Understanding South African inequality as a precondition for transformation

Daily Maverick

07-05-2025

There's no shortage of opinions, both new and old, as to the meaning of authentic transformation and how to get there. Navigating through this minefield is determined by the particularities of the compass being used.
'South Africa's economic and social stability hinges on genuine, not superficial, transformation,' writes Daily Maverick's Yeshiel Panchia, whose article was high among Daily Maverick's top reads for March 2025.
Despite almost 31 post-apartheid years, Panchia continues, 'legislation enacted specifically to rectify historical economic injustices' via 'explicit redistribution' is still waiting for the needed 'genuine transformation'.
Transformation has now become the popular generic term for affirmative action, employment equity, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and the gamut of other measures all taken in the name of redress, of levelling the pot-holed playing fields.
But the times are a'changin. Among others, Stephen Grootes, noting that the 'policy of black economic empowerment has always been intensely controversial', reminds us that after about three decades, political forces from the centre as well as organised business 'may be gathering enough strength to overturn it'. The challenge for him is to find options other than the 'unworkable' or 'unfair' ones of BEE.
He concludes his impassioned article thus: 'Genuine diversity and economic empowerment are still elusive (after) three decades. For South Africa to realise the promise of a better life for all, policymakers, corporations and civil society must commit to true diversity, not merely as regulatory compliance, but as a fundamental pursuit of equity and inclusivity.
'The resilience and stability of South Africa's economic and social fabric depend on achieving this authentic transformation.'
Donald Trump's recent intervention in these matters has further focused public attention on 'authentic transformation'.
There's no shortage, both new and old, as to the meaning of authentic transformation and how to get there. Navigating through this minefield is determined by the particularities of the compass being used. This is to say, one's understanding of South Africa's inequality is the starting point for all competing answers.
The more challenging issue of the policy changes required to meet the numerous constitutional injunctions regarding transformation is for another time. Notwithstanding these still-to-be-met constitutional injunctions, the exclusive focus of this article is how South African inequality has come to be understood. For convenience, I have grouped them into four broad ones.
The four competing understandings of our inequality
They are race; intersectionality; and two forms of class – reductionist and dialectical. We'll be looking at each separately, beginning with race.
1. Race
Unbroken racialised inequality remains overwhelmingly the primary, if not only, understanding of South Africa since 1994. Underpinning this understanding is the undoubted reality of the specifically apartheid racialised inequality of racial capitalism. Aided by a huge amount of selective perception, contemporary South Africa appears to be unchanged. The face of poverty remains overwhelming African. (Why African rather than black will be explained in due course.)
Apart from blindness to African wealth — white wealth being the main, when not only, measure of the supposedly racialised inequality — there is however still no analysis provided by those who invoke this perception to explain why, beginning with the repeal of the cornerstone of apartheid, the Population Registration Act, in 1991, along with the phalanx of related laws deliberately designed to discriminate against Africans, African poverty not only remains but is worse than ever.
Similarly known but without recognition or subject to analysis by them is the growth of this malady. This despite a mainly African Parliament, with an always African president heading an almost exclusively African Cabinet.
Moreover, the laws, policies and practices either passed or sanctioned by Parliament reproducing African poverty have been implemented and enforced by a rapidly Africanised judiciary, labour department and other organs of the civil service.
So ubiquitous is the appearance of African poverty that the mere assertion of it being racialised poverty is sufficient. The hows and whys behind its repeated reproduction seem to make superfluous the need for its proponents to supply any supporting research.
Saying all this in no way denies that racism is involved in some instances of retarding African upward mobility. But, other than anecdotal evidence, this, too, is left bare of the required research evidence.
2. Intersectionality
Introduced by feminists and subsequently adopted by the broad left, intersectionality is offered as a multi-focused alternative to racialised inequality. Being taught at many universities globally adds academic gravitas to the concept, originally introduced in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Bridie Taylor, a specialist in race and gender issues, having additionally been an important founder of critical race theory, provides a useful definition of intersectionality in her article: 'Intersectionality 101: What Is It And Why Is It Important?'
