Watching the violence that greeted the antiracism protests outside Brackenfell High School in Cape Town this week was a particularly painful and unnerving experience; not unlike watching the pus from an open wound as it festered before our very eyes.
For those who still remember the state of emergency in the 1980s, the sight of a masked white man beating a black woman with a baseball bat could only have caused the blood to curdle.
Despite this deep discomfort, I remain of the firm belief that we should look such incidents in the eye and ask ourselves what they mean about the state of race relations and the elusive state of “social cohesion” in SA today.
Indeed, we have a duty to maintain an open and honest conversation about race and racism as our country continues to reel from the effects of racial discrimination under apartheid and colonialism.
It is now common cause that in the 1990s our political leaders’ urgent need to secure the peace amid violence and massacres from Bhisho to Umlazi and Boipatong resulted in the bigger complexities of race relations in postapartheid SA being papered over, perhaps unintentionally.
This is what young people have for some time referred to as “rainbowism” — an ideology linked to the idea of the Rainbow Nation that implies peace is more important than critical engagement with the continued drivers of racial disparity, inequality and disaffection in our society. We know better today than to gloss over these issues in the name of a unity that lacks deep roots.
I am less interested, however, in racial discourse becoming a tool with which political parties are able to pit South Africans against one another in order to guarantee themselves angry, fearful and divided constituents and voters from one election to the next. Racial disaffection as a tool for political division is a dangerous thing indeed.
After over a decade of working to build a political discourse and a level of engagement in SA that cuts across racial groups and focuses instead on whether the state has the capacity to deliver to citizens across demographics, it would be a grand tragedy if we found ourselves going into the 2021 local government polls and 2024 general elections faced with political choices based entirely on race and ethnicity.
To be sure, even those political organisations that claim to want to do away with the saliency of race in public policy are themselves peddling a narrative designed to win back “lost” votes from a fearful white right wing — making those very policies an appeal to racial identity politics.
The EFF has become the de facto voice of disaffected black South Africans who are fed up with systemic racism getting less attention than it deserves.
The other opposition parties represented in parliament — despite having world-class legislators and public leaders — are on some level proxies for a particular regional, ethnic or racial grouping.
And when pushed, these parties will retreat to their racial laagers in favour of securing an ethnic voter base of “guaranteed” votes.
Under these circumstances, we are one or two elections away from the political map in SA becoming little more than a racial census.
Some organisations will want things this way; having a guaranteed ethnic political base is much easier than having to fight for a broad coalition of supporters who are willing to fight for the progressive realisation of each other’s rights and freedoms. Better to make South Africans of different colours fear one another and make off with your locked-in 10% of the vote, and keep your parliamentary job secure for another five years.
SA’s people should be more imaginative than these political organisations about the possibilities for a future of complex engagement and racial and social equity, and less interested than the parties are in mortgaging the chance of a shared future in exchange for job security for their leaders.
Civil society and its organisations should play a bigger role in SA’s conversation about race and take it back from the choices at the ballot box.
More civil society organisations — such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Institute for Justice & Reconciliation — should concern themselves with the everyday realities of racial tensions in SA, demonstrate leadership on these issues and align their programmatic work accordingly.
Political parties should not be vehicles for racial animus in our country; rather, they should be held to the standard of defining a vision and articulating a plan for improving the lives and prospects of all South Africans — not just the few with whom they happen demographically to identify.
Otherwise we risk city councils, parliament and the provincial legislatures becoming, more and more, theatres for race-baiting and personal attacks, rather than multiparty institutions of fiscal and policy oversight that demand accountability from the government.
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