There’s been no end of articles recently on the need for a new way forward for our ailing land. I have yet to see one though that gets at the essence of the challenge that faces us.
We all know how important it is to grow the economy and curb corruption and crime; improve education and lessen inequality. What no one talks about however is the foundational flaw in the nature of the South African enterprise.
We think — our pundits tell us — that we’re living in a fairly normal, mid-tier nation-state, brought low by a succession of bad governments. That we could be just like Canada, say, or New Zealand, were it not for the evils and follies of the ANC (especially under Jacob Zuma) and the NP before them (most notably under HF Verwoerd and PW Botha).
The truth is however that this rendering of what might have been is nonsense. A pipe dream. And a dispiriting scourge. South Africa was set up for failure from the outset; not by unusual badness but by untenable borders.
The contours of the country, like those across the continent, were determined by self-interested outsiders. Those outsiders were focused on underground resources — massive gold and diamond deposits in our case — and they paid no real heed to above-ground demographics.
North of the Limpopo the process was genteelly and briskly completed by a handful of politicians (in Berlin, in 1884), but here things didn’t go quite as smoothly. The coveted minerals were all located in the fledgling Boer republics, so it took a three-year war to attain the requisite buy-in. Including concentration camps.
The Union of South Africa, in short, was a British contrivance whose provenance bore no resemblance whatsoever to the nation-state ideal. Instead, as was the case throughout the continent, it encompassed a raft of different ethnicities and language groups, with little or nothing in common. There was no shared will or culture or history of the sort that underpinned the unifications of Germany and Italy — and then there was the considerable added wrinkle of profound enmity between the two big settler communities.
The majority of Afrikaners had to be dragged in kicking and screaming; this while no one bothered to canvass the wishes of the various long-term indigenes. Such were the power dynamics, and racial sensibilities, of the European imperial epoch.
My forebears fled to this misbegotten “nation” to escape another form of race-based persecution in Eastern Europe. They were drawn here, or so I like to think, by the fact that the settlers hadn’t gone in for annihilation like their equivalents in America and Australia, but had instead chosen the more benign options of containment, subjugation and exploitation. What they couldn’t possibly have foreseen was the sea change in (overt) attitudes towards race in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The whole colonial project was, notoriously, anchored in the notion of a “civilising mission” with its core implication of a race-based value hierarchy. Thus it was that John Stuart Mill, the leading democratic theoretician of the 19th century, could say that if two nationalities were to find themselves together in one polity and the one that was lesser “in civilisation” were set to prevail in an election, by dint of numbers, this would be “a sheer mischief to the human race and one which civilised humanity with one accord should rise in arms to prevent”. Mill used the example of the Greeks and the Macedonians, but it’s perfectly clear how the principle would have landed in the late 20th century.
That kind of talk is anathema today, mercifully, but what remains stubbornly resilient is the phenomenon of group-based loyalty per se. I still consider myself an internationalist: I still dream of the day when there will be no countries and where all people will relate to all others based “not on the colour of their skin but on the content of their character”.
I can’t though honestly deny the fact that despite decades of sedulous effort on the part of artists, academics and activists, everywhere, there is no evidence that John Lennon’s or Karl Marx’s utopia is coming anytime soon. On the contrary, post-war history points pretty overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. I was appalled when I first read the dictum of (Marx’s socialist collaborator) Moses Hess - “class is secondary, race is primary” — but now it just makes me sad.
This truth has been obscured, in part, by the fact that in much the same way that the countries of the global North continue to control the global economy, so do their academies continue to set the terms of reference of the global political discourse. And though the latter — the Oxbridge-Princeton cohort — have very different sensibilities and ideals to the lot on Wall Street, their critiques and solutions are very much based on their own, parochial perspectives. Most significantly, and damningly, they uniformly assume that borders are sacrosanct and that the essential struggles are those that occur within existing countries, rather than between them.
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There is validity in this approach, to be sure. Indeed it’s probably true that most people in most countries today see real worth in their particular national projects (including people who are uncomfortable about patriotism and all other kinds of chauvinism). What is ignored, however, in this framing of the world is the fate of countries that do not fit the sensible-nation bill — they being ones that were not formed voluntarily, or organically, and that lack the essential ingredients for functional nationhood.
