The ties that blind, and why I’m staying put

The biggest problem facing South Africa isn’t government corruption or ineptitude. It isn’t ethnic chauvinism either, or the wretched triumvirate of poverty, inequality, and unemployment. Those things all weigh heavily, to be sure, but the single greatest threat to our collective well-being is a failure of understanding and imagination. Our politics is debased, and our economy sclerotic, but at a deeper level than both, we are suffering from a twisted self-conception; a warped idea of what kind of country we are, and what we’re capable of becoming.

We think – our pundits tell us – that we’re living in a mid-brow nation state, diminished by generations of bad governance. But that’s grandly misconceived. As well as unfair. And utterly uninspiring.

The origin of this enduring, enervating delusion lies in four storied treaties.

The first was signed in Westphalia, in 1648, bringing an end to a terrible 30-year war and laying the basis for the modern-day nation state. The second was also concluded in – and for – Europe, this time in Berlin, in 1884, parcelling up Africa in a way that would damn its majority populace to permanent penury. The third deal was the one imposed on the Afrikaner republics at Vereeniging, in 1902, completing the annexation of the region’s mineral wealth to Britain, and effectively creating the South African Union. And finally, there was Kempton Park, in 1993, bringing European style democracy to a country for which it was wholly unsuited. The latter, tellingly, was the first of the four at which black people had a presence at the table.

Lies on maps

What might make the argument that follows feel anti-intuitive is the fact that pretty much all of us, in South Africa and everywhere else, have been reared in the logic and the idiom of Westphalian “countryhood”. We have been taught, for generations, to believe in the inviolability, the sanctity, of national borders, to the point where that idea has become normative and therefore unexamined.

Countries are fictions of course, but that’s not to say they lack value or legitimacy. To the contrary, the benefits of belonging to such entities can be considerable and in the majority of cases, the bulk of the citizenry are comfortable with their status as subjects. They enjoy the protections provided by the security forces; they benefit from public goods like schools, hospitals, and transport infrastructure; and layered on top of all that there is the shared sense of involvement, meaning, and purpose. We’re not all patriots, let alone jingoists, but rare is the person who doesn’t experience at least some sense of national belonging.

This is an entirely uncontroversial point. And my quarrel here is in any event not with nation states as such, nor with the borders that delineate them. Rather it’s with the blithe assumption – or pretence – that all such entities are equal. I’m not arguing for an end to all borders and for true universalism, though that would be nice, one day. I’m simply pointing to the fact that there are two broad categories that are plainly discernible: countries that make sense, on balance, and those that do not. To apply the same frame of moral reference to, say, Germany and Malawi, is to conjure Anatole France’s withering observation that, “The law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”.

It’s not the disparity in wealth that’s implicated here, though that matters a lot, of course. There cannot but be a meaningful correlation between levels of prosperity and education on the one hand, and democratic viability on the other. But the dynamic I’m pointing to is another one. It involves what the great 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill called “fellow feeling”.

Most Germans today can understand one another and relate to one another, and, if asked, they would choose to stay part of the existing federation. The same cannot be said though of the 13 different ethnic groups that were thrown together to make Nyasaland – the precursor to modern-day Malawi. When Germany was unified in the mid-1800s, there was buy-in from the leaders of the Teutons, the Franks, the Huns, and the rest, if not, universally, from their subjects. When Nyasaland was invented in 1884, on the other hand – in Berlin as it happened – it wasn’t only the demos that was ignored, but demography too. The legacy of colonialism wasn’t just the destruction of traditional social institutions and underdevelopment, it was also the creation of modern institutions that were virtually guaranteed to fail.

Not to put too fine a point on it: most of the countries in Europe, and in Asia, the Americas, and Australasia, belong in the “okay” category, but virtually all of the 54 in Africa don’t. They are routinely described as nations by outsiders and by their own political leaders, but in reality, they are nothing of the sort. Not by history or design, not by race or ethnicity, and not by language or culture. Africa’s borders were made in Europe, for Europe, and it shows, abundantly. The states they define aren’t just abstractions, like all such entities, but absurdities. Judging them against ostensibly universal democratic standards adds insult to the injury, despair to the destruction.