'Intersectionality is the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression, and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people — gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.'
Preceding this definition is the following diagramme, also by Taylor:
Her diagrammatic illustration, along with her definition, highlight intersectionality's immediate limitations.
These include.
All five of the overlapping spheres she recognises are of equal size.
They are just posited without any origin, history or the possibility of change.
Apart from being timeless, they are additionally presented as being implicitly universal.
Her exclusive focus on discrimination and oppression, as per her definition.
Her definition omits economic exploitation, in all its various forms.
While emphasising that all forms of oppression are interconnected and cannot be understood in isolation, class is a singular unseen. Indeed, although class is part of her definition, it doesn't figure in what is supposed to be her diagrammatic representation of her definition.
Like transformation, she is similarly silent about privilege. Are the rich also not a class? Moreover, given that wealth also means political power, she says nothing about the nature of the dominant class and its internal divisions.
The interconnections are undeveloped. We either accept these interconnections or are left in ignorance as to their nature.
Implicitly on offer is nothing more than stereotypes of each of the five identities in her diagramme. The headline in a recent Daily Maverick article by Judith February, a well-respected legal figure, exemplifies the male stereotype: 'The truth is needed in a world polluted by big-mouthed men' (the headline in this link is from the Daily Maverick 168's reprint of her Daily Maverick newsletter). The egregious gender essentialism is explored in Clare Kerchhoff's Daily Maverick article, ' Who Benefits from Inclusivity '.
Some of the screaming silences on class are rectified in left-influenced, current versions of intersectionality. They do at least recognise privilege. Class, for them, is a conjoined twin between the rich and workers, along with the otherwise poor.
However, even though recognising both the rich and poor realms of class, they invariably don't:
Go beyond just mentioning class.
Say anything about the nature and dynamics behind the distinctly different forms of inequality universally taken — often concurrently — by the rich and poor since the emergence of class.
Say much, if anything, about the nature and dynamics of the interactions between intersectionality's five main constituents and class.
Recognise the reciprocal though uneven interactions between class and the intersectionality's circles. Water provides a simple analogy. Water, a distinct entity, is nevertheless made up of unequal elements: two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen.
Intersectionality has two South African-specific racial features.
First is the conscious consolidation of apartheid's artificially manufactured four 'races'. Race required no resurrection following 1994's formal burial of apartheid. Former heroes of the liberation Struggle against apartheid discovered this almost immediately after the beginning of the new 1994 Parliament when being rebutted by the inherent advantages of being 'white' ANC MPs.
To my certain knowledge (I was an ANC parliamentary researcher for five years) this accusation occurred to some of them who questioned the ANC's ready acceptance of the enhanced pay and perks they had just awarded themselves, even though the ANC had attacked the previously even less outrageous privileges of apartheid-era MPs.
Black and white are indeed the only 'races' recognised in the Employment Equity Act of 1998, the foundational legislation of all subsequent transformation laws — but not transformation practices. African, coloured, Indian occur in the act — and all its subsequent amendments and extensions — only once and that is to reject them in favour of the generic 'black'.
Yet these apartheid races — statutorily disavowed because of their divisiveness and creation of hierarchies of oppression — are still the only ones used in all relevant official statistics, including the annual reports of the Employment Equity Commission, the statutory body established to advise the labour minister and ensure the proper enforcement of the Employment Equity Act.
Having already written several articles over the years on why 'African', in particular, became and has been allowed by Parliament to remain a legally unauthorised metric, I invite interested readers to google 'Daily Maverick Rudin Employment Equity Act'. (As will be seen below, I occasionally self-reference. I do so only because the specific issues cannot be developed in this article and, when it happens, that elaboration of the subject at hand is available in articles I've previously published.)
