invoked by the NSDAP in Germany in their anti-Jewish propaganda in 1934 (see here) and it subsequently spread across Europe. Its influence even extended down to the southern tip of Africa. One convert, at least for a while, was the editor of Die Transvaler, Hendrik Verwoerd (see here for his 1937 treatise on the topic). In 1938 - under pressure from Nazi Germany - Hungary passed the "first Jewish law" to correct the problem of Jewish ‘dominance' of the economy and professions. The provisions of which were as follows: