In a country where taking to the streets is commonplace, this week’s protest in Johannesburg’s coloured communities would have gone largely unnoticed.
It was apparently triggered by unhappiness with the Employment Equity Amendment (EEA) Act, among other things. According to news reports, other grievances included racial discrimination against coloured work seekers in local institutions such as hospitals, retail shops, “the Gauteng premier’s office” and the metro police.
On the face of it the protest was local in nature, one of many that have become part of the political white noise in South Africa.
But it went to the heart of our stalled nation-building project, which was supposed to have begun in 1994, and which has left us trapped in apartheid modes of looking at our society’s racial problem.
Continuing race-based spatial separation has helped to keep alive mutual suspicion among the populace. Our presumed differences, based on skin colour, remain ingrained in older and younger generations, despite talk of a new “Rainbow Nation” and glib references to the importance of social cohesion.
Race-based spatial separation has helped to keep alive mutual suspicion among the populace. Our presumed differences, based on skin colour, remain ingrained
The physical distance has led to a lack of empathy for each other as fellow human beings with a common destiny. Instead, we perceive the interests of “our group” to be different to those of other racial groups. The divisions have been fuelled by political parties that have cynically exploited deemed differences, genuine grievances, anger and fear to create captive voter bases for their own short-term gain.
Each group’s ignorance about members of “the other” and how they live feeds gullibility, including a belief that life is better on “the other side”, as it were. And so, in a society that promotes the notion that different race groups have different human needs, this week’s protest in places such as Westbury and Westdene would likely have been seen by “outsiders” as “a coloured thing”. Nothing to do with white or black South Africans.
There was even a newspaper headline declaring: “Coloureds want jobs, security”. As if these were not universal human needs, felt by every South African, irrespective of race.
In the same publication, the African Christian Democratic Party leader, Dulton Adams, was quoted as saying: “Even if we put the EEA Act aside, the reality of the coloured community is we have high unemployment rates which aggravate poverty, gangsterism, drug abuse, crime and even teenage pregnancy.”
From a nation-building point of view, physical separation along racial lines has played a huge role in preventing the emergence of empathy and solidarity among our country’s people.
Indeed. Yet this is a cry that would resonate with many other marginalised communities regardless of colour, whether in Westbury, Soweto, KwaMashu, Phoenix or the Cape Flats.
From a nation-building point of view, physical separation along racial lines has played a huge role in preventing the emergence of empathy and solidarity among our country’s people.
How could that not be when to many, if not most, white people the black township is a distant, fabled place, the inside of which they haven’t the foggiest idea about? How do they empathise with black or coloured people whose wretched living circumstances they perhaps only hear about, but have never seen?
Not forgetting the cohort of township- or village-bound young black people whose first interaction with a white person is probably when they enter university, if they are lucky enough to do so. Or when they first join the labour force.
But to return to the Westbury issue — coloured people know they belong in the category of South Africans that politicians call “minorities”. The term could mean simply that coloureds are not a national majority, a position occupied by Africans or blacks (depending on your preferred terminology).
But beyond the skin distinction and the numbers game, what does it mean to live as a “minority” in the new South Africa? Does it mean having fewer rights than the numerical majority?
If you are a young coloured person and part of a “minority”, for instance, should you lower your life ambitions? How does it sound when you hear that the objective of the transformation project is to liberate “Africans in particular, and blacks (Africans, coloureds and Indians) in general”? In this Youth Month, would you not be justified in wondering, after nearly 30 years of freedom, how much longer you’ll have to wait to become a fully fledged citizen, with equal rights to everyone else?
And when leaders talk about doing things for “our people”, do you wonder if you are included?
If we are serious about nation-building, we should not scoff at the complaint by coloured people that under apartheid they were not white enough, and now under the new dispensation they are not black enough.
An added danger for the country is that aggrieved national groups tend to be targets of the idea that their interests would be best served by isolating themselves from the national majority, that is black/African South Africans.
But the separation option is a cul-de-sac, a road to nowhere. Whether it means establishing a landlocked racial enclave like Orania, trying to develop the Western Cape as a white island of development, or voting for the FF+ or Patriotic Alliance because these parties champion your racial concerns. The reality is that no part of the country can thrive independently and in isolation from the rest.
Equally erroneous is the view among the economically excluded that nation-building must wait until all inequalities have been eliminated. Similarly, nation-building and reconciliation will not succeed in the face of inequalities that fuel divisions and ensure that whites remain permanent villains of the South African story, and blacks the perpetual, angry victims.
Both projects must be pursued concurrently. True, we have a constitution and laws that seek to banish racism and inequality. But it remains a legitimate question, looking at Westbury and other marginalised places: have nonracialism and nation-building failed after nearly three decades?
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