Abstract
Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about ‘race’ and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state’s re-calibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. These adjustments have meant a re-articulation of ‘race’, class, nation and meanings of liberation that sparks contestations of affirmative action from both its beneficiaries and its ‘victims’. When situated within this global and local matrix, these reconfigurations of power, domination and exclusion reveal post-colonial iterations of both the ‘ethnographic state’ and the well-worn statecraft of divide and rule.
Situating racial redress
As early as 1943, and 12 years prior to the 1955 Freedom Charter, South Africa’s Non-European Unity Movement articulated demands for democratic rights and for the abolition of racial discrimination in its Ten-Point Programme (Karis and Carter, 1973: 355–357). Despite this call, racist structures of the colonial era were statutorily entrenched by apartheid’s Population Registration Act No. 30 of 1950. That law stipulated these race classifications: ‘White’, ‘Native’ and ‘Coloured’ (Union of South Africa, 1950: 279). About a decade later, ‘Indian’ and ‘Chinese’ were designated sub-categories of ‘Coloured’ (Erasmus cited in Erasmus and Park, 2008: 100). Muriel Horrell (1982) notes from 1951 the National Party (NP) used ‘Bantu’ instead of the category ‘Native’, making this an official race category as of 1962. In 1978, the category ‘Bantu’ changed again and became ‘Black’. This usage excluded people racially classified ‘Coloured’. It referred only to South Africans formerly classified ‘Native’ and ‘Bantu’. In the 1970s, the Black Consciousness Movement contested this narrow use of ‘Black’. It argued that ‘Black’ was not a race category or classification, but a global political identification premised on resistance to oppression in contexts of White supremacy (Biko, 2004). The classifications of the apartheid state determined, among other significant factors that shape social positioning, where one could live and set up a business; the quality of one’s education and the level of one’s skill; through Job Reservation laws, one’s access to the labour market and one’s ‘place’ in the social division of labour; one’s earnings and the degree of a person’s job security. Thus, ‘race’ and class became more tightly bound under apartheid. For example, by the early 1990s, close to 90% of managerial posts were filled by men of South Africa’s classified ‘White’ minority. Furthermore, legally differentiated wages by ‘race’ and gender classification persisted under apartheid rule until this time (Standing et al., 1996: 385–414).
Lewins (unpublished manuscript) notes that struggles against what Von Holdt (2003) calls the ‘apartheid workplace regime’ were characterised predominantly by resistance to racial discrimination in the workplace and demands for equal access to both the labour and the corporate market, irrespective of ‘race’. Founded in the 1960s, the National African Federated Chambers of Commerce, an association of Black entrepreneurs, advocated the idea of ‘Black economic empowerment’. The combined effect of global pressures and local struggles by Black workers and by South Africa’s then embryonic Black middle class meant that by the end of the 1970s, some multinational corporations in South Africa adopted the code of conduct initiated by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, then a member of General Motors Board of Directors in the United States. This code provided limited measures for ‘equal opportunity’ and equal pay for equal work, mainly on the basis of ‘race’ and also on the basis of gender, in the midst of a deeply racialised society and labour market. It served as somewhat of a prototype for South Africa’s post-1994 Employment Equity and Black Economic Empowerment policies. Beneficiaries of this proto-affirmative action were Black professionals, among them members of the Black Management Forum, founded in 1976 (Bezuidenhout et al., 2008; Marais, 2011: 109). The primary place given to ‘race’ – in relation to class, gender and disability – as a criterion for equity in these later policies should be seen in the context of this history in which, understandably, ‘race’ is given precedence. Significantly, despite 15 years of predominantly race-based affirmative action, the Commission for Employment Equity pessimistically reports that the percentage of ‘Whites’ in top management has remained static at 73%, with ‘White’ men constituting almost 60% of these positions (Department of Labour, 2013: 45). Given the figures for the early 1990s noted above, comparatively speaking, this suggests that affirmative action has had scant effect, at least in corporate management.
