SA's trust deficit has as much to do with enduring whiteness as with colonial legacies

Daily Maverick

8 hours ago

It is one of those unfortunate things, the need to declare one's principles, or starting positions, before presenting any discussion or point of view. I do it often with reminders like 'good people can be bad and bad people can be good' or 'nobody rules without guilt' or 'the country belongs to everyone who lives in it'.
Having just written that, I realise that all of the above are what provokes the infectum somnium of the posties. They may ask what you mean by 'good' or 'people' or 'can' or 'be' or 'rules' or 'country' or 'lives'. The wilful obscurantism gets rather tedious.
For the record, there is a place for 'complicated' or apparently obscurantist writing when the objective is, in part, to reveal fallacies about 'common sense' claims or 'simplicity' or parsimonious statements. It's the wilfulness (even pretentiousness and performativity) that turns postie discussions farcical.
Then there are, of course, calcified positions, which are generally alluded to here. These are the positions where, for instance, even if Cyril Ramaphosa invoked the Second Coming, people would repeat mantric statements like 'what about Phala Phala?' or corruption or a traffic light in the Northern Cape that's not working. These are all valid.
The point here is that as soon as Ramaphosa announced the creation of a National Dialogue, it was dismissed as a 'talk-shop' or something unnecessary. It has to do, I think, with trust, or the lack of it – and wilful blindness.
The calcified positions would simply have us hand the country to the Democratic Alliance, and when they fail, make the claim that the country was too messed up to begin with (but no, don't refer to how the apartheid era messed things up).
Parenthetically (somewhat related), the road to my village has been closed for repairs because of rockfalls, over and again over the past several years, and villagers have been patient, kind and understanding.
I often wonder what the response would have been if the road had not been built by the apartheid-era government, which clearly did not envision that floods might destroy parts of the road along False Bay on the edge of cliffs. I have no doubt that if Clarence Drive were built after 1994, there would have been charges of 'incompetence' or 'mismanagement' or a lack of vision… this is, surely, a case of wilful blindness.
That's just the way it is; some things will never change, wrote that feller Bruce Hornby in the 1980s…
Global white panic
The responses of the calcified crowd is not the tedium of wilful obscurantism, it seems to be driven by anger, catastrophism, dissatisfaction, senses of loss (of power) – all of which may best be understood when placed under the rubric of the decline or rapidly disappearing tendency to universalise European values.
That's putting it very politely.
When I wear my other cap, I look at global historical trends. Cast in the global context, Donald Trump and his followers hate affirmative action as much as some of our compatriots hate affirmative action, and as much as Brexiteers fear the loss of a white Britain, all of which is not dissimilar to Poland or Hungary's boasts about how well they have done by preserving their whiteness… Again, at a macro level, this is about the global rise of opposition to multiculturalism, of diversity, inclusion and equity, which are presented as threats to white hegemony.
Have a read, for example, of the study ' Global white nationalism: From apartheid to Trump' edited by Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield and Jennifer Sutton, and published by the University of Manchester. See, also, the discussion on The global rise of white supremacist terrorism, by the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. I identify these studies, and the ones below, because the research by white people in the European world will probably be taken more seriously…
One study, and subsequent iterations (some of which were written by not-so-progressive scholars) that I have followed for most of the past two decades, pointed to evidence that ethnic diversity, or ethnic change, has caused many (white) people to become less trusting and led – mainly in Europe and North America – to people retreating into the safety of their whiteness.
Trump is not the only European leader (I use the late economist Angus Maddison's definition of North America as an outgrowth of the European world) in this spiral of white panic; in Germany, there is a similar sentiment towards mass deportations.
In South Africa, there is much reason for distrust. It's not only because of the state of the country and extant conditions… It also has to do with people refusing to accept that 'non-white' people have a history, heritages and landscapes that define a community's culture.
I write the above in the wake of some nasty responses directed my way for my concern over the sale of cultural heritage in the Bo-Kaap. One response was that there was 'a market' for the homes in the Bo-Kaap. Well, there is 'a market' for human kidneys, and governments can intervene to prevent 'markets' from spreading. (Don't come at me about 'moral equivalence' – that's just a useful trick to allow people to get away with murder).
Anyway, the point about the Western Cape and Cape Town government's permissibility of the sale of homes is that it can be stopped, in the same way that these governments would protect the landscapes and sites that have been most dear to white people and colonial settlers.
There is no sign that this will happen… Kirstenbosch Gardens or the Company's Garden in Cape Town's CBD are protected spaces: why, then, not the Bo-Kaap? (This is a topic on which I have done some research).
Perhaps because the destruction of Bo-Kaap paves the way for expansive white/foreign settlement, and for removing the Muslim community from the City Bowl – and getting rid of those Palestine solidarity movements… Remember, the European world's great bête noire today is precisely the Muslims! (See here).
Muslims in the European world are expected to make themselves ' acceptable ' to Europeans if they wish to be admitted to society, and are expected to blend into the history of their new homes and landscapes. What was it that Amilcar Cabral said? 'They made us leave history – our history – to follow them… to follow the progress of their history.'
I should be clear, this is not a cry for the destruction of Kirstenbosch, or the Company's Garden in the City Bowl, although one of the first things that European colonialists have done wherever they settled was to build gardens to provide them places to stroll at ease and remind them of Kew Gardens 'back home', with nary a concern for the natives. The Company's Garden was the first of its kind across all the places where the Dutch and the British held colonies and enslaved people.
From a chapter of the book I am working on:
'The Gardens', we called it, was created under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, shortly after the arrival of Dutch settlers in 1652. While the Dutch first created The Gardens, the British would alter the cultural landscape quite considerably, preserving its 'Englishness,' …. By 1837, there were 22 botanical gardens across the British Empire, and at the end of that century, in 1900, there more than a hundred as continental Europeans, French, Dutch, and Germans spread their colonial wings. The East India Company transformed gardens … (and the Dutch in Java) from food crops to refashioned and curated spaces to reflect colonial preferences and tastes. These curated gardens 'anchored' the European presence and were created to reinforce them as 'spaces of sociability for Europeans that responded to homesickness' … and offered spaces for walks in which ordered paths, benches, and bandstands provided reminders of the parks of Europe.
This creation of green spaces is a mark, also, of European settlement in Palestine, which some people have justified or accepted as permissible, and others have described as green colonialism to displace Palestinians.
Just by writing that sentence opens one up for much vitriol, criticism, cancellation and – at the extremes (I am always concerned about this) – losing one's income…
It's funny (not). I have, in this column, been highly critical (over and again) of Julius Malema, Cyril Ramaphosa, Gayton McKenzie, the ANC, Al Jamaa'ah, of greed, corruption, prebendalism, cronyism, braskap and tall poppy syndrome, parallels between South Africa's politics and organised crime, and not a single person from any of those political parties and not one of those individuals have attacked me (verbally) personally, or suggested that I be cancelled.
However, as soon as I write anything about white privilege, about the vertically segmented privileges inherited (explained by Gerald Cohen's development thesis), or about the umbilical ties that bind the intellectual transnational capitalist class, the quite perverse intellectually calcified class exploded, and there are veiled threats about cancellation. The class, here, are those good people among us who are instinctively opposed to, say, Ramaphosa's National Dialogue.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is the lack of trust (distrust of black governance), the continuity – at least in Cape Town – of apartheid (how else does one explain the building of the same matchbox-type houses that marked Soweto's early years), where it is now 'the market' that is pushing low-income housing to the far reaches of the Cape Flats and beyond.