The Colour of Our Future: Does race matter in post-apartheid South Africa?

By Nina G. Jablonski, Lawrence Blum, Steven Friedman and 6 more

South Africa is ready for a new vocabulary than can form the basis for a national consciousness which recognises racialised identities while affirming that, as human beings, we are much more than our racial, sexual, class, religious or national identities.
The Colour of Our Future makes a bold and ambitious contribution to the discourse on race. It addresses the tension between the promise of a post-racial society and the persistence of racialised identities in South Africa, which has historically played itself out in debates between the ‘I don’t see race’ of non-racialism and the ‘I’m proud to be black’ of black consciousness.
The chapters in this volume highlight the need for a race-transcendent vision that moves beyond ‘the festival of negatives’ embodied in concepts such as non-racialism, non-sexism, anti-colonialism and anti-apartheid. Steve Biko’s notion of a ‘joint culture’ is the scaffold on which this vision rests; it recognises that a race-transcendent society can only be built by acknowledging the constituent elements of South Africa’s EuroAfricanAsian heritage.
The distinguished authors in this volume have, over the past two decades, used the democratic space to insert into the public domain new conversations around the intersections of race and the economy, race and the state, race and the environment, race and ethnic difference, and race and higher education. Presented here is some of their most trenchant and yet still evolving thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781868149100

Nina G. Jablonski

Nina G. Jablonski is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Skin: A Natural History, (UC Press), and was named one of the first Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows for her efforts to improve the public understanding of skin color.

Book preview

THE COLOUR OF OUR FUTURE

DOES RACE MATTER IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA?

Edited by

Xolela Mangcu

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg, 2001

www.witspress.co.za

Compilation © Xolela Mangcu 2015

Chapters © Individual contributors 2015

Foreword © David Scott 2015

Published edition © Wits University Press 2015

First published 2015

978-1-86814-569-0 (print)

978-1-86814- 623-9 (PDF)

978-1-86814-910-0 (EPUB: North America, South America, China)

978-1-86814-911-7 (EPUB: Rest of the World)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

Edited by Inga Norenius

Proofread by Lisa Compton

Index by Clifford Perusset

Cover design by Michelle Staples

Typeset by Newgen

Printed by Paarl Media, South Africa

To the memory of Martin Bernal, who once said, memorably, ‘I am the enemy of purity’.

CONTENTS

FIGURES AND TABLES

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE

What Moving Beyond Race Can Actually Mean: Towards a Joint Culture

Xolela Mangcu

CHAPTER TWO

The Colour of Our Past and Present: The Evolution of Human Skin Pigmentation

Nina G Jablonski

CHAPTER THREE

Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States

Lawrence Blum

CHAPTER FOUR

The Janus Face of the Past: Preserving and Resisting South African Path Dependence

Steven Friedman

CHAPTER FIVE

How Black is the Future of Green in South Africa’s Urban Future?

Mark Swilling

CHAPTER SIX

Inequality in Democratic South Africa

Vusi Gumede

CHAPTER SEVEN

Interrogating the Concept and Dynamics of Race in Public Policy

Joel Netshitenzhe

CHAPTER EIGHT

Why I Am No Longer a Non-Racialist: Identity and Difference

Suren Pillay

CHAPTER NINE

Interrogating Transformation in South African Higher Education

Crain Soudien

CHAPTER TEN

The Black Interpreters and the Arch of History

Hlonipha Mokoena

NOTES

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 5.1:Class structure in Cape Town

Table 5.1:Household class structure in Cape Town

Table 6.1:Gini coefficient by population group, 1975–2011

Table 6.2:Human development and human poverty indices by population group, 2008 and 2010

Table 6.3:Estimates of annual per capita personal income by population group, 1917–2008

Table 7.1:Public opinion on race relations, 2006

Table 9.1:Gross higher education participation rates in 2005–2007 (%)

Table 9.2:Headcount enrolment and growth by race, 2000–2010

Table 9.3:UCT graduation rates, 2006–2009 (%)

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD

PARADOXICAL TIME

In his novel about the English peasant revolt of 1381, A Dream of John Ball (1888), the great nineteenth-century artist and socialist William Morris makes this observation about the past in the present: ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’ Disclosed in this condensed reflection is an important lesson about how we think – or should think – in a properly historical way. Evidently, the relationship between the past and the present, between winning and losing (political struggles, for example), between what we aim for and what we get, is not what we would expect from the perspective of a seamless, linear notion of causes and results. Discontinuities are embodied in the appearance of continuities, and continuities are often characterised by surprising discontinuities. What Morris suggests is that history, how the past relates to the present, should be thought of as paradoxical. Notably too, his insight has about it a tragic aura, in that it solicits from us a suspension of our progressivist expectations about the secure connection between the intentions of reasoned agency and the outcomes of plurally constituted historical action. And therefore what is entailed in thinking historically is an ongoing attunement to the non-synchronicity of pasts in the present. I’ve found myself returning again and again to this singular recognition.