Neoliberal globalisation: A conception
Neoliberalism is understood here as a dynamic constellation of political projects, power relations, ‘structural adjustment’ policies and forms of government that provoke struggles about the constitutive making and remaking of necessarily interactive global and local fields of social life. Fernando Coronil’s (2000) argument is insightful: neoliberal globalisation recasts colonialisms’ often vulgar and mostly upfront assertions of a geo-politics of difference – with difference understood as bounded and as hierarchy – into a seemingly unified yet more occluded assumption of such radical difference. In this re-casting, he argues, ‘the elusive figure of the globe … conceals the socially concentrated but geographically diffuse transnational financial and political networks that integrate metropolitan and peripheral dominant sectors’ (Coronil, 2000: 368, emphasis added). The global south is no longer conceived as a separate, ‘closed-off’ Other. Instead, it is either ‘integrated’ or expected to ‘integrate’ into the ‘global free market’, of course, on unequal terms. In neoliberal discourse, the cultural dominance of ‘the global free market’ subsumes under its umbrella complex, multiple, contestatory and power-laden social realities making ‘the open market’ that to which all the world has to submit. Its genius makes all the world creatures of ‘the market’ which it constructs around ‘the survival of the fittest’. Its reasoning occludes changed continuities across the days of colonial exploitation and ways ‘the market’, in lived reality today, feathers the riches of the richest and rips at the rags of the poorest (Coronil, 2000: 353–356). For Coronil (2000: 358), the distinctive and novel feature of globalisation since the 1970s is the contradictory coalescence of ‘new patterns of global integration’ and ‘heightened social polarisation within and among nations’. Thus, he writes:, ‘neoliberal globalisation … builds commonalities upon asymmetries … it unites by dividing’ (Coronil, 200: 352). This article locates the outcomes of affirmative action in South Africa within local manifestations of this coalescence of processes.
Drawing on his work in southern Africa, Ferguson (2009) writes against this often repeated, yet valid, conclusion about market dominance and its ‘evils’ for the poor. He cites Brazil, South Africa and India to illustrate that unlike neoliberal doctrine, in practice, neoliberal government does not always ignore poverty or relegate it to ‘the market’ (Ferguson, 2009: 169). He distinguishes between neoliberalism’s ‘arts of government’ and their related means of creating subjectivities, on the one hand, and its economic and ideological project, on the other. Among the subjectivities neoliberal globalisation wishes to produce is the ‘responsible citizen’ – an entrepreneur who, irrespective of his or her assets, bears the risks and costs of this order. Furthermore, he suggests that these ‘arts of government’ are pregnant with ideas and questions that can be appropriated for progressive forms of government generated by new forms of politics pressed from the challenges of our time: precarious work, improvised livelihoods, transnationalism and the retreat of the nation-state from public life. In support of his argument, he cites the idea of a Basic Income Grant put forward in the late 1990s by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, South Africa’s major trade union federation. Proponents of this grant argued it would enable human capabilities and empowerment through basic cash payments without policing the poor and their decisions about risk, investment and expenditure.
Ferguson’s (2009) perspicacious paradox of ‘pro-poor/neoliberal’ possibilities resonates with what Lazzarato (2012) sees as a ‘paradoxical articulation between political subject[ion] and economies’, in so far as such articulation pries open a space for reconfiguring social and political life (p. 54). Ferguson (2009: 182) is concerned with possibilities for peeling entrenched technologies of government from their neoliberal political ends and putting them to different use. In contrast, Lazzarato (2012) is concerned with the dire implications for progressive political struggle, of the moral and economic ‘debt economy’ at the foundation of neoliberalism. For example, he argues that this logic of debt seems to freeze ‘the future and its possibilities’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 49) by exploiting poor people’s very existence in the service of turning their ‘social rights into debts’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 104). In post-1994 South Africa, the poor’s inability to buy basic services, mainly due to the confluence of their growing deprivation, on the one hand, and the privatisation of public services, on the other, is an example of such exploitation. Poor people’s resistance to evictions and to pre-paid water and electricity in South Africa is one manifestation of struggles against both brutal and nuanced ways in which the state deploys debt as an apparatus of power through its commodification of vital needs (see: Desai, 2003; Naidoo, 2007; Veriava and Naidoo, 2013).
Structural adjustment converges with transition
The space for reconfiguring social and political life suggested by Ferguson (2009) and Lazzarato (2012) has been far smaller than the painful hardships visited on ‘the poor’ in South Africa. In an earlier work, Ferguson (2006) reminds us that ‘the promise of democracy has been held out to African publics at just the moment in history when key matters of macro-economic policy were taken out of the hands of African states’ (p. 12). South Africa is no exception.
Historical processes specific to neoliberal globalisation and at the centre of growing inequality in South Africa date back to the global recession of the 1960s which continued into the 1980s. In the context of this increasingly volatile world economic system, neoliberal technologies of rule and of adjustment came as a response to this structural volatility. A key feature of neoliberal globalisation is the articulation of economies within a wider landscape of an increasingly polarised world economy in which particularly those with colonial histories are integrated into this economy on especially unequal terms (Marais, 2011: 84). Following on earlier neoliberal adjustments to accumulation crises in apartheid South Africa’s racial capitalism, the early 1990s saw more such adjustments to South Africa’s accumulation strategies, this time, intensified. Marais (2011: 84) writes, ‘South Africa entered its historic transition hauling along a bedraggled economy’. While he traces in detail the unfolding of South Africa’s post-1994 economic policies and provides as detailed an analysis of these (Marais, 2011: 97–175), I note only briefly key neoliberal macroeconomic policies.
