Mixed messages

Written by Jonathan Jansen

Does South Africa really belong to all who live in it? When I first developed a sense for politics, as a teenager on the Cape Flats, wallowing in anger, this was the one clause in the Freedom Charter that upset me: "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white."

They (whites) came from elsewhere; they caused all our problems; they took the land and exterminated the indigenous people, such as the San; they uprooted, disenfranchised, tortured and killed black people at will.

How on earth could the Congress Alliance even think of such a concession?

In the course of time, and as I became aware of the broad front of resistance and solidarity across the colour line, this clause for me became the single most admired assertion in the charter.

When I learnt of John Harris's execution (a story, by the way, told very movingly in David Beresford's recent book, Truth is a Strange Fruit), of Beyers Naude's sacrifice, of Ruth First's martyrdom, anger gave way to admiration.

That memorable photograph of those four women of different shades walking confidently up the steps of the Union Building in 1956 to protest against the deviance of apartheid remains, in my judgment, the most moving image of nonracial solidarity this country has ever produced.

But something has gone wrong, especially since 1999. And, depending on where you spend your time working and living, you might be more or less conscious of the racial fault lines opening up across the land.

I spent much of my time in rural and agricultural South Africa during the past year, far away from the cosmopolitanism of Johannesburg or Durban. I spend time at formerly white universities, to which students often come from rural South Africa, and at which racial divisions between white and black are more deeply ingrained than elsewhere.

I listen carefully to the voices of white and black parents, students and communities up and down South Africa, and I am troubled.

Events such as Reitz or Ventersdorp or Waterkloof or Skierlik are NOT examples of spontaneous combustion.

They represent underlying lava-currents of racial discontent (dismissing these horrific events as "racism" does not advance understanding, let alone solutions) that constantly threaten our young democracy, and which will, from time to time, burst through the social surface like an erupting volcano with huge damage to our quest for a nonracial society.

Why is this happening? I believe we lost ground with the project of nation-building in the post-Mandela period. Our language started to change, our sense of others started to shift. Angry and undisciplined voices emerged all over the land, and the politics of accusation and insult replaced earlier efforts at dialogue.

We adopted angry public positions that conveyed, especially to young white South Africans, a sense of our anger.

In the name of equity and redistribution, we sent messages throughout society that were interpreted as politically exclusionary rather than as calling for a commonality of purpose in rebuilding on the ruins of our shattered past.

That we achieved little of either equity or redistribution is a separate (though critically important) issue.

What we have failed to do is build a strong and sustainable understanding across the nation, as we did briefly for the soccer World Cup, that "together" means black and white, all of us, are together in developing this economy, this democracy and this society.

Of course, we have a constitution that guarantees certain rights and policies that, on paper, are not discriminatory. But here we need to be very careful.

We must distinguish official directives (the formal claims of a policy) from the emotional understanding of a policy of ordinary citizens. Few people have major gripes with our national policies or laws; in fact, you might have noticed that the people who most often cite the Constitution in their claims are those on the right of the political spectrum.

What divides us are not our policies but the secondary messages sent out about them.

What do I mean by this tricky term "secondary messages"?

I mean the subtle, and sometimes not-too-subtle, cues, suggestions, actions and symbols communicated not through official statements but through dispersed segments of society that often speak for, or at the very least, are not repudiated by, the powerful.

Messages such as: "The struggle was/is about black people in general and Africans in particular"; "Only blacks need apply" and "Despite your academic results, we reserve places at medical school on a sliding scale from white to Indian to coloured to African".

Messages such as: "Only an African can become president of the country", "It is a matter of time before your farms will be taken from you and given to the dispossessed" and "We will punish you if you do not get your employment equity commitments right soon".

These secondary messages are often much more powerful than the primary or official messages that emanate from the political centre of the country.

I could go on with many other examples.

Here is the good news. South Africans are emotional people, an insight recognised by Nelson Mandela and by President Jacob Zuma.

Strong leaders, who lead in the aftermath of the world's longest surviving racial order, know that we do not have to make a choice between equity and equality, or between redistribution and reconciliation.

We can and must do both.

We must recapture that sense of grace and generosity, not in our policies but in our practice.

This is not an easy or popular way to go - for grace, a friend reminds me, is always scandalous and generosity risks rejection.

But this is what bold and courageous leadership is about; we can afford nothing less.

Our leaders must be careful not to think that, by attending to the extremes of society - such as the whites of Orania, or Eugene de Kock, in Pretoria Central Prison - we can build respect, tolerance and samewerking (working together in partnership) in middle South Africa, the country of those ordinary citizens among whom the quest for hope and healing remains, and where the desire to make a difference can still be harnessed by the government and civil society.

But our starting point should be different.

Perhaps the primary message should be that the struggle for development is about South Africans in general, and human beings in particular.

(This story was provided and used with permission by Timeslive.)