The limits of democracy

The nub of the problem was identified by Mill in his seminal treatise “On Representative Government”. 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”.

Writing in the mid 19th century, Mill doubled down on this basic idea in considering a situation where two different national groups might be brought together into a single polity. If the group that was “the superior in civilisation” were to prevail, by dint of numbers, that would be okay, but if the converse were true – as with the absorption of ancient Greece by Macedonia – this would be “a sheer mischief to the human race and one which civilised humanity with one accord should rise in arms to prevent”.

Today, needless to say – and mercifully – no-one uses language like that. It doesn’t follow though that Mill’s challenge is itself superannuated or invalid. Yes there is encouragement to be drawn from post-war moves towards multiculturalism, especially – and somewhat ironically – in Western Europe. But there’s little in the past 160 years of history to found in the belief, or even the serious hope, that ethnicity – or other forms of us-versus-them-ism – is waning as a fundamental force in human political affairs.

Despite the best efforts of progressive academics, writers, artists, and politicians everywhere, it appears that most ordinary people remain resolutely tribal. Actual chauvinism has mostly gone underground after the horrors of World War II but consider the real-world data from the past 50 years or so.

On the “coming together” side, there was the end of apartheid in South Africa and the election of a black president in America. On the “moving apart” side, sadly, the flow of evidence has been fairly overwhelming: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Bosnia; Burundi; Belfast; Brexit; Croatia; Czechoslovakia; Cyprus; Catalonia; Crimea; and so on.

My counsel, mind you, isn’t one of despair, let alone the active embrace of division as a solution. I think there’s still hope for non-racialism, in the longish term, as long as we give up the pretence that it is either easily achieved or morally irresistible.

I confess I plugged this line myself through the 1970s and 1980s, rubbishing the concept of group rights and innate group loyalty at every turn, but that was in a radically different context. That was when PW Botha was still president and apartheid still official policy. “Group-based politics” was a euphemism for the extension of white rule and so we, pro-democracy activists, sneered at its every mention. It felt right back then, imperative even, but so much has changed in the interim. Today, with due respect for my dreamer friends, it’s past time to bury the idea that ethnicity can simply be willed away. Any more than wealth can be willed into being.

We need to hold on to the ideal, and to plug away at winning more people to join the universalist project. But do we really have to carry on insisting, with Marx, that all societal forces other than class are “merely superstructural” or the result of “false consciousness”?

American exceptionalism?

Part of the difficulty here is perspectival. The lead in the post-war, race-reimagining process was taken by the American intelligentsia, and while there’s no obvious reason to doubt the bona fides of those involved or their progressive credentials, there were at least four ways in which their viewpoint was both atypical and unhelpful.

First, they spoke from within, if not for, the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth. Given the observable correlation between mass prosperity and democratic success, the United States experience defies useful comparison with anywhere in the third world.

Second, if one takes a long-range historical view, America is unquestionably the worst offender of all in terms of racist policy and practice. The advances made since the 1950s have been fairly impressive, but consider the amount of guilt in the collective psyche on account of the slave trade; the Native American genocide; the Jim Crow laws; and the Ku Klux Klan era, when 15% of white adults supported said Nazi-like outfit. Of course, those were very different times, with very different collective sensibilities, but even when measured against contemporaneous mores, the Yanks don’t come out at all well. I’ve read that Hitler, as Führer, sent an observer to study the US approach to race relations and the man came back saying “their approach is just too extreme”, or words to that effect.

Third, the American national ethos has always been radically individualistic in terms of both the implicit rules of economic activity and the explicit rules of law. Progressive academics may be opposed to capitalism and the “Washington consensus”, but that doesn’t make them collectivists, other than in respect of their economic policy preferences. Black Americans were granted rights by degrees, over the course of a century, but their African-ness – or their Yoruba-ness or Ibo-ness or whatever-ness – was by then comprehensively extinguished. The point being that, having been thus “deracinated”, they could much more easily be fitted into the dominant culture.