In 1996, the South African government adopted its Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy which advocated in the main economic and trade liberalisation, privatisation of some state enterprises and some commitment to social spending from savings accrued from deficit reduction (Marais, 2011: 113). In 2006, the government adopted a framework called the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA) which emphasised infrastructure development, social grants and a public-works programme (Marais, 2011: 137). Significantly, Marais (2011: 137, 139) alerts one to these policies, including South Africa’s most recent National Development Plan, as part of ‘a longer narrative of restructuring that dates back to … the early 1980s’ and continues its reconfiguration of the elite and its alliances with global capital.
The underbelly of this reconfiguration is that South Africa today is marked by gross and starkly visible unequal distribution of income and wealth. Alongside China, as of 2013 South Africa is ‘the most unequal country on earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid’ (Oxfam, 2013). With a Gini-coefficient of around 0.70 (OECD, 2013: 18), it more closely resembles a low-income country than its imagined middle-income status. While its eager youthful population offers a ‘demographic dividend’, young people are vulnerable: 71% of the total unemployed population in South Africa are aged 15-34 years and are neither employed, educated or trained - dubbed the NEET (Neither Employed, Educated or Trained) generation (Hofmeyr, 2012a: 22). The World Economic Forum 2012 ranks South Africa’s education system among the worst in the world - 140 out of 144 countries (Hofmeyr, 2012b: 46). Given that education is a key asset required for poverty eradication, these indicators gesture towards a future of increased precariousness, deepening inequality, increased poverty and increased unemployment. Such possible (not inevitable) decline should be viewed in light of a rate of unemployment, officially 25% for 2011, and when more broadly defined, at 36% for 2012 (Chitiga-Mabugu, 2013: 169). This is already much higher than that of middle-income countries like Brazil and China with rates of 6% and 6.5%, respectively, for 2011 (Chitiga-Mabugu, 2013: 170). Such possible decline should also be viewed in light of current estimates that 40% of South Africa’s population of 51 million live in poverty (Chitiga-Mabugu, 2013: 173).
At the upper end of the class hierarchy, a recent study by the University of Cape Town’s Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing – ‘Four Million and Rising’ – reports that South Africa’s Black middle class has grown from 1.7 million in 2004 to 4.2 million in 2012, while its disposable household income grew by 34% for the same period. This is in contrast to the growth of the long well-established White middle class over the same period: from 2.8 million in 2004 to 3 million in 2012 (Steyn, 2013), its disposable household income having grown by 10% (Radebe, 2013). Much of the former increase in disposable household income is, however, from a lower base and is attributed to public sector employment, the largest employer in South Africa. This sector has ‘doubled its wage bill over the past five years’ (Steyn, 2013). In stark contrast, the wage share of value added (profits + wages) in this country’s strike-ridden mining industry dropped by 7% over the last decade (Forslund, 2013: 101).
Alongside systemic inequalities inherited from colonialism and apartheid, there are controversial, yet notable, continuities between South Africa’s apartheid and post-1994 regimes. Against this backdrop, I explore the ways some features of the colonial/apartheid state have been recast into post-colonial/post-apartheid forms, the ways forms of differentiated citizenship have proliferated and the implications for affirmative action in South Africa.
Post-colonial divide and rule
Against apartheid’s racially differentiated citizenship, the national liberation movement made equal citizenship its key goal. However, South Africa’s democratic government continues to use apartheid race classifications for purposes of redress (Erasmus, 2010; Maré, 2001; Posel, 2001; Ruggunan and Maré, 2012). Furthermore, its related ‘tribal’ sub-classifications were expressed in the now lapsed Traditional Courts Bill of 2008 (Smythe, 2012). In its production of a post-colonial version of the ‘ethnographic state’, the post-1994 South African state has re-calibrated the nation’s ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. The former are beneficiaries of affirmative action policies – either in their apartheid or post-1994 formulations – designed, to paraphrase Coronil (2000: 360), to help the state concentrate privilege among old and new elites. The latter are neither targets nor beneficiaries of these policies. Instead, ‘populations of need’ are targets and survivors of a plethora of policies designed to help the state ‘distribute poverty’ (Coronil, 2000: 360). Central to these strategies on the part of the state is a post-colonial version of a well-worn practice: divide and rule (see: Chatterjee, 2004: 50). Thus, the state divides ‘populations of need’ into ‘those really in need’ and ‘those who claim to be in need, but are not’. In developmental parlance, this translates into ‘the deserving poor’, and the ‘undeserving poor’.
