It cannot have been an easy Christmas for those politically displaced by the coming in of the Democratic Alliance-led administrations of Athol Trollip, Solly Msimanga and Herman Mashaba in the major metropolitan areas of South Africa.
Most people can adjust to a political demotion, but what does not adjust so easily is the level of one’s lifestyle.
Bond and car instalment defaults may have already been experienced by some since ANC losses in the 2016 municipal elections.
While we may not be sympathetic to those losing income obtained through unethical means, there is a much deeper crisis of values triggered by aspirational pressures that we must be able to understand and address.
Having grown up in a rural area, I remember a time when exploitative behaviour and crass materialism were frowned upon as anti-ubuntu. But I was born into a dying traditional moral order.
It has been a hallmark of South African culture since the first European sailor-colonists escaped the control of the Dutch East India Company by trekking inland and grabbing as much land as they could in an aggressive, capitalistic manner.
The soulless acquisitive spirit of South Africa was normalised in the diamond and gold mines, a spirit that Olive Schreiner lamented in her writings about Cecil John Rhodes.
Though this spirit of greed and acquisition is inherent in all colonising enterprise, it is sometimes offset by religion and traditionalism.
This we see in how a Calvinist moral ethos created a sense of moral outlook among Afrikaner nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s when they formed some of the major Afrikaner corporations such as Sanlam.
However, the Calvinist ethos of disciplined financial behaviour declined once Afrikaners began to ascend into the middle class in the 1960s, where they began to show the materialist tendencies of aspirational middle classes.
Now, in the ‘60s, the older Afrikaners might have been shocked at the flagrant displays of wealth of the new Afrikaner consumer classes, but by the 1970s and 1980s, white South Africans enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world, and it was obtained quite cheaply too.
Thus in the ‘70s and ‘80s, white middle-class life came to be normalised for whites. They worked, had cheap domestic assistance, job preference and a range of benefits that made the standard of life they were living appear quite ordinary to themselves.
Of course “standard white life” was not normal to the black majority, whose idea of the good life is best exemplified in South Africa by ordinary white middle-class life.
The ascendancy of black people up the class ladder in South Africa has thus always been a game of catching up to whatever whites have.
This is why, subconsciously, we never turned our attention to fixing township and rural schools. Instead, we created systems that preserved what are now Model C schools – the goal was to get into the white areas – these areas of our aspiration.
Those who could afford it moved their children into these aspirational Model C schools, and we bought houses in the suburbs and nice cars to drive in.
Yet we still had massive financial obligation to our families, and so began cycles of financial burden.
Township schools went into decline, and the scramble to afford exclusive schools intensified. Historically black universities went into decline, and so the further degradation of intergenerational black intellectual transfer.
In the 20 years of wielding political power, the ANC failed to understand how these aspirational dynamics put pressure on people, leading to a vicious cycle of corruption that ate up the movement.
But this is not a problem for the ANC, but for society as a whole, as we cannot deliver on the aspirational expectations that many hold.
As the economic squeeze tightens in 2017, black South Africans will need to think with visionary urgency by no longer focusing on catching up with whites, but on building an intergenerational economic vision.
Black society must redefine aspiration
Most people can adjust to a political demotion, but what does not adjust so easily is the level of one’s lifestyle.
Bond and car instalment defaults may have already been experienced by some since ANC losses in the 2016 municipal elections.
While we may not be sympathetic to those losing income obtained through unethical means, there is a much deeper crisis of values triggered by aspirational pressures that we must be able to understand and address.
Having grown up in a rural area, I remember a time when exploitative behaviour and crass materialism were frowned upon as anti-ubuntu. But I was born into a dying traditional moral order.
It has been a hallmark of South African culture since the first European sailor-colonists escaped the control of the Dutch East India Company by trekking inland and grabbing as much land as they could in an aggressive, capitalistic manner.
The soulless acquisitive spirit of South Africa was normalised in the diamond and gold mines, a spirit that Olive Schreiner lamented in her writings about Cecil John Rhodes.
Though this spirit of greed and acquisition is inherent in all colonising enterprise, it is sometimes offset by religion and traditionalism.
This we see in how a Calvinist moral ethos created a sense of moral outlook among Afrikaner nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s when they formed some of the major Afrikaner corporations such as Sanlam.
However, the Calvinist ethos of disciplined financial behaviour declined once Afrikaners began to ascend into the middle class in the 1960s, where they began to show the materialist tendencies of aspirational middle classes.
Now, in the ‘60s, the older Afrikaners might have been shocked at the flagrant displays of wealth of the new Afrikaner consumer classes, but by the 1970s and 1980s, white South Africans enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world, and it was obtained quite cheaply too.
Thus in the ‘70s and ‘80s, white middle-class life came to be normalised for whites. They worked, had cheap domestic assistance, job preference and a range of benefits that made the standard of life they were living appear quite ordinary to themselves.
Of course “standard white life” was not normal to the black majority, whose idea of the good life is best exemplified in South Africa by ordinary white middle-class life.
The ascendancy of black people up the class ladder in South Africa has thus always been a game of catching up to whatever whites have.
This is why, subconsciously, we never turned our attention to fixing township and rural schools. Instead, we created systems that preserved what are now Model C schools – the goal was to get into the white areas – these areas of our aspiration.
Those who could afford it moved their children into these aspirational Model C schools, and we bought houses in the suburbs and nice cars to drive in.
Yet we still had massive financial obligation to our families, and so began cycles of financial burden.
Township schools went into decline, and the scramble to afford exclusive schools intensified. Historically black universities went into decline, and so the further degradation of intergenerational black intellectual transfer.
In the 20 years of wielding political power, the ANC failed to understand how these aspirational dynamics put pressure on people, leading to a vicious cycle of corruption that ate up the movement.
But this is not a problem for the ANC, but for society as a whole, as we cannot deliver on the aspirational expectations that many hold.
As the economic squeeze tightens in 2017, black South Africans will need to think with visionary urgency by no longer focusing on catching up with whites, but on building an intergenerational economic vision.
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