Fourth, and most pertinently for present purposes, America’s population numbers were such that the gains made through the Civil Rights Movement didn’t threaten the white-dominated status quo. The judgment in Brown v The Board of Education, which was crucial to what followed, was predicated on the principle of equality before the law; the one that is absolutely central to the democratic, or liberal democratic, model. That was a good, brave, significant decision, in context, but that’s not to say it’s universally applicable. To the contrary, it’s of highly questionable value at best in cases where upholding that same foundational principle collides directly with the then-applicable socio-political realities.

Apartness 2.0

I was born in 1957, which was round about the time that racism got outlawed. It was only a year later that Ghana became the first (black) African independent “nation”, but within a decade, there were 40 others, and any suggestion that people of different races were intrinsically different from one another, or incompatible, was completely anathema, in good society.

This was an extraordinary – and salutary – inversion of the pre-existing order. Of the paternalism – at best – that had characterised the colonial era. And it was also a change that enabled the European powers to extricate themselves from their assumed responsibilities towards their African “subjects” without any demand for reparations, or any apparent shame. The “liberated” countries all got colourful flags, two-bit airports, and seats in the General Assembly, but with jerry-built infrastructure and institutions, and tiny educated elites, their chances of enduring success were pretty close to zero.

South Africa – having been the one white settler society where the indigenous population had been subjugated rather than decimated – was the only country to swim against this non-racial tide. Separate development was never going to sell internationally, no matter how fairly it was applied, but there’s no denying that DF Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd et al made a bad situation a whole lot worse. It was math that drove them more than misanthropy – universal enfranchisement meant a certain loss of power – but the way they doubled down on vulgar policies of exclusion, segregation, and diminution was both unnecessary and profoundly destructive.

This is not a plaint for exculpation, let alone an active commendation of either colonialism or its rogue spawn apartheid. What FW De Klerk authored in 1990 was truly extraordinary – without precedent in human history, I think – but the three and a half centuries of white rule was, by modern lights, a massive, though not unqualified, misadventure.

Here’s the nub of the matter though. We can’t will away the past, but we certainly can reframe it. And, without doing a disservice to either truth or reason, we can make a strong case for elevating South Africa a long way up the all-time geopolitical morality chart. It’s hard to get a grip on what exactly it is that we’re talking about – there was no actual country till 1909, and Lesotho is an enduring wrinkle – but at most points in time, we’ve been moving forward as a collective rather than backwards. This despite the most un-propitious circumstances imaginable.

Separate and unequal

The end of apartheid and of the two great 20th century experiments in Marxism threw the world academy into a giant philosophical funk. Some on the right misread the moment as auguring the final triumph of liberal democracy, but it was on the left where the fallout was especially keenly felt. Losing a moral lodestar is terribly unsettling; losing two in quick succession is the stuff of derangement.

The progressive intelligentsia has since recovered some of its prior composure, and conviction, on the back of the “great recession” and of global warming. This we see in the resumed assaults on the failings, crimes, and contradictions of capitalist economics. But it’s floundering more than ever in terms of its other primary preoccupation, that being the one regarding race and its various proxies.

The problem is partly situational and partly epistemological. Human history itself has not played out the way it was supposed to, according to Marxist theory, over the course of the past 30 years. And it’s not just the working classes who have failed to honour their grand historical vocation, but also an element within the academy itself.

The abandonment of the Verwoerdian divide-and-rule project should have been a moment of unqualified joy and vindication for progressives. In the event though, the ink was barely dry on the edict to end “separate development” when Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia fractured into a dozen or so ethnically exclusive statelets. The terminology used was “self-determination”, but there’s no getting away from the fact that this was the Balkans re-Balkanising; the Eastern part of Europe giving the finger to the notion that tribalism was a thing of the past.