‘Populations of privilege’ are divided, too: those ‘forever indebted to history’ and those whom ‘history owes something’ today and tomorrow (Ndebele, 2014: 14). Most South Africans classified ‘White’ remain a ‘population of privilege’ by virtue of the historical benefits accrued to White privilege. These indebted citizens (sometimes with the exception of ‘White’ women) are excluded from today’s affirmative action policies. Ndebele’s (2014) ‘South African “Black” … [who] still has to be affirmed through special policies’ is the citizen, cadre and/or bureaucrat who assumes that his or her eligibility for privilege is given by history (p. 14). But who is considered ‘Black’ remains contested. Post-1994 South African Government policy and institutional practices both within and outside of government use various combinations of conceptions of ‘Black’ that circulated during apartheid. For example, the Employment Equity Act (EEA) of 1998 (South African Government, 1998) in its stipulation of designated groups – Black people, women and the disabled – includes those historically classified ‘Black’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’ and more recently ‘Chinese’ in its definition of ‘Black’. This suggests a political use of the term ‘Black’. There are, however, discrepancies between (a) official apartheid race categories noted above, (b) the EEA’s definition of ‘Black people’ and (c) everyday notions of who is considered ‘Black’. In line with the EEA, for some South Africans, ‘Black’ refers to all people who were oppressed under apartheid. For other South Africans, ‘Black’ refers only to those considered ‘African’ (formerly classified ‘Native’ or ‘Bantu’) – a narrow conception of the term.
These discrepancies are significant as they shape notions of who is more deserving of affirmative action, its implementation as well as the terms upon which legal cases regarding affirmative action are brought before the courts. Eligibility for affirmative action is often spoken about in terms of a sliding scale: those eligible without question and those with ambiguous eligibility requiring justification. For example, the Pretoria High Court ruled in June 2008 that Chinese South Africans fall within the EEA’s definition of ‘Black people’ given the evidence-based argument that these South Africans were subject to apartheid’s exclusions and oppressions because of their classification under the category ‘Coloured’ (Erasmus and Park, 2008). Some Black corporate professionals referred to the ruling as ‘surprising, irrational, shallow, opportunistic and inexplicable’ (Chilwane cited in Erasmus and Park, 2008: 99). The Labour Minister’s statements indicate his disagreement with the judgement: ‘What I know is that coloureds don’t speak Chinese’ (Sapa cited in Erasmus and Park, 2008: 99). More recently, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Professor Adam Habib, told a local newspaper, The Times, that he has been ‘screamed at … and threatened with legal action from parents [whose children were] denied entry’ into this university’s medical school (Child, 2014). This report further noted Professor Habib’s knowledge ‘of a case in which a student had tried to change his racial classification to [‘Coloured’] at the Department of Home Affairs to improve his chances of acceptance into a medical degree course’ (Child, 2014). These examples indicate the complications, ambiguities and contestations introduced both by race classification in the past and by the use of these apartheid classifications for administrative purposes in the present.
Furthermore, these examples highlight the way both eligible and ambiguously eligible ‘populations of privilege’ rely on their substantive citizenship to access affirmative action. To do this, they operate ‘on the terrain of established law or administrative procedure’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 60) in their fight for access to and representation in structures of privilege. The overarching frame of their politics is targeted social inclusion (see Walsh, 2015). On the contrary, ‘populations of need’ rely on a politics of affirmation to stretch their equally young but minimally formal citizenship. To do this, they operate on the terrain of life itself: struggling for access to water, shelter, warmth and livelihoods (see Naidoo, 2007; see Walsh, 2015). While the overarching frame of their politics is to transform structures of privilege with a view to social justice (Walsh, 2015), Veriava and Naidoo (2013: 86) advocate mindfulness around the forms of affirmation in which such politics is grounded. What this re-calibration, particularly of populations of privilege, has meant for ways the South African state has been deployed in service of affirmative action and with what effect must be considered.
Politics of the directorate
Sixty years ago Frantz Fanon, with astounding foresight, provided a stinging analysis of what Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (2006) calls the ‘power daemons’ of the post-colonial state. Fanon (1990: 131, 127, 120, 138, 128, 134) addressed the limits of its ‘narrow nationalism’ and its ‘race feeling’; the ‘wilful narcissism’ of the post-independence political directorate which, in a ‘great procession of corruption’, ‘wastes the victory … gained’ by its use of the party for its ‘scandalous enrichment, speedy and pitiless’, in a context where the majority of people are poor and most youth are unemployed. He noted that the continued dire material conditions of the majority would deafen their ears to leaders’ calls ‘to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then’ (Fanon, 1990: 136). That this analysis rings true for many South Africans contradicts Southall’s (2013: 18) suggestion that theories of the post-colonial state might have ‘limited applicability’ to South Africa’s post-1994 state.
