Tackle our giants head on

No single concept has shaped the modern world quite like “race” or, more directly,   colonial racism.Francisco Lopez de Gomara described  Columbus’ “discovery” of  the Americas as “the greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation of and death of Him who created it)”.

Joseph Leo Koerner described  Pedro Alvares Cabral’s “discovery” of the Tupinamba off the coast of Brazil a decade later  as an  “epochal event”.

According to Biodun Jeyifo, colonialism was “perhaps the single most important historical force in the making and unmaking of the modern world”, while Ira Katznelson notes that “the conquest, expulsion, and enslavement engendered by colonialism made of all the world a community of Jews”.

The distinguished historian, Eric Hobsbawm,  has dubbed the past   400 years as the era of “Euromegalomania”.

Europe’s expansion extension to the New World was carried out initially by the Portuguese and the Spanish but this role soon passed to what George Lefebvre described  as “England, the mistress of the seas… the only nation capable of imposing the authority of the white man”.

However, as  British – and French, Belgian and German –  dominion over  the colonies loosened, a new age was set upon the world.

Henry Luce charitably called it the American Century, and Cornel West critically christened it as the Age of  American Empire.

What do these brief accounts of colonial racism and empire have to do with a discussion of race in South Africa?

To maintain order at home, colonial powers exported their lower classes to the new found colonies, where they would be masters of their own realms. Or as Benedict Anderson puts it, “colonial racism was a major element in that conception of Empire which attempted to weld dynastic legitimacy and national community. It did so by generating a principle of innate inherited superiority… conveying the idea that if, say, English lords were superior to other Englishmen, no matter: these other Englishmen were no less superior to the subjected natives”.

Koerner argues the same point when he notes that “difference within an entity was repressed in favour of difference  between entities”.

Colonial racism in South Africa was established by lower class Europeans who suddenly found in dark-skinned people a “species” they could describe as below themselves.

From the early Christian era they had all inherited the  Manichean distinctions of good and evil, lightness and darkness, and superimposed it on skin colour.

Lighter skin stood for the noble and darker skin for the ignoble.

To be sure, colonialism was also an adventure for some members of the upper classes. As  Lefebvre notes, “colonial administrators, who descended from the nobility, satisfied their yearnings for action by spontaneously pushing for further conquests… and the Cape was taken from the Dutch”,  if mainly because the British needed an anchorage on the Cape Coast.

In time, and after much internal strife, including a bloody war called the Anglo-Boer war  but properly understood as the South African war – black people were just as invested in the outcome of the war –  Europe’s unlikely kith and kin found common cause around the one thing that separated them from the natives – skin colour.

Unlike other parts of Africa, where the metropole administered the colony from a distance, colonial racism in South Africa assumed a particular ferocity because the proximity of coloniser and colonised was an existential threat.

The ever-inventive British came up with racial segregation to make that co-existence tolerable.

It was an invention that was enforced with utter ruthlessness.  According to Noel Mostert, the British set out to “impose their language, their currency, their legal system and their political concepts and to bring the single greatest alteration since the Dutch East India Company’s sanction of permanent settlers in 1657”.

In devising apartheid, the Afrikaners learned from British segregationist policies devised by the likes of Cecil John Rhodes. The goal of apartheid, declared one Connie Mulder, was to make South Africa a whites-only country.

The international community was roused enough to declare this absurdity a crime against humanity, and to isolate South Africa through a combination of boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions.

The struggles that black people fought to resist these processes of purification of their own country are now legend, although they still have to be told in all of their variety and complexity.

South Africa’s historical memory is undermined not only by the denial of the gruesomeness of its history by those who benefited from it, but also by the one-sided telling of the struggle for freedom by the ruling ANC. There were way too many movements to reduce that struggle to just one organisation.

Had it not been for the black consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the ANC would most likely never have found footing in the country again.

The movement replenished it with young cadres fleeing from the banning of black consciousness organisations and the killing of Steve Biko in 1977.

As Milan Kundera once wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

Kundera’s insight was part of the inspiration for my earlier book, Becoming Worthy Ancestors, which sought, among other things, to restore to the historical archive the contributions of individuals such as Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe.

The proper and comprehensive telling of the South African liberation history (ies) remains unfinished business.

Nonetheless, we are in a position to concur with Achille Mbembe’s observations about the collective contribution of these movements to South Africa’s political morality, and that of the world at large:  “Race has been a powerful, if destructive, force in the making of the modern world. It has separated masters from slaves, colonisers from the colonised, settlers from natives, rulers from their subjects.

“In response, historical struggles against racism and white supremacy have contributed to a deepening of the key normative pillars of the modern international order.

“Various rights, including the right to self-determination, have been universalised. So have core concepts of modern life such as freedom and justice, the equality of all human beings, or the belief that political power is meant to protect human life. The persistent conviction that democracy is the best form of the realisation of human freedom is owed in no small way, to the relentless critique of racial rule by abolitionist, anti-colonial and civil rights movements.”

Unfortunately, the “critique of racial rule” also led to the symmetric logic that presented non-racialism as the alternative to apartheid. This was assumed to be the normative consensus in the liberation movement despite the fact that non-racialism only came to the fore  in the 1980s.

It was only in 1985 – a mere five years before being unbanned – that the ANC allowed membership to whites.

In addition, significant sections of the liberation movement were not entirely convinced by the logic of non-racialism. Biko was one of the foremost critics – and certainly not the first –  of non-racialism, or at least that aspect of non-racialism that urged us to look beyond our racial identities “so while we progressively lose ourselves in a world of colourlessness and amorphous common humanity, whites are deriving pleasure and security in entrenching white racism and further exploiting the minds and bodies of unsuspecting black masses”.

In today’s South Africa our critique of non-racialism is not as pronounced as that expressed by Biko. However, there is a sense that non-racialism is used as an ideology of denial and non-racial inequality.

We should not talk about race, the previous beneficiaries say, as a way of avoiding difficult discussions about privilege. But this is short-term thinking because it fails to prepare our children for a future in which they can comfortably talk about the past in understandable language.

And so the intellectuals I have gathered in this book – from Suren Pillay to Joel Netshitenze – are asking serious questions about  whether this is not the time to revisit the concept of non-racialism.

They are asking whether there are no other concepts that can help  South Africans meaningfully beyond race.

I personally believe that anti-racism is one concept that can unite black and white people in a conversation about what it would take to create a common humanity.

However, to paraphrase Barack Obama, it might well be that the path beyond race is not through its avoidance, but by working through it.

Speaking about race in the United States, Obama noted: “We do not need to recite here, the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist between the African American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

Obama thus urged black Americans to “embrace the burdens of our past without being the victims of our past”.

For white Americans, he continued, this meant “acknowledging that what ails the African American community is not simply in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination, and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past, are real and must be addressed, not just with words but with deeds, by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system;  by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”

We will win the struggle against racism, secure a peaceful future for our children and reach for a common humanity when we stop avoiding race and start working through it instead.

The Colour of Our Future – Does Race Matter in Post-Apartheid South Africa? (Wits University Press) is available from good bookstores nationwide