No-one inside Harvard, Oxford, or the Sorbonne had the temerity to register the irony, but there was worse yet to come. The dismemberment of the two most credible members of the Eastern Bloc was a setback for internationalism, and cost 140 000 (Slavic) lives. In 1994 however, just after Nelson Mandela acceded to the presidency of the “rainbow nation”, close to a million Rwandan Tutsis were hacked to death, by their Hutu fellow citizens, in the space of three apocalyptic weeks. The left blamed colonialism, aptly. The right blamed tribalism, aptly too. No-one of consequence blamed cartographers.

Critical race theories (CRT)

The practical travails of the past 30 years have been accompanied by a break from the non-racial orthodoxy within Western (mainly American) academic institutions. Where Marxists have held resolutely to the view that class analysis explains everything, critical studies scholars began to posit that there’s something more in play that dialectical materialism doesn’t adequately register. “Whiteness” is the shorthand for this phenomenon in the US, and the hypothesis is that it’s so deeply embedded in the societal set up as to go entirely or largely unnoticed. The word “normative” is often used as the descriptor and what that neatly conveys is the idea – the truth, surely – that there is something deeper than laws and other rules of behaviour that is operative in (all) human societies. This doesn’t mean that all those in the dominant group are necessarily prejudiced against minorities, wittingly or otherwise, but what it does mean is that the norms of that group are embedded in the culture, in the moral codes and in the unwritten rules of distributive justice. It might be going too far to say, with those in the 1619 Project, that anti-black racism is central to the American DNA, but who can doubt that the pro-white – and pro male – biases and predilections of the founding fathers, and their descendants, are woven into it meaningfully.

This critique has an interesting antecedent in a work that was published in Europe in 1862, the year in which Abraham Lincoln issued the decree that abolished slavery in America. Derrick Bell and other CRT theorists might not recognise – or welcome – the parallel, but there’s value to be had, for progressives of all kinds, in reading Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem.

Hess was a German philosopher and activist who worked collaboratively with Karl Marx and who retained a lifelong commitment to socialism. He however came over time to believe in the idea of a Jewish homeland – as the only viable response to ongoing European persecution – and is best known for the aphorism “class is the secondary struggle: the race struggle is primary”. The specifics of anti-Jewish racism in Europe and of anti-black racism in America are very different, but then all I’m trying to highlight here is that the notion of a progressive embrace of racial or ethnic particularity, and separateness, has a long and respectable pedigree.

White lines

Good borders don’t guarantee good outcomes: enduring societal success depends also on factors like leadership, discipline, ingenuity, and luck. Bad borders, however, are a virtual guarantee of bad outcomes – and the borders that were imposed on Africa were uniformly bad. There are long overdue engagements going on inside America about reparations for slavery. These should be extended to include those countries, or communities, which were ravaged by the loss of many of their best people, and also by colonial depredations more generally.

That’s about making good for past wrongs. Even more important though is a thoroughgoing re-examination of present assumptions about borders and their ramifications. Here are a few specific topics that could make for instructive and useful discussion:

• Suppose there was a country which, courtesy of historic happenstance, was home to two groups of people who self-identified as, respectively, As and Bs. The As were mostly dark-skinned, X-speaking, liberal-minded secularists while the Bs were lighter-skinned, spoke Y, and were staunchly religious conservatives. Assuming the two groups were more or less equal in size, what would the right or best answer be to the question whether a democratic dispensation was viable, or tenable?
• What would the point be of a general election in Cyprus?
• What’s wrong, on principle, with Orania?
• Having considered regard for CRT, is there not a compelling case to be made for a phased, methodical takeover by black Americans of three or four contiguous, well-endowed states, with a view to possible secession from the union (or special status within it)?
• Why is Lesotho an independent sovereign state? Why was it referenced expressly in the South African Freedom Charter? How does it differ, conceptually, from the Bantustan archetype? And how, if one follows the logic of the nation state, does one justify South Africa continuing to host tens of thousands of its citizens as “gastarbeiters”, given our unemployment crisis?