The spirit of Fanon’s argument then, and of Coronil (2000) and Chatterjee’s (2004, 2011) more recent arguments about post-colonial re-castings, resonates with analyses of the politics of the South African state in relation to affirmative action. Paul Maylam (2013) provides a deliberately cautious and historically contextualised map of the similarities between the apartheid and post-independence orders of South Africa. He writes, The very idea of drawing any kind of comparison between the pre-1994 and post-1994 history of South Africa is offensive, wholly improper, thoroughly perverse, and open to serious objection … Yet despite [the] fundamental differences [between these regimes], it is possible to detect some similar tendencies and trajectories in the respective histories of the [National Party’s post-1948 Afrikaner nationalism and the African National Congress’s post-1994 African nationalism]. (Maylam, 2013: 62, author’s emphasis).
This caution stands in stark contrast to the hyperbolic ‘power daemons’ of post-independence Africa animated into familiarity by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s (2006) literary brilliance.
The continuities sketched by Maylam (2013) provide a useful screen against which to read growing concerns about the broader political implications of the ways South Africa’s affirmative action legislation has been implemented since 1998. He notes that both the NP’s post-1948 Afrikaner nationalism and the African National Congress’ (ANC) post-1994 African Nationalism are rendered brittle by internal class and factional tensions. Both are victim-nationalisms premised on claims that all classes of Afrikaners are equally marginalised ‘culturally’ (for the NP) and that all classes among those deemed ‘African’ (in the eyes of dominant factions of the ANC) are equally marginalised racially. Both are characterised by ambiguous economic policies leaning heavily towards capitalism, with the ANC supporting neoliberal orthodoxy. This support favours respective elites: on the one hand, the old, established elite, born of British colonialism and post-1948 Afrikaner Economic Empowerment and on the other, ‘Black Diamonds’, the new emerging elite, born of post-1994 narrow Black nationalism, Black Economic Empowerment and affirmative action. ‘The Afrikaner’ viewed the public sector as a key site for consolidating power and as a source of patronage providing fertile ground for ‘culture/race’ to triumph over administrative competence, serving citizens, and over an anti-corruption ethic. So does the new political directorate. Power and patronage in these nationalist projects foster cronyism, nepotism and corruption (Maylam, 2013: 62–75). The South African civil service is a good example of such consolidation of power through affirmative action.
Cadre affirmation
This civil service has a long history of racialised power struggles. These date back to the early 19th century when the British excluded Dutch in favour of English-speaking civil servants and the mid-20th century when ‘Afrikaners’ excluded English-speaking civil servants (Marais, 1994). The racial profile of apartheid’s public service and its maintenance of apartheid’s exclusionary policies were intimately connected. The geographically separated and administratively ‘independent’ homelands created for those classified ‘African’ epitomised racialised governance. These arrangements meant ‘before 1994 more than 94% of senior posts in the public service (of what was then referred to as ‘white’ South Africa) were occupied by white people’ (Martin, 1999 cited in Naidoo, 2008: 103) who, in 1989, constituted only 13.6% of the total population (SAIRR, 1990 cited in Naidoo, 2008: 108).
Given this, the post-1994 government created, in addition to the EEA of 1998, affirmative action policies specifically for the public service. The White Paper on Affirmative Action in the Public Service (DPSA, 1998 cited in Naidoo, 2008) argued a racially representative public service was key to restore its ‘legitimacy’ and ‘credibility’ for the majority of South Africans (Naidoo, 2008: 106). Thus, by 2004 ‘African’ representation (79% of the total population) in the public service was about 74.9%, while ‘White’ representation (about 9% of the population) stood at 12.4% (Statistics SA, 2003 cited in Naidoo, 2008: 111). In addition, this White Paper argued Black public servants would enhance efficiency given linguistic and social skills better ‘matched’ to historically excluded communities (Naidoo, 2008: 111). Given this history, the political meaning of ‘efficiency’ stretched beyond mere delivery of public services and, it was hoped, would be kept in check by prioritising the needs of South African residents.
Inefficient public services are commonly attributed to skill shortages and incompetence on the part of affirmative action appointees. Naidoo (2008) provides several convincing reasons why one cannot, however, easily establish such a causal relationship. First, the post-1994 government attempts to provide quality services for all its constituents (51 million people), not just for a White minority (Cameron, 2004 cited in Naidoo, 2008: 117). Second, in the context of this increased responsibility, the public service staff component was reduced by about 151,764 between 1993 and 2006 (Naidoo, 2008: 119). Third, this sector is marked by high staff turnover in managerial posts (Naidoo, 2008: 120), and fourth, it faces serious difficulties with filling vacancies at middle and senior management levels (Naidoo, 2008: 121).
