Race, race consciousness and, worse still, racism still loom largely in the minds of many South Africans, even though the legal buttresses of apartheid have been swept away. Hardly a day passes without charges of racism being trumpeted across the land.
The year 2000 has witnessed two major events in which racism, and the need to excise it from South African society, have been the dominant themes: the inquiry into racism in the media by the state-funded Human Rights Commission and the National Conference on Racism, held at the instigation of President Thabo Mbeki. As Mr Mbeki put it: "Despite all our collective intentions [to establish a non-racial state], racism continues to be our common bedfellow. All of us are, therefore, faced with the challenge to translate the dream of a non-racial society into a reality."
One reason for the persistence of race consciousness and racism in South Africa is obvious: the legacy of decades of institutionalised racism - which reserved the upper ranks of the racial hierarchy for whites, assigned blacks to the lowest tiers and allocated the intermediate strata to brown-hued people - cannot be excised within a decade.
Politicians, of course, offer differing reasons for the prevalence of racism in South Africa in the 21st century, depending on their political allegiances. The African National Congress (ANC) tends to blame those whites who cling to their inherited privileges and, while paying public obeisance to the new philosophy of non-racialism, actively resist the drive to transform South Africa by affirmative action and black empowerment. Its public representatives have even accused the opposition Democratic Party (DP) of neo-Nazism and its leader, Tony Leon, of replacing the party's original liberal principles with a pernicious right-wing philosophy.
Part of the ANC's hostility towards Leon - who is frequently referred to as a white opposition leader, not an opposition leader - is prompted by his refusal to acknowledge collective guilt on behalf of whites for the apartheid past. The DP counters that the ANC has raised race consciousness through its policies and laws, which strive for "representativity" in all walks of life, meaning that the profiles of company employees and national sport teams should, in the end, mirror the racial demography of South Africa, in which indigenous blacks account for more than 75 per cent of the total population.
The DP goes further, arguing that the pursuit of representativity requires "racial head counting" that, in turn, necessitates the revival of classification of South Africans by race, a hallmark of the apartheid system that the ANC government has adopted for its own ends. Another way in which the ANC contributes to the persistence of racist attitudes, according to the DP, is by playing the "race card", accusing its opponents of racism when it disagrees with their policies.
The ANC's presentation to the inquiry into racism in the media is illustrative of the intensity of the debate over race in South Africa. It focuses in part on J.M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel Dis- grace, for which he was granted the prestigious Booker Prize for the second time, the only novelist to have achieved that distinction. "In the novel, a young white woman [Lucy] is gang-raped by three black men who, afterwards, also steal her car and household goods [and shoot her dogs]," the ANC observes in its presentation. It goes on to accuse Mr Coetzee of depicting "as brutally as he can" the white perception of "the post-apartheid black man" as a savage "without a restraining leash around his neck".
The ANC takes Mr Coetzee to task for suggesting that whites should emigrate because to be in post-apartheid South Africa is to live in a state of siege, in territory controlled by blacks who are - to quote the ANC's paraphrasing of Mr Coetzee - "incapable of refinement through education and driven by hereditary, dark satanic impulses". Thus Mr Coetzee, a highly acclaimed novelist and a professor of literature, is portrayed by the ANC as a purveyor of racist stereotypes and, by extension, of racism.
It does not seem to have struck the ANC drafters of the presentation that Mr Coetzee is describing a situation that exists on the ground in contemporary South Africa. Hardly a day goes by without an attack on a white farmstead. Almost invariably, the assailants are young black men. A white farmer or a member of his family (or, less frequently, a member of his staff) is murdered every three days. Rape of farming women and the killing of farm animals, including dogs, is not uncommon during these attacks.
The apparent inability of the ANC government to halt these attacks, like its failure to stem the rising crime rate, makes whites nervous and often leads to emigration by those who can afford it. Police successes on one front are almost invariably cancelled by their failures on another. Thus, while comparison between the number of reported cases between 1989 and 1994 reflects a decrease of just over 11 per cent for murder, the number of reported cases for robbery with aggravating circumstances rose by 14.5 per cent over the same period and by 20.8 per cent for rape. But to return to the ANC's attack on Coetzee. By incorporating these sociological realities into his novel (which is set, in part, in the rural hinterland of the Eastern Cape), and by reflecting the deep apprehension that they generate in the white community, is Mr Coetzee succumbing to racism or is he merely exercising his rich talents as a novelist by writing about the society into which he was born and in which he lives? If he is guilty of racism, who in South Africa is free of it? Is the ANC, by playing the race card, not as guilty as those who it accuses of racism?
The creation of a non-racial society apart, another objective of the ANC, when it won power in the watershed 1994 general election, was to reduce the gross racial disparities in income. Progress has been made since 1994, although the process of redistribution, away from white towards black, began long before the collapse of apartheid and the installation of a black-dominated government.
In 1996, the average household income of whites was 5.5 times higher than of an equivalent black household; in 1991, it was 6.6 times higher and, in the 1970s, it was more than 10 times higher. Between 1995 and 1996, the number of black households with incomes above 50,000 rand (£5,840) per year increased by nearly 80 per cent, while the number of white households in the same category fell by well over 20 per cent. But a recent publication by the Department of Social Development notes: "Although inequality between the population groups has decreased, there has been a remarkable increase in inequality within population groups classified as black." The main beneficiaries of the distribution of incomes away from whites as a whole have been the elites within the indigenous black, coloured and Indian communities, not the people in the poorest strata of these societies.
To quote WEFA Southern Africa, an econometric think tank in Pretoria: "Within the African [indigenous black] group, the poorest 40 per cent of households have suffered a 21 per cent decrease in household income, whereas the richest 10 per cent have enjoyed an average income rise of 17 per cent."
These changing income patterns within black societies explain why the ANC is seen as a party which that talks on behalf of the impoverished masses but represents the interests of the emerging black bourgeoisie. One of the objectives propagated by the ANC is black economic empowerment. But, judging from the figures quoted above, economic empowerment is largely restricted to the upper strata of the black community.
For the unemployed, the most tangible form of empowerment is an income-earning job. By that criterion, post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed the disempowerment of at least 500,000 South Africans, the vast majority of them black. The report of the Black Empowerment Commission notes: "Since 1994, about 500,000 jobs have been lost."
The ANC has succeeded in reversing the decline in per capita GDP during the past decades of white minority rule (between 1970 and 1992, it fell from zero to -3.4 per cent). But the modest gains in per capita GDP in the first years of ANC rule are now once again threatening to fall below zero line, according to the Black Empowerment Commission report.
Sociologist Lawrence Schlemmer observes that one reason for the ANC's inclination to play the "race card" is its need to deflect attention away from its failure to provide a better life for all. No South African, not even the ANC's political opponents, should delight in its failure to alleviate poverty on a meaningful scale. As President Mbeki warned: "If the poor rise, they will rise against us all."
Within the African (indigenous black) group, the poorest 40 per cent of householders have suffered a 21 per cent decrease in household income, whereas the richest 10 per cent have enjoyed an average income rise of 17 per cent. South Africa's President Mbeki has warned: "If the poor rise, they will rise against us all."