TimesLIVE columnist and renowned academic Jonathan Jansen has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his latest column, which provocatively asks: “Be honest, are you better off now than under apartheid?”
The column, first published on Wednesday, has predictably elicited passionate responses from readers — some endorsing the view that things were much better in 1993 than they are now, and others expressing shock and anger at him for even daring to ask the question.
Jansen opens his column by asking readers to compare the “country’s overall infrastructure” — roads, electricity, water supply, transport — as it was in 1993 with how it is now, and say if they think it is better in 2023 than it was during the last year of formal apartheid.
“You can ask that question of almost any sector of the social and economic landscape, from education to health to urban housing. Never before have I seen so many shelters going up along main roads into and out of our great cities as desperate citizens risk life and limb trying to survive from day to day,” writes Jansen.
In a poll he conducted on his Twitter feed, Jansen says, 89% of respondents agreed that things were better during FW de Klerk’s last days as president than they are now. Only 11% said the state of infrastructure was “better now” than it was in 1993.
“Now I do not know who the 11% are, but I suspect they live under rocks in the Karoo because news from the wealthiest city on the continent is pretty dismal: weeks without water, hobbled by daily electricity outages, and holes like craters in more and more Johannesburg roads, is not what we had on the eve of democracy,” Jansen continues.
While I too cannot presume to know who the 11% are, I don’t think “they live under rocks in the Karoo” or are oblivious to the deteriorating state of our country’s infrastructure.
They probably experienced and remember the past, especially the last days of apartheid, differently from the way Jansen and many others who express similar sentiments do.
If, for instance, in 1993 you lived in Katlehong or any of the townships in the then Transvaal and Natal, where scores of people died every day on trains, at church gatherings and elsewhere as a result of state-sponsored violence, you’d probably answer in the affirmative to Jansen’s question of whether you have “more sense of personal safety and security than when apartheid collapsed”.
Without doubt, collectively we are better off now than under apartheid
Our public education system is far from perfect — and too many black children still drop out of the system before they reach matric — but is producing far better learners than those who came out of most of the 13 racially segregated education departments of the apartheid era.
The explosion of shelters “along main roads into and out of great cities” that Jansen speaks of was prevented during apartheid through racist and repressive legislation, such as the Group Areas Act and influx control, which restricted the entry of black people into “white South Africa”. Most were kept in far-away Bantustans where, as “surplus people”, their day-to-day survival struggles could be hidden.
Of course by 1993 most of such legislation had been repealed and, as a result, the shanty towns had begun to mushroom all over urban areas.
The “RDP houses” that the state has built since the collapse of apartheid are not ideal, but many families who now own their homes for the first time would agree that what they have is far better than the precarious state of living in a rented four-room house where you could be kicked out at any moment for no justifiable reason.
Without doubt, collectively we are better off now than under apartheid.
Yet the question keeps coming up, not just from intellectuals such as Jansen or even those who were privileged by apartheid. Increasingly it is being raised in conversation among the supposed primary beneficiaries of post-apartheid South Africa.
It is raised in different forms: sometimes as nostalgia for life under Lucas Mangope’s Bophuthatswana or Kaizer Matanzima’s Transkei; in radio debates about the quality of services delivered by apartheid-era councillors in Soweto vs what the current crop is doing; and even in the claims that it was easier for a black entrepreneur to thrive in the bad old days than in the current era of “politically connected BEE and tenderpreneurs”.
Listen carefully and you’ll hear that it is not really a yearning for our apartheid past but a cry of despair at r the current state of affairs, an expression of disappointment and anger at the establishment’s failure to deliver on its promise of a better life for all.
To fix the problem, however, we should not look back into our past — it has nothing but misery to offer. We should look to the future. Instead of wondering if we were not better off in 1993 than we are now, we should be asking what we need to do right now so that those who are alive in 2053 will be able to say the country is better than it was in 2023.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.