Such difficulty, argues Chipkin (2008), is compounded by reducing affirmative action to ‘numbers of Black faces’, a practice which encourages departments to leave posts vacant when unable to find suitably qualified or skilled Black candidates. Perversely, this undermines efficiency while giving the impression of a high statistical average for racial redress and representivity (Chipkin, 2008: 143–144). He further argues that positions are either poorly defined and/or job descriptions are unrealistic about the combination of skills required of a single individual. This complicates finding suitably qualified candidates – irrespective of historical race classification – and causes high staff turnover since excellent candidates are set up to fail against overly ambitious job descriptions (Chipkin, 2008: 149).
In sum, these analyses reveal a far more complex relationship between affirmative action and public sector efficiency than commonly imagined. They suggest affirmative action policy in itself is not the key barrier to efficiency in this sector. Instead, ‘cadre deployment’ as a key method of affirmative action in South Africa’s public sector is the primary cause of mediocre service delivery. This blurring of administrative responsibility based on merit with political loyalty based on patronage is a challenge hardly unique to the ANC or South Africa. However, it takes a particular form when configured around narrow nationalism expressed in party political factionalism and infused with narrow meanings of ‘blackness’ at the expense of competent, accountable governance with integrity. In a context of high unemployment, this configuration lends itself to greater risks for abuse of power and for clientele-ism. Cadre affirmation is flawed as a politics for social justice. It serves the dominant party’s political elite. It renders public institutions unstable because politicised public appointments strip these institutions of continuity in effective leadership and leave them open to dissatisfaction from constituencies they are meant to serve. I turn to some expressions of such dissatisfaction.
‘Race’, class, nation and liberation
‘Populations of privilege’ would be considered part of what Chatterjee (2004) refers to as ‘civil society’ which emerges in the sphere of legality and civility. On the contrary, ‘populations of need’ constitute what he calls ‘political society’ which emerges from the contradictions and excesses of the politics and performance of each of these sets of population. ‘Political society’ in post-1994 South Africa emerges mainly from the betrayal of what seemed to be a common conception of liberation at a time when many among its now ‘privileged populations’ were struggling, alongside those now considered ‘needy’, against apartheid domination (Hart, 2007). It emerges in the entanglement and contradictions produced by technologies of developmental government – one set of technologies geared to the ‘privileged’, the other to the ‘needy’ – that have overtaken the politics of equal citizenship of the national liberation movement (Chatterjee, 2004: 37–40). The consequences of the re-calibrations and proliferations discussed so far come into sharp relief in this neoliberal conjuncture of South Africa in which ‘self-determination’ is assumed either to have been restored to its citizens or to be in the process of such restoration. Hence, Hart’s (2007) argument that the key tensions of this conjuncture emerge from the re-articulation of ‘race’, class, nation and liberation.
In the late Stuart Hall’s (1980) terms, South Africa is a society historically structured in patterns of dominance marked by the different ways ‘race’ and class articulate at various historical conjunctures, rendering each mutually constitutive in producing different configurations of their intersection, also in the present. The idea of ‘articulation’ is a thread of Stuart Hall’s thought that has not necessarily gained traction in the social sciences, but rather, as Hart (2007) notes, remains under-utilised. The idea allows one to reveal the ways various shifting elements of a social formation – seemingly congruent or seemingly discrepant – constellate particular social realities, under particular conditions. It is a tool with which to think through ways power is reconfigured in the continuities and changes of relations of domination and subjugation.
Hart (2002) reinvigorates Stuart Hall’s interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of ‘articulation’ in her theorisation of Coronil’s (2000) conception of neoliberal globalisation’s seemingly unified and free global market which obscures often life-threatening politics of difference. In this interpretation, neoliberal ideology ‘articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations; it does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference’ (Hall, 1988: 166 cited in Hart, 2002: 28). She writes that Hall’s concept of articulation ‘… refers not just to a structural effect … rather, … the ‘unities’ constructed through … articulation are almost always contradictory, and must be continually renovated, renewed, and re-enacted’ (Hart, 2002: 29).
