Cliff and Steenhuisen are wrong. Here’s why race matters in South Africa

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In last week’s episode of The Burning Platform podcast, the host, Gareth Cliff, and one of his two guests on the programme, John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, weaved an ahistorical, dishonest and incoherent web of assertions regarding the relevance of race and racism in South Africa. 

In response to Mudzuli Rakhivane, a member and advocate of the One South Africa Movement, who questioned whether the DA had fed racial tensions by erecting its controversial election posters in Phoenix, Cliff asserted that racism was not a priority in the 1 November local elections and claimed that no one was interested in identity politics. As Rakhivane was articulating a response, citing her own experience of racism, Cliff interjected to assert that her “personal experience is completely anecdotal and unimportant to all of us”. 

Examining Cliff’s and Steenhuisen’s assertions allows us to obtain clarity on why some self-proclaimed liberals, both white and black, confidently and continually fail to grasp the uncomfortable reality of racism. Moreover, assessing their remarks allows us to see how their political imaginations are held hostage by culture-war talking points exported from the US. 

What needs close inspection is not just the antics of Cliff or Steenhuisen as individuals, although their outlooks provide insights into how messy and potentially debilitating our conversations about race can be; their perspectives exist within a long tradition of toothless non-racialism that claims to recognise the social construction of race while separating it from its historical roots and economic underpinnings. 

This ineffective non-racialism is not new, but in the past 10 years — both in South Africa and other countries, notably the US and UK — it has been reinvigorated, in part, by the return of race reductionism and the reification of race. The ascendance of race essentialism needs to be examined together with the impotent non-racialism represented by the likes of Cliff, the DA and the South African Institute of Race Relations. 

Critical episodes in our history

But to do this we need to understand the significance of recent events. Critical episodes of history persist in our memory not only because of what profound changes they may, or have, produced — but they also remain significant in what they reveal about a particular society. 

Like the Marikana massacre and the horror of the Life Esidimeni scandal, the unrest of July this year was a grand and terrifying unveiling that exposed the flaws of post-apartheid South Africa and the destruction that awaits an unsustainable social order. 

Amid the vast destruction there was also death. Unlike those killed in stampedes, fires or shot by the South African Police Service, death was summoned by the ideology of racism that has always existed to serve the powerful and justify domination, not only in our country but across the world. 

Thirty-six people were killed in Phoenix, accounting for 10% of the deaths resulting from the unrest in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Twenty-two people have been arrested to account for these murders and police are investigating four security companies that operate in the area to establish whether their weapons and other resources were used in the killings. 

The unrest was a disquieting reminder that racism has not retreated into the dusty caverns of history. The majority of those murdered were black residents of Inanda, Amooti and Bhambayi who were travelling by Phoenix, a town that was largely untouched by the mass looting and protests of that week. With police overwhelmed and incapacitated, fake news proliferated about attempts to specifically target Indian communities, and vigilante groups sick with paranoid fear mobilised and armed themselves to protect their properties and lives. 

I don’t doubt that many people were understandably scared during that week in July. I certainly was. But in some communities that fear, stewed with an anxious rage, became the muse that inspired discrimination as black people in suburban and affluent areas were harassed, assaulted, denied entry into their own neighbourhoods and others killed because their skin colour symbolised a threat.

Intellectual arrogance

An intellectual arrogance hinders those like Steenhuisen and Cliff from realising that racism has produced and proliferated the myth that black people, especially poor black men, are inherently dangerous or strongly inclined towards violent criminality. 

The economic hierarchy of apartheid at times worked brilliantly to distance its oppressed subjects from each other in an attempt to eradicate the possibility of solidarity between persecuted communities. And so some members of the Indian community absorbed such myths and some black people continue to foster distrust or resentment for the bigotry of some Indian South Africans. 

The relationship between Indian and black communities in KwaZulu-Natal is complex. It is not entirely antagonistic nor is it entirely peaceful and cohesive. Phoenix was a place in which historic and present antagonisms rose to dominance and propelled violence. It is in this context that two posters erected in tandem by the DA caused outrage. One poster read “The ANC calls you racists” and the other “We call you heroes”. 

Despite a letter of apology from the DA and regardless that the poster debacle causing internal divisions within the party’s leadership, Steenhuisen and the DA’s federal chair Helen Zille have maintained that the posters were not an attempt to provoke racial division. Furthermore both leaders, and some rightwing talking heads, claim that accusing them of racism is itself racist. 

