Not the sharpest stick with which to prod the ANC

Whites build and blacks destroy? This false construct should be knocked down

SOME time in the early 1990s, I was driving through Cape Town's City Bowl with two members of my extended family. We turned a corner to find ourselves staring at the face of Table Mountain. It was a glorious sight.

"Do you think that they are capable of breaking even that?" one of my relatives commented.

"They", of course, were the black people who were about to take power in South Africa. My relative was drawing upon the old, racist adage, uttered in many homes across white South African under apartheid, that whatever you give black people they will break. Are they going to destroy the country so thoroughly, he was asking, that even Table Mountain will fall down?

Two decades later, with the carnage of ANC governance strewn about us, variants of this question, once voiced only in white racial privacy, are finding wider audiences.

"Whatever else you can say about apartheid," a distinguished, black, ANC-aligned person said in a closed forum I attended recently, "at least they got things done. We have a choice. We can either build on what we have inherited, or we can ruin it."

And so the idea that a black propensity to break things is undoing white accomplishments has now become a rhetorical stick that black people wave at the ANC. "Look at you," they are saying. "You are behaving the way crass racists predicted you would."

It is an unfortunate rhetorical flourish for all sorts of reasons, the most important of which is that it simply isn't true.

In the 1950s and '60s, at the pinnacle of high apartheid, white rule in South Africa was not just chillingly brutal, it was comically inefficient. The government erected a monster of a bureaucracy and wrote a welter of laws to keep the number of black people in the cities down. The great plan was to maintain black and white urban numbers at parity so that whites could keep ruling for generations.

The system was ridiculous. It required white employers and black workers to jump through such a convoluted series of hoops that everyone simply ignored them. Black people came to the cities in their millions without the right stamps in their passbooks and spent their lives dodging the police. White employers hired workers off the books. Even National Party-run city councils were caught employing street cleaners illegally because going through the right channels was impossible.

Grand apartheid failed in all of its major aims. One was to create full employment in the cities, expelling "idle blacks" to the countryside. Yet urban unemployment climbed by 25% in the first decade of apartheid. Another was to reduce black urbanisation. Yet the black urban population grew faster during the 1950s than it ever had.

Precisely because it was so horribly inefficient, apartheid became more and more brutal. The subtle stuff was beyond the state machinery. By the mid-'60s, 750000 people a year were being arrested for pass offences. Men with sticks and guns were churning the streets and smashing down doors in the middle of the night. And yet the brutality was only a symptom of failure; the number of urban blacks kept climbing.

We seem to have forgotten what everyone knew back then, that the bureaucracy was stupid. That is where the old Van der Merwe jokes came from: they were aimed at the useless affirmative action candidates who staffed the civil service.

In truth, apartheid's grandees were lucky to have ruled during a generation of prosperity when practically every economy on the planet was growing and the world was hungry for South African minerals. It was hard to mess up. Every seed, no matter how carelessly thrown, simply grew.

Which brings us back to the present. It is, of course, very important to gather an armoury of rhetorical weapons to aim at the ANC. These weapons ought to be sharp; they ought to hit home. The ANC must be told that it is corroding the institutions in its care, and it must be told in ways that hurt.

But I'm not sure that borrowing an old racist adage about whites building things and blacks breaking them does much good. For one, it distorts history; this old Germanic ghost of white efficiency is a spectre: it never did exist. Nor, I think, is a weapon fashioned from the ways whites consider themselves superior a very sharp one. It simply gives offence, causing those who govern this country to retreat deeper into the bunkers they already inhabit.