Hart (2007) provides a prescient application of Gramsci’s concept ‘articulation’ to the neoliberal conjuncture in South Africa. She points to ways re-articulations of ‘race’, class and nationalism in the context of neoliberalism bolster the ANC’s hegemony at the same time as they render it profoundly unstable. On the one hand, ruling-elite expressions of nationalism weld onto popular understandings of the same, producing a ‘unity’. On the other hand, the heightened conspicuous opulence of the elite – across racial lines and enabled by the ANC’s post-1994 embrace of neoliberalism – in contrast to the growing deprivation of the South Africa’s Black majority produces a ‘distinction’ that renders vulnerable this ‘unity’. Hart (2007) illustrates the ways tensions produced by these re-articulations have exacerbated since 1996. The year 2012, now known for the highest incidence of service delivery protests since 1994, is testimony to this amplification. Moreover, the intensity of protests about social exclusion is expected to rise in 2014 (Bond, 2014: 2). In response, the ANC repeatedly deploys ‘the national project’ to discipline the poor and the left into submission. A recent example is the Lonmin Massacre of 16 August 2012. Lonmin, one of the three largest platinum mining multinationals, together with the South African Police Service is responsible for killing 34 striking miners – the largest number of civilians killed by security forces since the abolition of official apartheid (Alexander et al., 2013). Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s Deputy President as of its May 2014 elections, a major owner of Lonmin, and former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, allegedly supported calling in the police now responsible for these killings (Bond, 2014: 8). At the time of writing, South Africans anxiously await the outcome of the Farlam Commission’s hearings on this tragedy, while a 5-month-long miners’ strike for better wages in this sector ended in late June 2014. These are but two of several indicators that make political analysts question how much longer the ANC can ride on its ‘liberation movement dividend’ to retain its dominant position (Booysen, 2013). President Zuma’s refrain in his 2014 State of the Nation address – ‘South Africa has a good story to tell’ – seems farcical in the face of these crises.
The limits of South African affirmative action policies for the current conjuncture lie in their disavowal of a long history of articulations of ‘race’ and class. This is not to say that South Africa’s long and notorious history of racial discrimination should not matter. Instead, it is to suggest that the complexity of this history and its place in post-1994 reconfigurations of relations of power, dominance and exclusion should matter more, particularly when it comes to policy and practice for racial redress that coheres with broader social justice.
Anti-, not post-race
Kimberley Crenshaw (2011) rightly argues that technologies of formal race classification – I would add, for purposes of domination – are not a necessary condition for racism(s) and attendant inequalities to thrive. Brazil is a good example. To complicate matters further, South Africa’s recent history shows the use of such technology for purposes of redress does not necessarily address the racial inequalities it is intended to erode. Instead, both ‘inter’- and ‘intra-racial’ inequality are reproduced by the current South African state through its appropriation of this technology for the benefit of political and economic elites. Given this, from the vantage point of South Africa, the problem of the 21st century is not only ‘the colour-blind’ (Crenshaw, 2011), but how to navigate between the rock of post-colonial re-castings of ‘race’ and the no-place of ‘post-race’.
With reference to the private sector, the Commission for Employment Equity concludes that South Africa has not, in the last decade of affirmative action, ‘shaken the stubborn domination of … Whites’ (EEC, 2013: 45). This opens to question the continued administrative use of apartheid’s race categories for purposes of redress and the conflation of race categories with the complex range of inequalities for which they stand (Erasmus, 2010). It suggests that without surrendering to apartheid race categories, advocates of anti-racism and social justice need to create and test new indicators that account for the effects of ‘race’ on social life with a view to undoing persistent racial inequalities in asset-based wealth and in human capabilities required for substantive citizenship. In other words, we do need to work towards eliminating race categories from social analysis. But if our aim is to erode racialised inequality with a view to addressing growing poverty, we cannot eliminate the conception of ‘race’ as a social construct in such analysis. We need this conception of ‘race’ to name the consequences of its use – whether for spoken or unspoken domination, whether for the benefit of an elite – and to enable recognition of racial disparities in particular.
A gathering of South African scholars and activists of anti-racism suggests we can do much better than capitulate to customary practices of race classification. We can access what lies beneath and behind ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ in the present. We can access what might lay beyond life with these categories (Erasmus, 2012). Moreover, we can do this without seeking ‘release from “race”’ (Crenshaw, 2011), but by wrestling with its effects in less arbitrary ways. Among the indicators suggested at this gathering for excavating the underlying elements of ‘race’ were which languages do you speak, read, write; did you/did your parents have the right to vote before 1994; what kind of setback, if any, did you have during high school, for example, violence at school, political action, pregnancy; how many generations of your family have had access to tertiary education; do you have access to the Internet; do you have access to clean water; how do you get to school each day: by bus, by car, on foot; if on foot or by public transport, how long does it take you to get to school; do you have access to any form of collateral or credit (Erasmus, 2012).
Arguing against the continued use of race categories/classification and in favour of creating new indicators for the effects of meanings of ‘race’ on social life does not fit the now fashionable paradigm of post-race – the latest Northern reformulation of a persistent racial order. Arguing against continued use of race as an administrative category does not advocate erasure and de-legitimisation of the social effects of ‘race’. Instead, it is specifically anti-race and anti-racist in its recuperation of a politics of anti-racialist anti-racism. Its aim is to unmoor taken for granted uses of ‘race’ and their underlying structures of privilege, and to arm anti-racist critique and activism with sharper teeth.