So where to?

The ending of apartheid was celebrated, especially among progressives, as a triumph of freedom over repression, of humanism over racism, of goodness over evil. It was all of those things, to be fair, but it was also something else. What black South Africans got in 1994 was the full raft of civil rights that had been denied them previously, but, unlike their counterparts in America, they also got temporal power.

Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King both used to speak, lyrically, of the coming of an age where a person’s life outcomes would be determined by the content of their character alone; code for a society which was no longer characterised by the supremacy of whites and of whiteness. Fifty years down the line, where King’s grandchildren remain part of a beleaguered and largely powerless minority, the descendants of Mandela, and their extended kin, are in charge of every branch of the South African state. A standard refrain of the staunch and priggish left is that “nothing has really changed” since 1990, but this betrays a staggering blindness to the true nature of sovereign democratic authority. It’s true that most black people remain poor, and that most of those still seriously rich are white, but against this:

• Law-making power is now squarely in the hands of a government that is staffed predominantly by people of colour and that is elected by (and accountable to) a not-white majority populace;
• In terms of rights and of dignity, the contrast with what went before is enormous. And yes that matters a lot, outside of sociology and political science faculty rooms;
• The (much maligned) ANC government has delivered up more than three million housing units as well as free secondary education and largely free primary healthcare;
• More than a million people of colour are now employed in the civil service, many of them highly paid and in roles previously reserved for whites;
• In terms of culture and iconography, whiteness has been fairly comprehensively routed (as well as denigrated and defunded);
• As evidenced by ongoing migrant flows, the country remains a magnet for millions of people from the rest of the continent (this a measure of the contrast in mass prosperity, and perceived prospects); and
• While (too) many will be disappointed that democracy has not delivered material comfort, their talented children have opportunities for advancement, in multiple realms, that they themselves could only dream of. Not to mention those who have already benefited from a range of economic-redress measures.

South Africa is a radically transformed country already, in a way that America isn’t. You wouldn’t think that though to gauge from the writings of the local intelligentsia. I’m not sure whether it’s Oxbridge-awe, or apartheid-addiction, or whatever, but the fact is that this highly-privileged cohort is doing all of us a colossal disservice. By continually peddling the “no-change” meme, along with its two companions, namely, “De Klerk had no choice” and “There’s no upside to colonialism, white settlement, or capitalism” they are blocking our (best and maybe only) path to collective redemption.

History dealt us a bad hand – a succession of bad hands – but the very fact that we have been getting by for so many years, and getting along, mostly, is the first reason for my optimism. The natural inference is that those on all sides are cognisant of how close we are to the (race war) abyss, and that this discourages them from taking up extreme or confrontational positions. Black South Africans, in particular, have shown remarkable grace and forbearance; mindful, perhaps, of the travails of the rest of the continent, and of the statistical over-representation of whites among the best educated and most experientially advantaged.

The main reason I’m staying, however, is that I think that most people here will recognise, sooner or later, that we’re involved in something wholly extraordinary. That the 60 million of us who chanced to be born in this (beautiful, bountiful, and temperate) land are participants in a giant-scale, real-life experiment in the practicalities of world government, or of true multiculturalism. That the very impossibility of harmony in theory can provide the platform for harmony in action. That awareness of our myriad divisions can inspire us to exemplary ubuntu-ness.

The current default framing, birthed abroad, in guilt-laced indignation, is a recipe for decay or destruction, for regression or mayhem. “There was special malice here, and nothing of merit” is a mantra calculated to drive the poor to entitled plunder, and the skilled to enervated Perth. We need to put it to bed, once and for all.

#I’m-staying-I’m-sorry-and-I’m-willing-to-share

• Glen Heneck is a Cape Town based lawyer-cum-businessman and occasional OpEd writer. He is also the vice-chairperson of Cape SA Jewish Board of Deputies.