Indeed, although nowhere explicit, Morris’s insight was constantly in the background of the thinking that went into my writing of Conscripts of Modernity. Part of the point of that book was to offer a historiographical intervention into the writing of present histories of the colonial past. Put it this way: a long struggle was waged against colonial domination that in some paradoxical fashion was both won and lost inasmuch as something new and important emerged into the world but at the price of preserving something old. CLR James’s legendary book The Black Jacobins was of course my ostensible object (structured as it was around the themes of anti-colonial revolution and black political self-determination), and the contrast between romance and tragedy as modes of historical emplotment the specific theoretical axis of my preoccupations. But the larger objective into which these were folded was that of rethinking and rewriting the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, as a way of contributing to unsettling the complacencies and sense of stalled political possibilities that afflict our time. It seemed to me that central to the narrative poetics of liberationist (including anti-colonial) self-consciousness was a way of linking a past of intolerable subjection through a present of possible action to a promised future of total overcoming. This of course was understandable, even desirable, given the history of our victimisation and our natural search for the simple vindication of our humanity. But what if the futures imagined by the figuration of that past had now been effectively foreclosed by both political and conceptual transformations? What were we now to do with the concepts that had so naturally organised our political dreams of futures without the subjugations (racial and otherwise) derived from our colonial experience? This is why the idea of a ‘problem-space’ of questions and answers (which I formulated by way of the work of RG Collingwood and Quentin Skinner) seemed to me such a productive way of thinking the distinctive historicities of what Stuart Hall might have called successive ‘conjunctures’. What distinguishes one problem-space from another, as I see it, is less the prevailing answers offered for various conundrums than the assumptions that shape their underlying questions. Answers are always linked conceptually to more or less implicit questions. And therefore, to understand the present as a conjuncture, part of what is necessary is to try to discern, to excavate, the distinctive questions that constitute and orient it.

The essays in The Colour of Our Future seek, separately and together, to take the measure of the racial present in contemporary South Africa – not an easy undertaking in any circumstance. It is by now uncontroversial to say that the story of the making of the new/democratic/post-apartheid South Africa is often told as a narrative of the heroic struggle to overcome the entrenched and vicious racial past and to found a constitutional republic based on the refusal of racial identifications and exclusions. Central to this motivated narrative (one that gradually became the hegemonic if never uncontested one over the course of hard and sometimes bitter rivalries) was the demand to reject racial and ethnic self-identification as being in implicit collusion with the classificatory and administrative practices of the apartheid state. Race and ethnic consciousness were therefore frowned upon as morally suspect and politically retrograde. A principled ‘non-racialism’ had become the oppositional norm, perhaps even the politically correct orthodoxy. But in the conjuncture of post-apartheid South Africa, as the novelty of procedural democracy recedes and the pleasures and conceits of white privilege (not to mention the economic structures that sustain it) recognisably prevail in barely diminished form, it is no longer as clear as it once seemingly was that the great doctrine of ‘non-racialism’ is self-evidently the best way to engage and combat the scourge of individual and institutional racism.

This is the conundrum that challenges the conceptual-political resources of the writers you are about to read. In various ways, and taking up a number of thematic directions and preoccupations, they are asking questions such as the following: What is the problem-space about race and ethnicity in contemporary South Africa? What are the institutional and discursive structures through which the powers of racial and ethnic privilege and hierarchy disclose and reinvent and reinforce themselves? What are the practices and technologies by which certain kinds of raced and ethnic experience are silenced or displaced or disavowed, and others tacitly guaranteed and normalised? How does one even speak – that is to say, name – race and ethnicity in a supposedly post-racialised world? And how does all this contrast with earlier moments in the recent history of modern South Africa? To my mind, these questions are at once salient and urgent because (with William Morris) they attune us to an alert responsiveness to historical contingency and paradox. As all the writers in this volume cogently suggest in their diverse ways, unless we are able to deconstruct-reconstruct the conceptual-political story of race and ethnicity (a project that entails denormalising the progressivist narrative in which the virtues of ‘non-race’ carry out a constitutive and authoritative function), we are not likely to come to terms with the uncanny persistence of race and ethnicity in the various registers and dimensions of contemporary South African experience.

