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It is urgent that we move away speedily from dealing with apartheid symbols – and uproot apartheid from the roots, writes Buti Manamela
Last month one of the last remaining government ministers in the twilight years of the apartheid government – Pik Botha – died.
He was buried in a private funeral attended by family and close friends. Mourners and speakers included his close friend Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of former president Thabo Mbeki.
The various reactions to his death pose important questions on the progress we have made on the national question in South Africa.
At the time of his death, Botha was already a member of the ANC and was lauded by the party as having contributed to building a new South Africa.
Some expressed their shock on social media.
They did not understand Mbeki and the ANC’s positive or balanced statement on Botha, given his history.
Should we mourn Botha as one of the people who were at the forefront of selling the apartheid regime to the world as its foreign minister, or remember his and last apartheid president FW de Klerk’s role in negotiating a democratic settlement with the ANC, SA Communist Party and other forces of national liberation.
He died at a time when there is a rise of toxic narrow nationalism, politics of identity, ethnic chauvinism and sometimes overt racism that threaten to undo the national democratic project.
But why is the national question important, along with the nation-building project? There have been some worrying and threatening developments towards this project.
Recently, for instance, AfriForum went on a tirade in the US to sell lies about how the “black government” in South Africa has spearheaded the carnage of mainly white farm owners in the name of land redistribution.
Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini similarly led an ethno-mobilisation campaign promising to unleash amabutho if the state and Parliament go ahead in implementing the recommendations of a high-level panel on how land under the Ingonyama Trust should be transferred directly to those who occupy it.
The debate around land expropriation without compensation takes a racial stance because land, a highly emotive yet central question in our national discourse, is still a polarising issue to our nation.
Now and then there is a national outcry if a guesthouse owner or a restaurateur refuses to serve black people; or if a shareholder in a meat-basting company celebrates the absence of kaffirs on a beach in Greece.
Some of my black peers prefer, for instance, to support the All Blacks against the Springboks because they do not believe that our national team is representative of all of us.
All of these capture the national psyche, with temporary rage unleashed on social media and anger splashed in our talk shows and newspaper columns as people go berserk about yet another racist exposed.
What the above exposes is the deep-seated and unresolved national question that still lingers on and how it was sugar-coated in 1994.
Now and again when a Penny Sparrow gathers bravery to blurt out in public some of the dinner-table racial slurs, we pretend that these are isolated cases because racism ended with Nelson Mandela dancing side by side with De Klerk on the lawns of the Union Buildings.
I do not for a moment argue, or even think, that the ANC under Mandela sold out.
It was prudent then to enter into a temporary truce to restore peace and order so that when issues came up – such as land, wealth and other forms of expropriation and redistribution – we would be able to settle them.
The ANC and the alliance were under no illusion that the new state superstructure would with ease succeed in building a “nonracist, nonsexist and democratic and prosperous society” as envisioned in its strategy and tactics document.
This was to be achieved under new conditions of struggle.
But where are we now? There is still racism and it is systematic and structural.
It is visible in the workplace, in Parliament, in cities and gated communities, in the judiciary, in the stock exchange, in the media, in sports, within universities, in church and in all institutions that could not escape the barbarism and soft power of the apartheid system.
The main features of apartheid and colonialism are still visible and remain unresolved.
On the one hand the apartheid and colonial state proved to be incapable of reform; on the other the post-1994 democratic state proved incapable of destroying the apartheid state and building a new, cohesive, national and democratic state.
This is because of the innate racial, patriarchal and class contradictions within and outside of the state that seek to protect old interests and privileges.
Many have argued that the ANC-led government, and black people in general, should stop apportioning blame on apartheid for the persisting features of apartheid.
But, in reality, it can be achieved only by disrupting the status quo, installing a new state apparatus that is capable of building our society anew.
Others have gone as far as insisting that black people should stop blaming apartheid because the generation of whites now are not responsible for the past; they forget they inherited the wealth that had been appropriated violently for generations since the first settler set foot in our shore.
The ANC and the alliance should intensify the fight against corruption and state capture, among others; but it will succeed in changing the lives of millions of blacks in general, and Africans in particular, only from economic and political bondage by completely destroying whatever remains of neo-colonialism and apartheid.
This should be done by radically transforming our economy, breaking the back of white monopoly capitalism in the minerals-finance-energy complex, disrupting the dependence on the apartheid spatial development planning by introducing new human settlements that undermine the gated communities, pushing ahead with expropriation of land without compensation and fulfilling the basic tenets of the Freedom Charter.
It is urgent that we move away speedily from dealing with apartheid symbols – and uproot apartheid from the roots.
Failure to do so will lead to South Africa going full-swing into a racialised national war that will lead to no clear victors and vanquished, but will permanently destroy whatever little the 1994 consensus sought to salvage.
Manamela is member of the central committee of the SACP and ANC MP
