White privilege and the ANC

Much focus has been placed on personalities in the efforts to understand the contestation between President Thabo Mbeki and ANC president Jacob Zuma. But this battle is primarily a contestation of ideas.

On the one end is the hodgepodge of the Zuma motley crew, combining Cosatu’s social democratic capitalism and urban worker orientation; the ANC Youth League’s liberal capitalism; and the SACP’s socialism with Zuma’s patriarchal, rural-based traditionalism.

In contrast to the Zuma group’s political ambiguity, the Mbeki-ites have attempted to retain power in the party by delineating a specific version of nativism and “true Africanness”, a process through which a political identity is created that excludes those who dare transgress “true African values”.

The emphasis on “African values” has played out in ways that clash with the rights contained in South Africa’s Constitution. For example, freedom of expression becomes conditional upon permission from the ANC political leadership, as was seen last year in the brouhaha over the Sunday Times’s exposure of the health minister’s alleged abuse of her position.

Furthermore, the constitutionally enshrined democratic principles of the separation of powers and the rule of law came under considerable pressure with Mbeki’s suspension of the national director of public prosecutions in an apparent bid to protect the police commissioner. However, the Cabinet called it “extreme exaggeration” to say that a constitutional crisis had been created.

What is therefore at stake here is how our democracy will be defined. What will be the content of our democracy? Will it be democracy in name only?

In the clamour to understand the implications of this trench war of ideas, a third contender has been operating unnoticed. This is the political project of whiteness that asserts white superiority and is geared towards perpetuating white privilege. Just because the most visible symbol of white power, the National Party, has come to a fall does not mean that whiteness as a political project has ended.

The Mbeki-ite group has come closest to identifying this contender by emphasising the “foreignness” of certain ideas, with reference to Western (that is, white) conceptions of freedom of expression and what may or may not be acceptable political interaction between elected leaders and the citizenry.

The danger that we face as South Africans is that the universal principles of democracy and human rights become purposefully tainted as “foreign”. This reminds one of some African leaders’ arguments of yesteryear that autocracy is more truly “African” than democracy, an assertion that developed into a pretext for dictatorial excesses.

As the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has shown, pre-colonial Africa was a smorgasbord of both democratic and autocratic polities.

The distortion of democratic principles to bring them in line with newly conceived “African values” can happen partly because of how white power has operated historically and how it still operates. Under colonialism, political and social discourses were awash with ideologically engineered contradictions, myths and lies. Plunder and murder were justified with the ideology of racism, which included positioning people as “uncivilised” and “unchristian” because they were not “white” and from Europe.

Therefore, despite colonialists perpetrating deeds of extreme savagery (think Tasmania, Congo, Latin America), the whiteness project allowed white people to position themselves as “civilised”. These duplicitous constructions are still with us.

The artist Anton Kannemeyer had a recent exhibition where he displayed definitions from the Chambers and Oxford dictionaries of the words “black” and “white”. These dictionary definitions equated “black” with, among others, the “opposite of white, dirty … disastrous, dismal … horrible” while “white” was defined as “innocent … pure … auspicious, reliable … honourable”. This shows how meanings are fabricated out of something as arbitrary as skin colour and then strung together into an ideology — the ideology of racism.

Today we see that, just as colonial abuses were justified as the extension of white civilisation in which whiteness was presented as synonymous with civilisation, the Bush administration justifies its imperial abuses as the extension of democracy and civilisation in the name of Christianity. Democracy has been added to the meaning of being Western and white. But, as we have seen, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay contradict this claim.

White power depends on the extent to which people deny these contradictions. Similarly, in South Africa white power has been perpetuated after 1994 by the denial of how white privilege was achieved. We hear this in some white people’s insistence that they “have worked hard” for what they have and therefore see no reason for ameliorative steps such as the employment equity and black economic empowerment laws.

While some white people might have worked hard, this is not the full story by any means. The omission of the more decisive factors (the systematic colonial and apartheid advancement of white interests combined with the undermining of black people’s interests) serves a clear function because it obviates the need to take responsibility. Comprehensive redress is thus avoided, which is why socio-economic inequality in South Africa remains staggeringly high.

This is untenable. Zimbabwe has shown how the perpetuation of white privilege and lack of redress (in their case land ownership) can supply ideological ammunition for an anti-democratic project.

The challenge that we as South Africans face is to steer a path away from white power and from exclusionary definitions of Africanness and distortions of democracy to assert the universality of human rights and democracy and reclaim the promise of non-racialism that seemed so possible only 10 years ago.