Regardless of what Tutu intended by “rainbow nation”, its absorption into post-apartheid nationalism flattened the hierarchy and institutional violence encoded in difference, instead of transforming it. Later still, we would be invited to aspire to “unity in diversity”. Unity has always been a double-edged sword for the marginalised, and the transformation of the “rainbow” into “unity in diversity” cemented the avoidance of difference, the deferral of justice for apartheid’s victims. And apartheid’s victims were not just those who fell into the narrow category defined by the TRC. Violence victimises its targets. Black people may be survivors, but they were also apartheid’s victims.
Not all of us were euphoric in the 1990s. Indeed, even as we voted on 27 April 1994, many Black people deliberately withheld their votes in painful, principled refusal to accept the negotiated settlement. At the risk of being seen as the misguided renegades who would not come to the celebratory table, they insisted that real power was not transferring hands, that too much had been compromised at the negotiating table, that the nightmare that was apartheid would continue in a different guise. They resisted the nation mythmaking, they kept their eyes firmly on race as power and rejected race as colour as alibi for injustice.
I remember how much tension there was in many families, how devastating it was to see the low Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) showing at the polls even as many PAC members had publicly announced they would not participate. To watch the uncontested ANC wins in PAC strongholds, to see the even lower polling of Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), mixed some bile into the results of that first election for many of us, even if these were not parties we chose to vote for.
Many years later some of these renegades’ children, along with many children of willing voters, “born-frees”, deferred their own first vote. Race, racism and the state of Black life, had everything to do with this refusal on both counts. It is unsurprising that the refusal to vote by increasing numbers of eligible South Africans is readily dismissed across media and political parties as “apathy” or the “sign of a maturing democracy” resonant with voting patterns in some global North countries. This too is a refusal to confront the failure of the reconciliation myth, of unity in diversity and of rainbowism.
In the Black public sphere, public intellectuals had long dubbed the national narrative “reCONciliation”. Lizeka Mda and Christine Qunta published remarkably similar critiques of the violence and injustice of the reconciliation and rainbow nation motifs in 1996. Several senior Black journalists (many of whom have subsequently changed course) received tongue-lashings from then Deputy President Thabo Mbeki for their critical distance from the official narrative, and many did not mince their words in response to him in various editorials as well as on the pages of Tribute. Later in the same decade, Xolela Mangcu cautioned against the projection of apartheid racism on generals, colonels and select politicians, reminding us of the everydayness of racial violence under apartheid. Such insistences on taking race as power were as unfashionable in media and academia then as they are today.
Yet, fashionable or not, these rejections of nationalist narratives explain why we have a society that seems further away from “A better life for all” in 2017 than it did in 1997. This glossing over difference rather than systemic change has emboldened the worst kinds of violence. This is why we have constant explosions of naked racism now, why Helen Zille, an opposition party leader, can make an argument for the gains of colonialism. This is what the last two decades have enabled by negating the need for accountability, atonement and justice: racial harassment has moved from the hidden or individual to brazen articulation in public spaces, while Black poverty remains transmitted across generations.
The early detractors from the rainbow nation mythology underlined the value of linking race to justice as the way to undo the legacy of race. They required an interrogation of white power, recognising that pontificating on the social constructedness of race does not mitigate white supremacist violence. Such statements about constructedness very often invisibilise racism, stressing the need to focus on accent and nuance at the expense of pattern.
Today, it is not hard to recognise that rather than transcend race, white supremacist violence is gaining ground. Knowing that race is not “real” is no protection against racial harassment and extreme violence. White epistemic and economic power is entrenched in the economy, land ownership, language dominance and the academy. I have been in meetings where colleagues voiced the kind of naked white supremacist statements that they would have disguised a decade ago, where colleagues laughed as someone spoke of the bludgeoned, shot at, displaced bodies of student activists on our campus, where colleagues who previously argued against all forms of violence insisted that militarised campuses, tear gas canisters thrown into teaching and administrative buildings, and bullet wounds on our students’ bodies were unavoidable, and necessary to ensure that, unlike the University of Cape Town, our academic calendar concluded in December 2016.
Outside of government, the most powerful institutions in corporate and higher education have remained stubbornly resistant to transformation of culture or numbers.
The return of white supremacist violence to the sphere of the spectacular is everywhere evident from the resurgence of older notions of race, once again taking a grip on the popular imagination. The peers of the children around Mandela continue to live highly raced lives. Their race and inherited class position is more likely to determine whether they can afford school fees and are able to graduate, than their aptitude. Each challenge to how race works to exclude in the academy is met with statistics that show that university undergraduate enrolments are demographically representative. But this information is deceptive. The real answer lies in the demographics of who graduates, when, and with(out) student debt.
Every year we lose some of our best students because of inability to afford education. For many years, academics have complained of students passing out in class, sleeping in libraries, under stairs and “squatting” in friends’ rooms, of students who live on popcorn because it is filling and the only thing they can afford. The private food vendors on campus make food unaffordable. Some of the people I was a student with in the 1990s at UCT have no idea how different and unaffordable campus life is. They assume that our students’ residence fees include all meals, as ours did and that the university offers a range of affordable food options in canteens. These are the many ways in which race continues to matter. Students who travel for three hours on public transport to attend an eight o’clock class are more likely to be Black and poor/working class than not. At their most brilliant, they remain at a distinct disadvantage. This is not “just” class at play. It is not just the legacy of apartheid. It is the failure to create a different society with opportunities to be free of poverty. Students in my first year class in 2017 were born in the second year of democracy. They are younger than the children around Mandela on the poster I started with.
Avoiding race power has led not to the disappearance but to emboldened racism – institutional and individual.
A group of young white men who were either babies or not yet born in 1994 forced Black labourers to consume urine on camera at an institution of higher learning in the Free State, while another group at the same institution assaulted a Black fellow student a few months later. At a different institution in the Northern Cape, white students raped a Black student who has a white mother.
Closer to home, teachers separate students into Black groups and white groups for teaching in a school in Gauteng; Black parents have to go to court to force transformation of the governing body at an Eastern Cape private school and to ensure the teaching of isiXhosa at the same institution.
At Wits University, the campus newspaper reports that young white women racially harassed and threatened to assault a student who questioned their mocking of a Black academic’s pronunciation. In the Western Cape a domestic worker is assaulted in the suburb in which she works because the white man who assaults her “mistakes her for a prostitute” and “snapped […] as a result of having these people in our area”.
Perhaps the neighbourhood-watch