Heads up, white SA: skilful self-preservation is not enough

27 February 2011 - 02:08 By Jonny Steinberg
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now

Jonny Steinberg: In his classic book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville paints a dire portrait of the French aristocracy on the eve of the upheaval that was to unseat them.

The grand old feudal system, Tocqueville writes, was in decay. The political power the nobility once exercised was all but gone; France was now governed by a centralised bureaucracy controlled by civil servants in Paris, leaving the old feudal realms moribund. Economic power was also slipping through the nobility's fingers. Most of the people who were once their serfs now had an assortment of land rights and were independent farmers; their old lords were no longer their patrons but simply a burden around their necks.

The aristocracy dealt with the decline of their power disastrously, Tocqueville writes. In a state of denial, they tried to preserve what flesh remained on the skeleton of the system that was once theirs. Clinging to the privileges still left to them, such as exemption from paying tax, they only infuriated the masses further. Divorced from civic life, they had no idea that a revolution was brewing until it was too late.

Reading Tocqueville on the French aristocracy, one cannot but think of white South Africa. How did they deal with the fall of apartheid? Were they also a blind, sluggish bunch unprepared for the inevitable demise of their power?

Seventeen years on, it appears at first blush that white South Africa was the opposite of the French aristocracy. Whites adapted adroitly, eyes wide open; they knew where their interests lay and found ways to defend them.

Perhaps the most interesting indicator of how whites have dealt with the end of apartheid is the language that issues from their tongues. In the population census of the 1970s, about 60% of white South Africans described themselves as Afrikaans-speaking. Today, the figure has dropped to about 40%. Where have all these Afrikaners gone? The most likely answer is that their children have assimilated; they see themselves as English speakers now. At the core of their identities, they never were Afrikaans, nor English, for that matter, but simply educated, middle-class and careerist. At the height of apartheid, being Afrikaans was good for a white person bent on an education and a career. Today, it is limiting. Silently, without fuss, an entire generation has recalibrated its relation to the word.

You can witness these powers of adaption in countless individual lives. When I began reporting on the police in the late '90s, I got to know about a dozen white detectives well. They were the sons and grandsons of policemen. Had apartheid lasted another generation, they would have worked for the state until their pensions matured, then retired to a frugal old age.

But apartheid did end, and their white skins were no longer especially welcome in the police, and they have all, without exception, found lucrative work as corporate security experts. They have fancy cars and overseas holidays that were once available only to those in the stratosphere way above them.

The very rich also appear to have greeted the transition adroitly, at least at first glance. As Moeletsi Mbeki often points out, it was white business that invented what was to become black economic empowerment. It did so early, in the late '80s, in anticipation of the ANC coming home. In retrospect, it was impressively, if cynically, insightful. The ANC was at that stage firmly committed to wide-ranging economic transformation. Those who imagined BEE had the foresight to know that the politically connected would in fact be happy to keep the system just as it was if they could share in the booty.

But this last thought should set off alarm bells. Writing of white South Africans, JM Coetzee once argued that people can be so self-interested as to be mad. If BEE is corporate South Africa's most innovative contribution to the post-apartheid order, we are all in trouble. Repackaging equity and dishing it out to the influential is a clever way to defend one's interests for this generation, and perhaps the next. But when 40% of the adult population is unemployed, BEE simply rearranges the deck chairs on the ship we all share.

South Africa requires more than clever people skilfully defending their interests. It requires imaginations big enough to take in the vast breadth of this country, and robust enough to wonder how it can be reconfigured. Without that imagination, we are French nobles, blind to the trouble that awaits.

Steinberg is with Huma, University of Cape Town. His new book, Little Liberia, is out now

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now