David Scott

PREFACE

No single concept has shaped the modern world quite like ‘race’ or, more directly, colonial racism. Francisco López de Gómara described Columbus’s ‘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)’.¹ Joseph Leo Koerner described Pedro Álvares Cabral’s ‘discovery’ of the Tupinambá off the coast of Brazil a decade later as an ‘epochal event’.² According to Biodun Jeyifo, colonialism was ‘perhaps the single most important historical force in the making and unmaking of the modern world’,³ while Ira Katznelson notes that ‘the conquest, expulsion, and enslavement engendered by colonialism made of all the world a community of Jews’.⁴ The distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm has dubbed the last four hundred years as the era of ‘Euromegalomania’.⁵

Europe’s expansion into the New World was carried out initially by the Portuguese and the Spanish, but this role soon passed to what Georges Lefebvre described as ‘England, the mistress of the seas . . . the only nation capable of imposing the authority of the white man’.⁶ 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 wield 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.’⁷ Koerner argues the same point when he notes that ‘difference within an entity [thus] was repressed in favor of difference between entities.’⁸

Colonial racism in South Africa was ‘founded’ on these ‘pseudo-aristocratic’ pretensions. 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.⁹

In time, and after much internal strife, including a bloody war, Europe’s unlikely kith and kin would find common cause around the one thing that separated them from the natives – skin colour. 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.

But unlike other parts of Africa, where the metropole administered the colony from a distance, colonial racism in South Africa had a particular ferocity because the proximity of coloniser and colonised was seen as an existential threat. The ever-inventive British came up with racial segregation to make that coexistence tolerable. It was an invention that was enforced with the most vicious 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.’¹⁰ The Afrikaners would not be any kinder when they finally replaced segregation with the ideology of apartheid. 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 African National Congress. ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, Milan Kundera once wrote, rather memorably.¹¹

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.¹² 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 liberation movements to South Africa’s political morality, and to 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.¹³

However, the ‘critique of racial rule’ also led to the symmetric logic that apartheid racialism was to be replaced by the ideology of non-racialism. But significant sections of the liberation movement were not entirely convinced by this logic, even though it is largely taken to have been the normative consensus of the struggle against apartheid. The truth is that it never was. Steve Biko was one of the foremost critics – though certainly not the first – of non-racialism, or at least that aspect which 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. Their agents are ever present among us telling us that it is immoral to withdraw into a cocoon, that dialogue is the answer to our problem and that it is unfortunate that there is white racism in some quarters but that you must understand that things are changing.¹⁴

Now our fears of the dangers of non-racialism are not as pronounced as those expressed by Biko, but they are significant enough for a number of contributors in this volume to ask whether the concept should not be revisited, or whether there are other, more meaningful ways of moving beyond race. To paraphrase Barack Obama, it might well be that the path beyond race is not through avoidance but what Barack Obama called working through race: ‘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 African 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.¹⁵

I cannot imagine a more appropriate message for black and white South Africans alike. I am not exactly sure what Wits University Press’s Veronica Klipp expected when she asked me to tackle this thorny issue four years ago – her patience in this regard is astounding. Since then this book has taken many turns, and met dead ends. Some of the chapters in this volume were written a good few years ago – the patience of the authors is just as astounding. And so here we are with a collection by South Africa’s leading thinkers for many decades on questions of race and social justice. The brief I gave them was not dissimilar from what Barack Obama lays out above – which is not so much to recount the history of racial oppression but to ask whether the concepts we used in fighting that oppression hinder or help processes of racial transformation in contemporary South Africa. The essays are therefore an exercise – individually and collectively – in conceptual ground-clearing, of repudiation and affirmation, of turning upside down things we have held to be true. They constitute a process of intellectual detoxification, if you like. It is a process that came out of a realisation that the concept of non-racialism has come to take on a different meaning in post-apartheid South Africa, used more now to defend than to fight racial inequality. Concepts such as Black Consciousness cannot be interpreted in the same way that Biko formulated them almost fifty years ago. I have written elsewhere about the need for ‘consciousness of blackness’ as a project for South Africans of all races. This is a call, also not dissimilar from Barack Obama’s above, for black people to embrace their past without being victims of it, and for white people to acknowledge the truth of the past as the only way to healing in the present and the future.

One of the blessings of working at a university is the students who come through one’s door. One of those students, Jonathan Schoots, handed me David Scott’s book Conscripts of Modernity. That singular act delayed this book immeasurably as I persuaded and sometimes cajoled some of the authors to take his idea of the ‘problem-space’ into consideration as they wrote their chapters. Scott defines the problem-space as the ‘ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs’. After all, he writes, ‘problems are not timeless and do not have everlasting shapes. In new historical conditions old questions may lose their salience . . . and make the old answers that once attached to them to appear lifeless, quaint, not so much wrong as irrelevant.’¹⁶ And I am of course particularly delighted that he has written the Foreword for this book. That makes all the twists and turns, the dead ends and the humps more than worth the while. But above all, it is Roshan Cader who has steered this ship to where it is now. How she does it is beyond my understanding. Needless to say, without the authors there would be no book. Thank you all.

BOOK OUTLINE

In Chapter 1, I expand on ‘moving beyond race meaningfully’ – within the overall frame of race transcendence I have outlined – as a simultaneous process of affirming one’s identity while reaching out to build what Biko called the ‘joint culture’ of