Discourses of post-raciality are predominant in North America, the European Union and in countries with histories of settler colonialism where whiteness remains virtually a singularly hegemonic discourse in a context where people considered ‘White’ are dominant numerically, politically and economically. Australia is one such example (McAllan, 2011). In this discourse, the act of naming ‘race’ is not only seen as ‘dangerous’, but is itself considered ‘racist’, and the prevalence of systemic racialised inequality is trivialised as it places the burden of oppression at the door of its survivors, judging the latter for ‘not measuring up’. For Goldberg (2009), the privatisation of ‘race’ in these contexts erases the possibility of its public use for naming racial injustice – what he refers to as ‘racial neoliberalism’. Alongside such privatisation of ‘race’ among South Africa’s ‘White’ minority, contemporary South Africa reveals the public use of ‘race’ for private gain on the part of a political and economic elite described rather harshly by Moeletsi Mbeki (2009) as ‘a class of unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists … [who aspire to] … the lifestyle and standard of living of old white South Africa’ (pp. 61, 73). This public use of ‘race’ is a form of racialised selective and political patronage.
In South Africa, a hegemonic, narrow Black nationalism competes with hegemonic ‘forget about race’ discourse. The injunction to forget about ‘race’ is central to ways the idea of ‘post-race’ is deployed in South Africa. This use of ‘post-race’ spins webs of deceit about the history of racialised power. At the same time, South Africa’s post-1994 political directorate spins webs of deceit about the all-determining effects of ‘race’, about the ‘trickle-down effect’ of Black Economic Empowerment and about (im)possibilities for agency towards an economically more just society.
Closure
This article moves beyond a fragmentary assessment of the successes and failures of affirmative action in particular sectors of South Africa’s economy. It situates affirmative action in the wider post-1994 South African context which is marked by increasing social inequality. Central to this bigger picture are growing local struggles about social exclusion from basic rights to housing, water, power, sanitation, livelihoods and decent wages. These struggles are about questions of wealth distribution. Given that the majority of poor people are Black and that affirmative action has benefitted an elite minority, these struggles are also about what a politics of affirmation means in post-1994 South Africa.
It is important to examine affirmative action in relation to these struggles among the marginalised and to locate both these struggles about social exclusion within the global matrix of which South Africa is a part. The convergence of intensified neoliberal policies with South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy has had particular implications for the unfolding of affirmative action as part of its policies on racial redress. South Africa’s integration into ‘the global free market’ has meant the liberalisation of trade and increased ease of capital flows in the form of local multinational investments and particularly as capital flight in the form of offshore investments. At this moment of convergence, the rise to political power of the ANC as the leader of South Africa’s transition to democracy brought with it all manner of collusions between the state and White-dominated corporate capital. The underside of this confluence of processes has left the majority of South Africans to lives of increasing poverty, vulnerability and exposure to state violence, bringing into sharp relief the contradictions embedded in the ANC’s neoliberal economic policies, on the one hand, and in its deployment of the state in service of affirming its cadres, on the other hand. Cadre affirmation occurs through public sector employment and through what is derogatorily known as ‘tenderpreneurship’: ‘the granting, via a corrupting tender process, of small contracts to fledgling African entrepreneurs’ (Bond, 2014: 6), particularly those who are politically loyal to the ANC.
These contradictions are best situated at the nexus of occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and the simultaneous injunction to forget about ‘race’ and thus ignore the effects of its historical legacy on the present. As part of this nexus, the idea of a ‘global free market’ obscures ways in which its exploitative logic perpetuates histories of global inequality. The tyranny of the market is exacerbated by the logic of debt on which neoliberalism is premised. In addition, the ANC’s elite nationalism produces its own occlusions: deepening inter- and intra-racial inequality. Furthermore, both this nationalist project and affirmative action are each premised on their own moral economy of indebtedness: the former, on political debts accrued to leadership of the postcolony through unrealised promises to ‘the people’; the latter, on debts produced by colonial and apartheid history. Locating the outcomes of affirmative action in South Africa at the intersection of these debts and occlusions reveals the ways certain features of the colonial/apartheid state are recast in post-colonial/post-apartheid forms of divide and rule.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My appreciation extends to Michaeline Crichlow, Terence Gomez, Catherine Walsh, Prishani Naidoo, Kezia Lewins, Edmarie Pretorius, Kira Erwin and Renée van der Wiel for their unfailing collegial support during the completion of this article. Thanks also to the anonymous readers for their valuable commentary.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.