Race is not an objective reality

If you have the educational resources, and the DA leadership certainly does, it’s possible to open one’s mind and political imagination to understand the historic, economic and social roots and present causes of the social strains between the black and Indian community in KwaZulu-Natal. 

But this did not happen because weak non-racialism stunts our political imagination and strangles the urge for inquiry. Importantly, this tradition of non-racialism does not align with the DA’s political interests and it doesn’t echo in harmony with the economic concerns of their constituents. 

First we must always acknowledge that race, empirically, is not an objective reality. Here there is no room for unscientific, racist debate. It has long been established that there are no meaningful biological distinctions along the categories of race that determine intelligence, ability or psychological inclinations. 

It may seem pointless to say this but we behave, think and talk as if there are indeed essences to certain races or as if people are helplessly predisposed to certain kinds of behaviour because of their skin colour. The popularity of the term “coconut” or the trope of the “strong black woman”, which incorrectly assumes that black women have a higher tolerance for psychological trauma or general suffering. 

Race is a subjective reality. Like the law, the nation state and, for some, morality, race is a social construction. Just because the law is not an objective reality does not mean you won’t suffer tangible consequences for violating it. The numerous injustices of the previous century are disturbing evidence of the impact of social constructions. One could define social constructions as systems of beliefs, concepts and values utilised to guide our perception of the world, instruct our behaviour and at times organise relations within society. 

I’m confident that advocates of toothless non-racialism understand this but where they fail is in asking why certain social constructions exist. These inventions spring from certain material conditions in order to satisfy particular needs and advance particular interests. 

African slaves were not shipped across the Atlantic ocean because of the bigotry of their captors, nor did European imperialists carve out the borders of the African continent to prove their superiority. Racial categories, which now seem to be a permanent feature of our reality, are very recent inventions, built and developed in the destructive pursuit of economic power. 

Capitalism and colonisation

For colonialism to succeed, it required that imperialists possess vast political power but also needed a comprehensive ideology to justify the domination of newly conquered subjects and legitimise the exploitative socioeconomic relations that would define the relationship between imperial Europe and its subjects for centuries to come. 

Historians and sociologists do well to remind us that capitalism developed alongside colonisation. In South Africa the objective was not only to seize land, livestock and shatter precolonial society but to exploit African labour, establish markets and transform Africans into dependent consumers. In an address to the colonial parliament in 1855, Sir George Grey, once the governor of the Cape Colony, explained the function of capitalist imperialism: “The Natives were to become a part of ourselves … useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue; in short a source of strength and wealth for this colony, such as Providence designed them to be”. 

French philosopher Louis Althusser defined ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. The imagined, illusory relationship of colonisers and white settlers was one of inherent superiority, destined by God and rationalised by science, an institution which — like the church and colonial education — functioned to make the myth of white superiority appear as real and as tangible as the air we breathe. 

Expansive racial segregation was not the sole purpose of apartheid. Rather segregation was a mechanism to accumulate wealth for a white minority through the exploitation and draconian control of African, Indian and coloured labour. Forced to sell their labour for a pittance, working in grim conditions, perpetually reminded of their supposed inferiority, locked in ghettos and constantly enduring violent oppression by the state, black people became an underclass. Racism found vitality through legislation and interpersonal discrimination but it rested on the foundation of economic domination. 

Authoritarian tendencies

What the rightwing and self-proclaimed liberal non-racialists have failed to ask themselves is whether the economic relations of apartheid still endure today. The political dismantling of apartheid was a tremendous victory, but for nearly a decade now, activists, scholars, public intellectuals and a growing number of South Africans are recognising that too many black citizens work in low paying jobs, are trapped in townships plagued by increasing financial precarity, dire destitution, social death, violent crime and with each passing year the post-apartheid state displays authoritarian tendencies in its attempts to brutally silence dissent from its subjects. 

I would not say that apartheid was privatised but rather that its capitalist property relations largely remained intact after the transition to political democracy and in a beautifully written review of Steven Friedman’s book, Prisoners of the Past, Sisonke Msimang explains how the endurance of economic domination is in part due to the efforts of a multiracial elite, which benefits from a system that exults profits and political power over people. 

