The Nation,its populations and their re-calibration: South African affirmative action in a neoliberal age

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Lewins (unpublished manuscript) notes that struggles against what Von Holdt (2003) calls the ‘apartheid workplace regime’ were characterised predominantly by resistance to racial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.

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.

‘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.