Representivity is the second of the South African versions of 'race', with African being the primary focus. Until last year's establishment of the Government of National Unity, the required proportional 'demographic' representivity enshrined in the Employment Equity Act was honoured in the breach.
South African representivity becomes global in the ubiquitous confusion of class for race. Drawing on what is evidently taught at a leading British University's sociology department (where one of my Britain-born and based granddaughters is a student) as a typical example, data reveals that black, Latina, and indigenous people earn substantially less than the average for white people or they live in the most unhealthy of environments. Race is attributed to these statistically accurate realities.
In both cases, however, US inequality (including mental health) ensures that large numbers of 'white' Americans share these manifestations of class-based poverty.
And, so, we come to the final two of the main understandings of South African inequality.
3. Class reductionism
As a person often accused over the years of class reductionism by both friend and foe alike, this definition covers all the various charges laid against me: 'Class reductionism is disparagingly used to describe theoretical and political frameworks that prioritise the significance of class relations over all other societal hierarchies. The term is used to criticise theories, policies or strategies that neglect to directly address racism, sexism or other social oppressions… Class reductionism has been described as being opposed to identity politics and postmodernism. The term has also been used to describe Marxist theory as a whole.'
However, like Adolph Reed Jnr, a US activist academic, I agree that class reductionism is what he calls a 'myth', a 'caricature' of class; a label, in my view, used by lazy people needing quick dismissals of class.
Dismissing class always remains on option, but not without first considering:
4. The dialectics of class
My understanding of class, before complicating matters with the addition of dialectics, long precedes capitalism and is thus controversial. Class (in my understanding) emerged at different times in each particular place globally as soon as people were able to produce the physical essentials of life greater than their subsistence needs.
This surplus allowed for the original survival division of labour to expand sufficiently to include a small number of people privileged by appropriating various parts of the originally small surplus for themselves.
Whether the resulting social inequality was sufficient to produce a privileged class or proto/emerging class can be established only by a careful study of the specificities of each privileged group.
Be this as it may, the relative wealth, together with the consequent power and status they enjoyed, grew with the expanding surplus. This is to say, inequality is inherent in any group, regardless of its form and size as long as there is a surplus. Unavoidably inherent in this surplus reaching a certain size and being reproduced over sufficient generations are antagonistic interests between those who take from those who produce.
Before moving to dialectics, a quick stop at Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) — or, more accurately, a sort of social Newtonianism, is required, as David McNally, a North American academic and prolific author, points out.
Newton placed his dynamic world of constant motion, along with homogeneous and unmoving space and time, upon fixed and unchanging foundations. The billiard-ball metaphor, named after him, demonstrates his law of the conservation of energy: once set in motion, the billiard ball (in a vacuum) continues unstopped unless colliding and careening with the edges of the billiard table and/or other billiard balls.
Thus, McNally observes: 'Rather than the parts being unified as internally related aspects of a whole, the (Newtonian) whole is instead considered to be a mere sum of indifferent parts… of the world whose most basic properties are unaffected by other… (preexisting) parts.'
For present purposes, Georg Hegel (1770-1831), one of the 19th century's most prominent European philosophers, provided a dialectical alternative to the Newtonian physics of pre-existing parts unaffected by the other parts with which they interact. Rather than just interacting they mutually determine each other in a never-ending process of constant complexity.
I fundamentally differ from that Marxian school that sees economics in almost Newtonian terms. For me, the experiences of existence, while preceding consciousness, exist in a dynamic and mutually shaping interpenetration.
Crucially, consciousness, in the myriad social forms it takes — beginning with the alphabetic 'A', as in art and artificial intelligence — exercises limited autonomy. Self-identities — whether they be racial, sexual, gendered, language, religion, national, regional or ethnic — all shape the (sometimes ambiguous) class-determined behaviours of the wealthy takers and poor producers alike.
Evident contradictions
Class, understood dialectically, in other words, expressly allows for a heterogeneous complexity with all its evident contradictions. The struggle between the privileged and the deprived remains the ultimate contradiction in all class structured societies everywhere, and from their very birth.