There are a few examples in the North — Cyprus is emblematic — but they’re ubiquitous in the global (and more especially the once-colonised) South. Leave aside the (massive) fact that the latter are mostly poor; the question is what hope is there for functional democracy in countries which do not have a common language, culture and orientation?
Mill was categorical on this point. “Free institutions”, he wrote “are next to impossible in a society made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist” (my emphases).
It’s unsettling to think that Mill, the father of modern liberalism, would have been appalled by the first inclusive South African election of 1994. What is even more baffling though is what was written by the man who chaired the Electoral Commission that orchestrated that extraordinary event. Writing just a decade earlier, in 1978, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert concluded that “simple majoritarianism cannot bring democracy to divided societies”. What he urged instead was “a minority veto in the legislative process”.
None of these concerns got a proper airing during our constitutional negotiations, precisely because of the progressive hegemony referred to above. “There’s only one race and that’s the human race” was the mantra or catechism of the new order, and it partly reflected the fact that black Americans were not just subjugated but also comprehensively acculturated. There were no Yoruba-Americans or Ibo-Americans; there were only African-Americans in the round, and that meant that there was little or no appreciation of or tolerance for ethnic particularities.
The country was pervaded by sub-groups from the European family of nations — Spanish-Americans, German-Americans etc — but all those of African descent were simply thrown together.
It has to be said that the lot of black Americans was significantly improved from the early 1950s, with a key role played by the Supreme Court: in terms of legal rights the community went from deeply disadvantaged to fully equal and even beyond.
What bears emphasising though is that this progress was greatly facilitated by two basic realities. Firstly, the aforementioned acculturation, manifest in the fact that all spoke English and most practised Christianity. And secondly the electoral arithmetic. Black Americans made up about 12% of the total population and that meant the extension of full citizenship rights could be achieved without threatening white control.
In pointing out these background truths, I am not seeking to impugn the bona fides of the American left. And nor am I diminishing the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. Instead, all I’m saying is that the experience in the US, and also that in Europe, is not a universally useful guide to action, or understanding. The advent of the age of non-racialism was unquestionably a move for the good — but its implications and effects were anything but equally felt. At the time or since.
Consider the fact that, partly because of the anathematising of ethnicity, the faux nations delineated in Berlin became fossilised into full members of the world community (without reparations or the remotest prospects of success).
Or, more pertinently, consider the gulf in inter-group power dynamics between Europe, the US and South Africa. The move to non-racialism was a matter of manners for those in Europe, being countries with tiny minority populations. It involved a moral choice for white Americans, one they handled fairly admirably, eventually.
But it was in South Africa, and here alone, that the new order played itself out at the level of might. It was morally nourishing to dwell on the (all too real) excesses and wrongs of the NP government (and its electors) but what really explained their distinctiveness wasn’t nastiness but numbers.
When FW de Klerk agreed in 1990 to yield state power to the will of the majority, the response from progressives was “it’s about bloody time”. So comprehensively had we bought into the ideas of race as a fiction, and borders as a fact, that we failed to register, or acknowledge, the extraordinariness of the decision. A companion mantra was “they had no choice in the matter”, but I can say categorically, having engaged with the ANC in Lusaka less than a year prior that Oliver Tambo and his team weren’t seeing it that way at all. Not even nearly.
My purpose here though is not to extol FW, or to exonerate whites (like me) in general. Rather it’s to urge those who control the public discourse to stop peddling this “Nats as Nazis” canard and to get serious about the enormity of the challenges we’re facing.
We do still have a fair chance of avoiding complete state failure. And a small shot at achieving true greatness (as a model for a borderless world). The sine qua non for either of these outcomes however is acknowledging, and coming honestly to terms with our utter abnormality. Starting with the plain fact that South Africa never should have been a country and never will be a nation.
There’s endless room for argument, of course, about the correct apportionment of historic blame and also the most effective form of government. There could be minority vetoes, forced coalitions, cantonal devolution — or not much change at all.
My point, again, is that what matters most is not the organisation of inter-party politics but the integrity (and utility) of inter-group attitudes. Not how we format our future but how we understand our past. DM