Retracting the Intractable

Kicking off with politics. Next time, something important.

Our government has become so effective at controlling the way we describe ourselves that we no longer notice. Black economic empowerment, for example, is now such a normalised part of the jargon of business that no on stops to ask if BEE is about empowering ‘the people’ – i.e. the still disadvantaged masses (who are mostly black) – or about providing ethical credibility to business as usual. If one did, she might see that the relevant distinctions are now (mostly) about class rather than (mostly) about race.
This is part of the reason that President Mbeki and other leaders have been reluctant to make explicit statements against xenophobic violence. It is not that our leaders are never prepared to oppose the will of the majority (they have done this courageously and with integrity in, for example, not reinstituting the death penalty) but these incidences highlight fault lines that cannot be referred to directly, or it might become too clear that we don’t all stand on the same side. Not every politician has grasped the potential resentment to be caused by entering a squalid township in a convoy of luxury cars and ordering the inhabitants not to drive out migrants who (you believe) are stealing your jobs – itself revealing – but the cannier ones do. The apartheid government were equally conscious of the dangers of class solidarity, but while white workers could be induced to affirm allegiance the Volk against the swart gevaar, our government is running out of scapegoats. (If the cold war were still ongoing they might be said to be putting up an effective defence against communists.) Perhaps this is the root of Essop Pahad’s insinuations of a third force.

But politics is a fight over public rhetoric. It takes longer to change underlying assumptions. Indeed, public terminology is built upon those assumptions. How was BEE ever possible in a country with mass unemployment, extreme poverty and a sizable affluent minority? The poor aren’t stupid but most believe (because most people believe) in the global intractability of the status quo, which is capitalism. This is not ideology but (apparent) pragmatism. And in a day-to-day sense this is true. If mobs had targeted the Sandton CBD and beat investment bankers with sjamboks, the army would have been deployed in hours, not days. You can ask your government for a more efficient distribution of resources, but not a change in the basic way these are distributed. The obvious space for action, then, is against those with whom you share the margins.

The response of ‘ordinary South Africans’ (non-politicians) has been glorious and heartening. But we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: to what extent are we complicit in perpetuating these inequalities? Put another way, is there not the risk that treating the symptoms will mask the underlying disease?

Do we really want a return to ‘normality’ in our townships? Yes, certainly. And further pressure must be put on government to stop this tragic violence completely and to provide shelter and resources to the displaced. Indeed, few will disagree that there is an urgent need to provide more to South Africa’s poorest in general. But these events are not about poverty per se, but about the betrayal of the many by an elite, about the existence of an elite, even if this is never directly vocalised or acknowledged. When we (white or affluent or educated or for whatever reason comfortable) South Africans demonstrate against violence, this is correct, virtuous and brave. The right message is undoubtedly ‘Stop attacking foreigners; end the violence now’. But we need to decide the subtext. Is it ‘so everything can return to how it was’ or is it ‘because we are all human, we are all equal, and we must share’. South African history is a model of retracting the intractable. Are we willing to make that sacrifice?