Non-racialism: from slogan to ….

er, slogan
Warren Beatty, sadly under-appreciated for his political analysis,
once argued (in Bulworth) that non-racial democrats should pursue
‘… a programme of voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended procreative
racial deconstruction’, by which was meant, he explained, ‘…
everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody till we’re all the same
colour’. This is better (and more seductive) advice than South
Africans have received about what it means to be non-racial
citizens, or what we have to do to arrive at the democratic, non-
racial, non-sexist state outlined in our Constitution.

Successive governments, ruling (and opposition) parties and

civil society have all failed to offer us citizens much beyond an
early, misty-eyed ‘rainbowism’, which faded as Mandela’s glow
dimmed. Recently, a more hard-edged Africanism has become
evident in public discourse, compounding the tetchy responses to
supposed colonial slights that marked the Mbeki years, as well as
the deeply conservative ‘fight back/stop Zuma’ politics of the DA.
The xenophobic violence of 2008 spoke volumes about our failure to
stitch together a compelling national vision of citizenship, one that
exceeds racial categories. Race, we are told, must be confronted
and talked about. The fact that all the xenophobic victims were
African, and all their murderers were African, should tell us that we
need to do more than stop at race.

The history of the Congress Alliance from the 1950s onwards

compels us to base notions of citizenship on non-racialism, where
the values of people are what matters, not the colour of their skins.
Saying this without sounding like an apologist for the status quo, or
an opponent of redistribution or affirmative action (none of which
are true in this case), is virtually impossible. African nationalism has
triumphed; any criticism of where we are today is taken to be an
attack on the entire edifice of national liberation struggle.

How can this be the case? How is it that the country where
non-racialism was first popularised in the 1950s, has failed to set
out what it means for citizens, the state, the private sector and
others? Why don’t we know how to be non-racial? Do we have to
actively pursue it, or is it just a case of doing good deeds, or not
being a racist? Is it active or passive? Who decides when we’re non-
racialists? Is it all left to us to do alone, in private? How on earth did
we South Africans reach this position?

There are three answers, all linked. Firstly, African nationalism

is incompatible with non-racialism. ‘Equality under African
leadership’ is an essentialist, race-based approach that posits race
above values. We live in an African country, where Africans are in
the majority … and yet whites, coloureds and Indians live here and
are staying here. That’s what internal colonialism, the theoretical
engine of the SACP and ANC, is based on. So we clearly need to
imagine spaces beyond demographic mirroring, spaces where it is
‘enough to merely be’, as Walt Whitman would have it. I don’t know
what those spaces are or how they should look – I only know that
there is no concerted societal attempt to make the move beyond
race into non-racialism; beyond judging by skin colour and judge
rather on the basis of the moral value and qualities of each
individual.

Secondly, the history of the liberation struggle made non-

racialism an ideologically loaded issue. In the late 1940s and early
1950s, strident exclusive African nationalists in the ANC Youth
League and the ANC, insisted on a multi-racial Alliance, where races
were organised in their ‘national’ organisations – whites in the
Congress of Democrats (COD), Indians in their Congress, coloureds
in theirs, Africans in the ANC. White leftists – generally regarded as
communists in mufti – were seen as ‘foreign importers of foreign
ideologies’ and more interested in serving Moscow than South
Africa. This view ultimately saw the Pan-Africanist Congress split off
from the ANC.

Attacks also came from the extreme left, where Trotskyists,

non-SACP Marxists and trade unionists, all pilloried the Congress
Alliance for insisting on national liberation struggle as a precondition
for ‘the real enemy’, class oppression. The result, they argued,
would be to replace a white bourgeoisie with a black one, leaving
the working class – whatever their race – irredeemably poor.

Liberals also joined the fray, accusing the ANC of importing

apartheid race classification into the struggle, and of allowing white
communists (black communists seemed to be less of a worry)
overweening influence over the Alliance via their position in its co-
ordinating structures regardless of the tiny size of the COD.

Non-racialism could hardly be nurtured and developed while

under attack from such an unholy alliance of liberals, African
nationalists, Trotskyists and others, all glued together by a virulent
anti-communism, the same ideological legitimation used by the
apartheid state for viciously attacking the ANC and its allies. Under-
theorised in the past, non-racialism remains under-developed now.
History has blinkered the ANC and its allies as to what really can be
done with this multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-class, multi-hued,
multi-valued nation of ours.

Thirdly, the problem is not just one facing the ruling party. We
have all suffered a massive failure of imagination. Millions of South
Africans of all races, ages and classes work every day to help
others. They fight racism, they fight sexism, they give, they work to
unlock the potential of the poor … but they are left in isolated,
individual bubbles. As a nation we have failed to imagine a different
future, beyond the borders of race. As a result, the most common
response to questions about the meaning of non-racialism is ‘what
did you think majority rule meant’? Well, the answer is really simple:
majority rule was a necessary condition as a step along the road to
non-racialism. It was a critical democratic goal, but not an end in
itself. True non-racial, non-sexist democracy can only be built on the
basis of majority rule – but it goes way beyond it.

But majority rule, the triumph of African nationalism, has

become an end in itself, and we are surrounded by demographic
reductionists, who argue that non-racialism means that every
segment of public life must be a demographic mirror of the nation.
Only when we reach their mirror image, it seems, will South Africa
be ready to take the next step, to think about what non-racialism
might mean. Surely this is not an either/or issue: we must right the
wrongs of the past and simultaneously imagine new discursive
spaces where we can be citizens, adding value to our nation
regardless of the colour of our skin? If not, then Warren Beatty’s
advice is perhaps the quickest route to a non-racial future.

Professor David Everatt is Executive Director of the Gauteng City-

Region Observatory. This article is written in his personal capacity.
He is author of ‘The origins of non-racialism: white opposition to
apartheid 1945 – 1960’, to be published by Wits University press.