The legacy of racism and its economic foundations pours into politics on a local level. In her enlightening book Can We Be Safe? The future of policing in South Africa, Ziyanda Stuurman demonstrates how policing of black, Indian and coloured communities during colonialism and apartheid acted to protect private property alongside disciplining and punishing those who engaged in resistance. 

Policing did not usually work to pursue justice or prevent crime within townships and rural areas across the country. This neglect of non-white communities and the treatment of black and coloured citizens, especially, as those who must be disciplined and punished (through illegal harassment, torture and killings) persists today from Khayelitsha in Cape Town to KwaMashu in KwaZulu-Natal. 

Why does this inequality continue? It is not only through the legacies of the past but the present inequities of capitalism, which always requires a police force to manage, suppress and eradicate dissenting voices of the working class, the unemployed and poor. And in South Africa the face of socioeconomic suffering is one that is often not white. 

Meek non-racialism evades these realities for multiple reasons. The conservative liberalism of the DA and Gareth Cliff elevate the individual and the law to the point of mystification. Within their framework, the individual is not only the most important actor in society but also seen as some self-contained nomad, shielded from the currents of history and gliding above the economic conditions of society or the affect of structures within society. 

This naive framework results in conservative liberals understanding racism to be an issue of personal prejudice or legal discrimination and not an extensive ideology which has, in the words of sociologist Bernard Magubane, “stimulated the ordering of unequal and exploitative relations … and further demanded justification for these relations”. 

One result of the compromises during our transition was in how it never seriously compelled white South Africans to face the extent of apartheid’s damage. Reconciliation may have been a brief strategic necessity but the evasion of economic justice has led to an insensitivity and indifference from some white South Africans towards black suffering. 

Layered on top of this is an observable lack of reflection from some white South Africans on white supremacist ideology has infiltrated their perception of the world and their fellow citizens. 

Helen Zille’s infamous attempt to argue for the benefits of colonisation to the descendants of those conquered or her recent fear mongering about the persecution of white people, are examples of the callous ignorance far too common among some white liberals and conservatives. 

The Institute of Race Relations’ campaign “Educate, don’t indoctrinate” which was launched to assist parents, students and pupils in combating the supposedly dangerous ideas of critical race theory stands as another example of a conservative political imagination that refuses to see the core problems of our society due to an idealistic commitment to weak non-racialism.

Besides the fact that most South African students do not know what critical race theory is (because it isn’t prominent in our schools or our tertiary institutions), the institute’s paranoid assumption that a relatively unpopular field of academic study, mostly contained within American universities, could somehow sow racial discord is outlandish. 

To think, as critics of the theory and the institute claim, that a set of theories in itself and a small group of legal academics are sincerely interested in or have the ability to usher in communist revolution is an indictment on how far the Institute of Race Relations has strayed from serious political and sociological analysis. 

White guilt

To clarify, asking that white people critically reflect on the injustice of the past and act against the injustices in the present is not a call for white people to feel guilty or engage in self-flagellation because of their skin colour. White guilt is ultimately a useless, self-absorbed exercise. 

Perhaps the greatest attraction of toothless non-racialism is that it demands nothing of its adherents. If race is not real, and if the development of the ideology is severed from its historic roots and present economic foundations, then there is no need to radically change our social order. 

There is no need to question our idolisation of private property, no need to question the undemocratic power of corporations, no need to question the almost boundless commodification of basic necessities or to be curious of labour relations which leave workers underpaid and millions unemployed. 

To unearth the real history of race in South Africa is to excavate its intimate relationship with various forms of capitalism. Gareth Cliff, the Institute of Race Relations and the DA all zealously champion an approach to the economy which has led us back to a golden age of monumental inequality, financial precarity in even developed nations, animated political and identitarian divisions, while triggering climate change that will devastate the planet. 

The “non-racialism” of these actors will keep black people in positions of servitude and socioeconomic suffering because it erases critical questions we should be asking about our history, the economy and the living phantom of racial ideology, held not only by individuals but spread through media, religion and our educational institutions. 

We do not need the tears of guilty whites, more black chief executives or the provocations of black nationalists like Jacob Zuma who reify race to justify their endless chase for power. If there is to be a world beyond race, getting there necessitates radically upturning the political order and economic system which gave birth to the ruinous concept.

In response to Gareth’s Cliff dismissal of racism’s relevance, I would quote the Trinidadian historian and journalist CLR James: “To neglect the racial factor as incidental is an error only slightly less grave than to make it fundamental.”

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