Dialectical class consciousness applies equally to the privileged, although in a very different way. They have both the economic and political power to rule each of their varying domains. For contemporary South Africa, a Karl Marx quote from the mid-19th century, remains apposite: 'The specific economic form, in which… (surplus) is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form.
'It is always… (this foundation) which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis… due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances'.(Marx, Capital.)
This is to say, class, understood dialectically, expressly affirms the role that race and 'external historical influences' play in each individual. Additionally included in their consciousness by these influences are gender, religion and identity.
All the above theoretical stuff, having been said, leads us to the very concrete event of Freedom Day — 27 April 2025.
The tragedy of today's South Africa is the probability of most South Africans seeing 27 April as nothing more than a public holiday. Unknown to them is that it's a public holiday supposedly to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the long Struggle waged by many, including those who gave up their lives, for each South African over the age of 18 years to vote in a free election in which all votes are equal.
For many among the few who know this, their response has been a challenging one for the future of South Africa.
This begins with those born after the innocent days of 1994 who were referred to as the 'Born Frees'. That freedom is now a cynical joke for increasing numbers of the 'Born Free' generations.
Shack dwellers in Durban have turned 27 April into an 'Unfreedom Day' annual demonstration. The South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), which broke away from Cosatu because of its formal alliance with an ANC more at home with business than workers, noted in its Freedom Day statement, 'Freedom Without Economic Justice is an Empty Shell', the 'brutal deferment' of 'economic liberation'.
Among those most unlikely to know anything about Freedom Day are the mothers who sell their children, when not actually killing them; or the many in the townships and shacks throughout South Africa who have given up hope of having water, 21st century toilets; or clinics, which, even when open, are empty of standard medications; or the people deliberately running in front of fast moving cars in the hope of claiming compensation from the Road Accident Fund, if they are sufficiently fortunate to have been injured rather than killed.
These are the people all too unwelcomely familiar with poverty rather than freedom.
Hoax of a non-racial South Africa
The hoax of a non-racial South Africa that ANC leaders are now invoking — most recently by Acting President Gwede Mantashe on Freedom Day — is additional reason for ever-decreasing numbers of 'white' South Africans to shun Freedom Day, even among those who know why it has become a public holiday.
The facts of the highly selective use of racist laws are more than sufficient to make 'white' South Africans uneasy about what has become of South Africa's freedom.
This selectivity allows the Julius Malemas, Judge John Motatas, Andile Mngxitamas and Velaphi Khumalos to get away with incitement to murder all white people, while dismissal, imprisonment and/or heavy fines are reserved for the 'white' Chris Harts and, although racist, the tragic figures like the Penny Sparrows and Vicky Mombergs.
For Daily Maverick's Zukiswa Pikoli, all that is required for aspirations such as 'the sustainability of our humanness that does not need to be rubber-stamped by one race over another', is an 'honest recognition of past injustices'.
Alas, this is far from sufficient. 'Not yet Uhuru', the one-time Kenyan slogan, is especially relevant to our Freedom Day. Honest recognition of past injustices needs to be empowered by a better understanding of South Africa's inequality. Absent this understanding guarantees the perpetuation of the very policies inimical to Pikoli's aspirations.
The intention of this article is to enhance our ability to formulate policy directions substantially different from those of the previous 31 years.
Aslam Fataar's article, '' Kill the Boer' Is A Betrayal of SA's Democratic Promise ', provides a suitable conclusion: 'To speak against Malema's chant (of death) is not to stand with racists. It is to stand with the Constitution. It is to stand with Steve Biko, who taught us that the struggle is not merely against oppression but for restoring black dignity and consciousness…
'And it is to stand with the people — especially the poor, who have no use for rhetorical war games but hunger instead for policies that transform their lives. We must build a society where chants are replaced with choices, and politics is not a battleground of egos but a platform for hope.' DM