The Lesson South Africa Never Learnt

(This is an excerpt from my upcoming book 'South Africa Explained')

The electoral shorthand for South Africa’s racial division is ANC versus DA. South African minorities vote DA in similar proportion to what African Americans vote Democratic, around 90%. No matter the DA’s overwhelming support from whites, Indians and coloureds, these minorities are less than one in six of the population. You only need 60% of Africans to turn out for the ANC and they have a majority. And this is more-or-less what happens, ensuring that the minorities are unlikely ever to enjoy real political representation at national level.

The explicit political differences between the ANC and DA are not big. It’s not their politics, it’s the different cultures of the parties and the race of leaders that excites the electorate. After all, “people vote by group not conviction”.[1] Whites simply trust that when DA leader John Steenhuizen laments the corrosive effects of corruption he means it and would change it if he were in power. By contrast, when an African politician in the ANC laments corruption the minorities fear that he speaks in platitudes; and even if he were sincere the culture of his organisation would not let him take serious action. There is something defeated in this. Here is Helen Zille writing in Facebook on today’s great anti-corruption charade, the Zondo Commission:

"Many South Africans are asking why, despite the evidence before the Zondo Commission, none of the most corrupt politicians identified have yet been sent to jail. I have come to the sad conclusion that it is BECAUSE of the Zondo Commission. I am not for a moment suggesting that Judge Zondo, Deputy Chief Justice, is doing anything wrong. He is chairing the Commission well. It is because of the existence of the commission.

All the horrifying testimony that pours out every day should be presented to a properly constituted Court of Law, where the evidence can be tested, and if verified, used to convict and jail the corrupt. However a Commission does not have the power of a court of law, and cannot do this.

Instead, mind-boggling allegations and evidence of corruption pours out on a weekly basis, giving the public an illusion that "something" is being done, when in effect it is just a passing parade.

The very existence and extent of the evidence is a clear indication to me that this should be placed before a court of law, where it can be properly tested through cross-examination, and a verdict reached - and where there is enough evidence to produce a conviction and appropriate punishment.

Ask yourself: Why is this not happening? Why was a Commission set up, rather than using a properly constituted Court of Law as the appropriate place to present and test the evidence?

It is surely plausible to draw the conclusion that the ANC wants to create the “illusion” that something is being done about corruption without actually sending anyone too senior to jail.

It has been 2,5 years since the “new-look” NPA under Advocate Batoyi was established, and yet Dololo [nothing] (as the Twitterati say).

I am now moving from scepticism to cynicism."[2]

Whites, Indians and coloureds can vote all they like for Helen Zille and against a hopelessly corrupt ruling party, but it will not change anything. Our political system (straight proportional representation) gives the country to whoever can raise 60% of the African vote. Indeed, the system was almost designed to ensure the ANC would prevail for years to come.

Historian Hermann Giliomee bemoans the fact that the 1994 settlement was based on majority rule, with no concession to race representivity. It was thought that the white rulers would never bow to the one-man-one-vote principle. But they were under massive international pressure to do so. As Giliomee puts it, “By 1970…Most developed nations now insisted that democracy on the basis of universal franchise was the solution to any difficult problem.”[3] How should states transition? British diplomat Paddy Ashdown learnt some lessons from Yugoslavia’s transition after the fall of communism. He believed in three steps: “security and stability come first, then a well-functioning legal system and only then democracy.”[4] As Giliomee wryly notes: “This was a lesson the American and the British learnt at great cost in Iraq. The present South African government still has to learn it.”[5]

Our transition was wholly unique and altogether unsatisfying. There is something deeply suspicious about it, even if you discount the Winnie problem. We’re not properly integrated. Our politic scene is deeply segregated and our general society is only peripherally integrated; we don’t socialise much together or marry each other.

We cannot wish away this problem and pretend race does not exist, that we’re seeing something that’s…somehow…not there, as some DA people do. Every South African knows what race they are and can broadly identify other races. Race is real in South Africa; philosophic sleight-of-hand will not make it disappear.

In the same way that institutional segregation did not create excessive racial disharmony, democracy has not led to the expected gains in integration. The races seem to get along in a sort of fashion unaffected by political context. When we’re allowed to integrate we mostly choose not to. Something which is a cause of shame among sensitive left-leaning thinkers. I blame it on the Segregation Horseman of the Race Catastrophe. Different races legally?belong to the same nation-state as free and equal individuals; in reality they belong to opposing political blocs. And even the best efforts of integrationists of all stripes cannot seem to resolve the intractable problem of segregation.

Sol Plaatje was an integrationist who opposed political segregation and the establishment of an exclusive white bloc of political power in South Africa.

[1] Jonathan Haidt

[2] Facebook: (15 May, 2021, 9:36am)

[3] Hermann Giliomee reviewing Richard Steyn’s Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, in Rapport

[4] Ibid

[5] ibid