The primacy of race

Addressing a gathering in Durban recently, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier summarised a frustration he shares with many South Africans about “racial categorisation and classification which is tainting our new democracy and the Constitution which gives it meaning”.

His audience applauded loudly when the cardinal demanded: “We should simply be all South Africans.”

Cardinal Napier’s words are a fading echo of the ideals of non-racialism, the unkept promise of the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s and the efforts at national reconciliation in the 1990s led by Nelson Mandela.

Of course, questions of race must not be wished away. On the contrary, race remains a volatile issue, complicated by questions of class. It must be examined and debated with robust frankness. Racism must be identified and forthrightly condemned, whether racist sentiments are expressed in public discourse or around the braai.

Questions such as the relationship of race with access to opportunities and services must be addressed, as must be questions of on-going racial reconciliation. But that discussion requires thoughtful analysis, not shorthand populism or crude manipulation.

In public pronouncements, race is increasingly deployed as a political weapon. Charges of racism (or collusion with it) are used to shut down criticism. Racism is casually invoked as a diversion from too close inspection of incompetence, dishonesty and corruption. Racism is alleged when questions are being asked about the redirection of state resources towards a tiny elite that is plundering with impunity the coffers that might otherwise finance decent education, sanitary facilities, housing or health for the poor.

Let us not be fooled, however,  by insinuations that corruption is a new phenomenon in South Africa (or a peculiarly African phenomenon). Under apartheid, the autocratic regime used its control of parliament and draconian media laws to conceal the extent of its corruption.

In post-apartheid South Africa, a free press and vibrant civil society are at much greater liberty to investigate and disclose the venal machination of those in government who breach ethics. Alas, the African National Congress seems determined to curb these revelations through the Protection of Information Bill and the proposed statutory media tribunal.

In many ways, the press has itself to blame for that. When every asinine statement by Youth League president Julius Malema leads with banner headlines in a barely concealed effort to ridicule him, then one may not be surprised that legitimate questions regarding his opulent lifestyle are seen by his supporters as part of an agenda. From there it is not a leap for Mr Malema’s defenders to attribute the coverage to racism.

In that light, little is served when white outfits such as the AfriForum exploit legitimate newspaper reports on Mr Malema’s lifestyle for their own unsophisticated publicity stunts.

However, the proposition that black journalists and editors working for mostly black managers in black-owned publishing houses are somehow doing the bidding of vague white masters is preposterous and insulting to these media professionals, many of them veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle (and undeserving of murderous fantasies involving mob justice). More than that, it is seditious as it plants the seeds of, or at least perpetuates, racial suspicion.

At the same time, some media can be rightly accused of hypocrisy when they condemn the hate speech of the likes of Mr Malema and fire assorted newspaper columnists who discharge their bigoted opinions, but cheerfully feature on prime time TV the entertainer Steve Hofmeyr, whose serial manifestos are saturated with racist and white supremacist hate speech.

Indeed, while there is much about Mr Malema that is objectionable, it is fair to ask whether the extent of the opprobrium directed at him, but not at Mr Hofmeyr, is influenced by race.

All this should alarm us. But we must also have hope. Undeniably, South Africa has made great strides in diminishing the social illness of racism.

Young urban South Africans in particular are taking the nation closer to the ideal of a non-racial society, a place where, in the words of Cardinal Napier, we would “simply be all South Africans”.