Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa. Jacob Dlamini
European population, then they might very well apply any balance they had to our native population, and then they would see, strangely enough, that upon that basis it worked out that the actual trade of three Natives was worth about that of one white man. That, of course, [is] a very imperfect way of looking at the value of these people, because the trade value of some of these Natives [is] far greater than the trade value of some of our white people.
Merriman had referred to these trade figures to show ‘what an enormous asset we had in the Natives in that respect’.
Competitive Africans were deemed a threat to the white citizens of the Union. This threat had to be eliminated. The notion of the economy as a space of commonwealth was inconceivable to the majority of white Union citizens. That idea had to wait until 1994. Meanwhile, the whites of the Union would compete only among themselves. Thus, a systemic culture of white privilege was set in place.
Today, it is common to hear white South Africans justifying their economic success in terms of the hard work they have invested. Indeed! But the disproportionate wealth in assets they garnered in comparison to the disproportionate poverty and inequality in South Africa, tells a story not so neat and heroic. While there is no gainsaying the fact of such achievements, it is also true that as a result of the Land Act of 1913 these achievements occurred, by law, in an environment engineered for limited competition.
This perspective is crucial as we cannot know to what extent we might have evolved to a more successful economy if we operated from a culture of equally distributed competition. How could such an economy have contributed to distributing wealth more equitably for the benefit of the largest number of South African people? That we are not able to answer this question suggests that the apparent success of the South African economy is in large part illusory.
The illusion of competitive success in an uncompetitive environment contributed to other illusions, such as the superiority of white South Africans in every area of human endeavour. Such endeavours, enhanced through exclusive, accumulated social capital, include academic and sporting achievements, spatial and social environments that appear inherently advanced, literary, artistic, architectural and dance accomplishments that seem to represent the universal genius of their producers, and organisational and governance cultures designed to enhance and protect collective illusions that then become self-justified. Over time, white South Africa developed the disposition to claim victory in the absence of competition.
In 1948 when the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power, it took the remit of 1913 to a higher level of conceptualisation and justification. This was done through a plethora of legislation. The Population and Registration Act of 1950 required that people be classified into ‘population groups’ and the Group Areas Act of 1950 required urban settlement according to those population groups. The segregation of public facilities of various kinds was sanctified in the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, education was segregated through the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956, which was renamed the Industrial Relations Act, prohibited racially-mixed workers' unions and reserved skilled jobs for white workers. The white man of South Africa stood at the apex of all law-making, thereby engineering his superiority.2
If today the social grant is often criticised for absorbing a large portion of the national treasury, it would prove salutary for South Africans to remember that the white social grant was legislated into being in 1910, and then again, in 1913, and again in the 1960s, the decade in which some 6.5 million black people were forcibly moved from their lands to make way for white ‘superior beings’ who lorded over those they had rendered weak.
If collaborative economic competitiveness within the general South African population was discouraged over a century of legislated strife, it could perhaps be said that in the absence of such competition South Africans learned to compete in a different field. They competed in the devaluation of one another's humanity. One side devalued the other aggressively, the other defensively. If there is a lesson to be learned from the negotiated settlement that led to the birth of a democracy and the prospects of a new human(e) environment in South Africa, it is that mutual devaluation of a shared humanity on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, sexual-orientation, religion, educational achievement or the rural–urban divide should never be permitted to be deployed for political, economic, social or judicial advantage.
If the Afrikaners benefited from reconciliation with the British in 1910, in the democracy that was born in 1994 they became the beneficiaries of a reconciliation with people they had systematically oppressed since receiving custody of the state 84 years earlier. The descendants of Sol Plaatje are now in parliament making far more sensitive laws, subject to a constitution in the hands of a strong and tested judiciary. But since, in the moral world there can be no right way of doing the wrong thing, the recent reconciliation requires a life-long covenant strengthened by crosscutting bonds in a country now defined by a common citizenship, championed by the newly free and enfranchised.
In this new world, there will be no room for another culture of punitive, uncompetitive and legislated biases. It is a world that the diverse peoples of South Africa can willingly identify with, beyond their respective illusions of race and elemental ties of tribe. Those in power today should never forget that it is relatively easy to repeal legislation and promulgate new, more progressive legislation, based on a constitution. But is it far more difficult to create a human community, one which occasionally makes mistakes, but gets things right over time. This is a space of trial and error, but it is also potentially the most formative experience of mutuality. We will cross cultural, ethnic, gender, national and other borders because all of them become porous over time. Only then will South Africa truly belong to all who live in it.
What would Plaatje see today if he again cycled the routes he once took to observe and document the human effects of cruel laws? He would see a commercial landscape of shopping malls and national brands. He might see this as evidence of ties that bind and hope that behind these brands there is a significant spread of ownership across the population that breaks down the ‘us and them’ divide, such as Chabani Manganyi insightfully reflected on in 1973.3 It is critical that solidarities are affirmed by a real sense of collective ownership and of universal, collaborative competitiveness among fellow citizens.
The landscape he would see is still largely spatially divided. But he might find more South Africans uneasy and ashamed of this situation. He would be appalled that rural children walk long distances to school and back, often with cars, taxis, and buses hurtling past them at speed. But he may be heartened that with each national and local government election there is evidence of an increasing balancing of interests.
He might realise that a political environment dominated by black people can also suffer from a lack of competition if competitiveness is limited to maintaining electoral numbers, voting capital and loyalty that is based on social grants and empty promises. He might pray for heightened competition among political parties for the votes of citizens demanding increasing opportunities for self-advancement after having been kept out of competition for over one hundred years.
Today, it is not enough to protest the past. Indeed, the #RhodesMustFall movement indirectly asks not only ‘how do we visualise the future?’, but also ‘how do we make it come alive?’ This question has to be answered by any government in South Africa that has a universal electoral mandate and has the courage to translate that mandate into a radical public spiritedness – the critical social driver in terms of future public health, public education, public transport, public spaces, public broadcasting and wholesome human settlements. South Africans must now begin to live the future, and not fight over their pasts. ‘Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion’ is a history to be understood and not fought over.
Plaatje was the composite South African of the future: learned, eloquent, multi-lingual, well-travelled, multi-cultural. He set a high standard for rigorous investigative journalism and data-driven activism. He would no doubt have been exemplary in upholding the constitution of South Africa as the one hope for a grounded national unity that is as visionary as it is embodied in lived life. There lies the power of all.
NOTES
1 Sol T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2007), 35.
2