By: Buti Manamela
In a chance meeting between Pieter de Lange of the Broederbond and the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki in 1986 (in New York), the former sought assurances that in a future South Africa, there will be “segregated living areas, no mixed marriages, and all that.”
He opined, as observed by Allister Sparks in “Tomorrow is Another Country”, that they (captains of apartheid) can “remove the Group Areas Act tomorrow and it's not going to make any difference, because your (Mbeki) people don't have the money to move into the expensive white suburbs.”
De Lange said to Mbeki that, “from your point of view it will be a meaningless change, but for us Afrikaners it will mean we will wake up one day and realize that nothing has changed, that we are still all right, we've not perished as a people because the Group Areas Act is not there. That will open the way to asking the question: Why do we need a white government anyway?”
De Lange may be dead, but his spirit and ideas lives on in the hearts and minds of people like Dr. J Groenewald of the Freedom Front Plus.
“There was a court case about two black policemen and the court found that a white woman, a colonel, was the victim of racism by these two men...” blurted Groenewald last week during the debate on the State of the Nation in parliament.
He went further to conclude “that there is also black on white racism”, proclaiming that the manner in which the ANC condemned racism was different from that of his party.
The FF Plus, he said, condemned any form of racism whilst the ANC only condemned white on black racism.
The case that Groenewald referred to had nothing to do with racism, as the court found, but unfair discrimination. It is unfortunate that our country does not have a statutory definition of racism, and therefore what constitute racism remains politically, ideologically and legally contestable.
Even if Groenewald was right, racism has nothing to do with personal relations but has to do with the systemic and structural oppression of one racial group by another. For one to be racist, one has to have the institutional, political, military and ideological power to exercise it over another racial group, as was the case with apartheid. It is ridiculous to suggest that black people, given our history, have the power to exercise racism.
Groenewald goes on to “predict that in the coming election, the race card is going to be played a couple of times”.
Race, racism and racial exploitation did not wither away when the election euphoria engulfed this country and the world.
It nauseates Groenewald and his ilk when we continuously remind them that every facet of our society is defined by race, with its roots going deeper since colonialism and apartheid.
This is because they still want to continue lounging on the white privilege that they accrued as a result of the exploitation of black people, which continues to this day.
But this line of argument also benefits them in other ways. They, and their liberal friends in the Democratic Alliance want to place squarely the continued perpetuation of black poverty and white wealth on the doorstep of the ANC.
For them, it is not the largesse that they accrued during apartheid and protected through negotiations that has resulted in where our country is, but a mere failure of service delivery.
Next year, we will be observing the 30th anniversary of our democracy. Over these years, the quality of lives of the black majority has been significantly impacted by the revolutionary reforms that the ANC instituted through government.
These includes millions of houses, access to education and healthcare, roads to connect the cities and the country side, freedom of movement for people to migrate freely to better opportunities, access to electricity and water (albeit some challenges currently), and a higher life expectancy for the black majority.
All of these were done with the understanding that in the absence of a state-led reconstruction and development programme, the majority of black South Africans would have remained where they were under apartheid.
No wonder the backlash on that hired gun academic, Professor Jonathan Jansen, who foolishly and selfishly suggested that life was better under apartheid.
It can only be those who exclusively benefited under apartheid, and their stooges, who want to cling on to the ‘good old days’. Others have even went on to ‘build a makeshift country’ named Orania with its own flag and currency—something which the FF Plus tried to push for just before the elections in 1994—a Volkstaad.
For inequality, unemployment and poverty to end (economic conditions that mainly negatively affects the black majority), we have to radically change our approach in terms of economic transformation.
The security that was granted to mainly white communities in terms of property, wealth, inheritance and other defining features of white privilege during negotiations have to come to an end.
Many like Groenewald have been flippant in suggesting that the black condition in our country is as a result of failure of government. Others are as crude as suggesting that it is because black people are lazy.
According to him, the crisis at Eskom is the result of affirmative action and black economic empowerment policies. These will result in 500 white technicians losing their jobs at Eskom, obviously to be replaced by incompetent, unskilled black technicians.
He demands that they be scrapped, precisely because they are taking what the white volk have worked for so many years.
There are black companies in agriculture, transport, retail, mining, finance and other major sectors that have succeeded because acumen does not have to do with race, but a fair chance, the result of these two policies.
But hundreds of these, small and big, have been throttled by white monopolies that have enclosed the economy into the hands of a few.
We do not need an end to BEE and affirmative action, Groenewald; but radical policies that will redistribute land, wealth and the entire economy to the black majority.
We will forget apartheid the day you are willing to forego the wealth you amassed under it, and until then, we will call you out on racism until every root and fibre of apartheid have been cleansed off your soul.
* Buti Manamela is the Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation.