PART II: UNEQUAL, TRANSITIONAL CONTEXT
4. Introduction: Rendering trans-generational and lifespan inequality visible
4.5 The Apartheid period: legislated inequality
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115 during the 1960s. Under what was commonly known as territorial segregation, each race group lived in their own ‘area’ which was enforced by the Group Areas Act. Mixed communities were destroyed by forced removals to racially designated areas. Black employees had to commute long distances and carry passes to work in white areas. To forget your pass at home had both economic and criminal justice implications. I have early memories of black men running and policemen chasing and arresting those they caught for being without a pass. Many black domestic workers lived in outside
accommodation at their place of work while their children lived either in the homelands or in the dormitory townships. Racial and economic inequalities were demarcated by spatial inequality.
4.5.2 Inequality and the Criminal justice system
In the introduction to Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom Oliver Tambo (1965, 1989:
xii), former president of the ANC in exile, wrote that jails were ‘jam-packed’ with Africans. He stated:
To be unemployed is a crime because no African can for long evade arrest if his passbook does not carry the stamp […] To be landless can be a crime … families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected. To brew African beer, to drink it or to use the proceeds to
supplement family income is a crime […] To cheek a white man is a crime.
To live in the ‘wrong’ area … can be a crime for Africans. South African apartheid laws turn innumerable innocent people into ‘criminals’. (Tambo (1965, 1989: xii)
Wilson (2007) draws attention to the corruption of the Criminal justice system in enforcing unjust laws in this example from Cape Town:
By the early 1970s the annual number of prosecutions for being in town without permission averaged 540 000 persons - one every minute, 24 hours a day. In Langa, by the early 1970s the ratio of men to women was 11:1.
(Wilson 2007, web reference 11).
The criminal justice system, while on the surface prosecuting black people for
‘transgressing the law’, by that very act, obscured the fact that it entrenched economic inequality and acted as an instrument of cultural violence by criminalising blackness, thereby ‘legitimising and justifying structural and direct violence’ as suggested by Galtung (1996:2). Black people’s distrust of the criminal justice system runs deep as it
116 has been experienced as the strong arm of a criminal state, the actions of which even the UN renounced as a crime. Tambo makes the link between oppression and crime by stating that ‘[y]oung people who should be in school or learning a craft wreak their revenge on their society that confronts them with only the dead-end alley of crime or poverty’ (1965, 1989: xii).
4.5.3 Embedded inequality
Apartheid further entrenched inequality by providing the best amenities and education for white learners and progressively inferior amenities and education for Indian, coloured and Black learners, with ‘Bantu Education’ at the bottom of the pile. These stratified services extended to housing, health, municipal services and every conceivable right to live a dignified life. Other factors that deepened inequality are described by Gelb who states that:
Conquest and political exclusion were the ‘initial conditions’ shaping black peoples’ unequal access to resources, their potential for asset accumulation, and the returns from their assets. Inequality was deepened by the pattern of economic growth and development after the mineral discoveries. The forced labour regime in mining established the migrant system and provided the foundation of racial discrimination in the labour market and in the
workplace as the secondary and tertiary sectors developed. (Gelb, 2003:18).
Apartheid and its militarised enforcement by the white regime acted as stimulus to progressively angry and largely non-violent action during the 1950’s. Anger started to mount over time and Nelson Mandela and his peers considered armed resistance and went overseas for military training in the 1960s.
4.5.4 Inequality and violence
The trigger for the armed resistance came when 69 people were killed by police during non-violent protest in Sharpeville and Langa on 21 March 1960. A state of emergency was declared and an estimated 18 thousand people of all races were arrested. On 1 April 1960 the Security Council of the United Nations adopted Resolution 134 (1960), in which the actions and policies of the South African government were deplored. The ANC and PAC were banned on 8 April 1960 according to the Unlawful Organisations Act. During May and June 1960 many countries started boycotting South African products (web reference 18). As early as 1961 calls were made for a national convention to be held.
117 Chief Albert Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace prize one week before Umkonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, under the leadership of Mandela, set off explosions in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town (web reference 19). This is a key example of how cultural violence led to structural, direct and counter-violence in South Africa.
4.5.5 Widening racial inequality
According to Gelb (2003) the rising living standards of white people implied a growing gap between race groups. This he suggests, was ‘exacerbated by increasing capital- intensity and limited labour absorption raising black unemployment from the late 1960s’
(p.18). Gelb argues that:
In the early 1990s, 67000 white farmers owned 85.8 million hectares amounting to 86% of agricultural land supporting a population of 5.3 million people […] substantial state support from the 1930s on, via marketing boards, subsidised credit and generous rural infrastructure and extension services. By contrast 13.1 million Africans lived in Bantustans on 17.1 hectares (Gelb, 2003) 19).
The UN General Assembly ‘condemned South Africa’s racial discrimination as
reprehensible and repugnant to human dignity with a vote of 95-1’ on 13 April 1961. On 31 May 1961 South Africa was declared an independent republic outside the
Commonwealth. It was immediately ‘placed on a war footing to smash the nation-wide strike called to protest against the establishment of the so-called Republic of South Africa’ (web reference 20).
During the early 1970s, people arrested under security laws started to die in police detention. In 1976 many student leaders who were influenced by the ideas of black consciousness promoted by Steve Biko, as well as those who were linked to the ANC, were at the forefront of the Soweto uprisings which spread to many areas. Many pupils were killed and injured during clashes with police. In 1977 Steve Biko was murdered in detention by security police (web reference 21). Non-violent resistance morphed into violent and armed resistance over time. Cultural-structural-direct violence (Galtung, 1996:2) led to counter-violence (Gil, 2006:509) which set the country on a rocky path that elicited some tinkering with a tri-cameral system of government which excluded the black majority but split off some coloured and Indian people.
118 During the 1980’s, the period of ‘ungovernability’ called for by the ANC in exile, many violent acts and murders, notably ‘necklacing’ (car tyres filled with petrol, lit around the neck of suspected informers) and ‘mob killings’ ensued. Self Defence Units were formed in various black townships. Those who were viewed as collaborators in the tri-cameral (white, Indian and coloured) parliament were targeted by having their houses petrol bombed. The same applied to ‘kitskonstabels’ (black policemen trained for short periods and let loose in the townships) and others who colluded with the apartheid system.
Apartheid repression and violence acted as stimulus for an orgy of direct and counter- violence while cultural and structural violence continued. Many oppressed people, joined by a fair number of white people, started to join the struggle to overthrow the apartheid state. Instead of internalising their ascribed inferiority and superiority, those who were at the forefront of the struggle, externalised their anger by taking on the state. Other less confrontational ones played active and passive supportive and bystander roles. Yet others collaborated with the apartheid state, or acquiesced and co-operated with their
oppression. A minority engaged in self-destructive behaviour, which includes criminal behaviour. Regardless of the manifest response, no one in South Africa escaped with their full humanity intact.
The state responded to the struggle with targeted violence, torture, disappearances and murder euphemistically termed ‘gross violations of human rights’ in TRC legislation.
Because the TRC dealt with narrowly defined gross human rights violations of a political nature, other daily and destructive human rights abuses, violations and infringements, and the trauma it generated over generations, were never dealt with. For example, black people who committed street crimes received harsher punishment than their white counterparts who committed similar crimes. If a white man raped a black woman, his sentence would be lighter than the sentence that a black man received15. Equality before the law and adequate access to justice existed in theory, but many times unjust laws made a mockery of the notion of justice. This is the reason why many lawyers specialised in
15 I am aware of two black-coloured men who received the death sentence in the mid 1980s, for raping a white woman. A petition by the Legal Resources Centre, a public interest NGO, to have their sentences commuted to life, was met with no response from the prime minister. There are many similar examples that I am aware of, as I worked at the Legal Resources Centre between 1983 and 1986.
119 Human Rights Law. They were in heavy demand throughout the apartheid period and still litigate on behalf of vulnerable groups. This is one example of the strong and vibrant civil society that mushroomed to resist apartheid laws on the one hand and to show solidarity with the oppressed on the other.
Amongst white South Africans, the majority appeared to have had enough of apartheid and the instability it gave rise to. As Adam (2002:34) writes, by the 1990s, F. W. de Klerk ‘secured the consent of his white constituency for negotiations through a referendum on 17 March 1992’. The referendum showed that 68.7 per cent of white South Africans who voted, ‘supported a negotiated abolition of their minority rule through a likely non-racial majority rule’.
4.5.6 Some effects of inequality and violence
Standpoint theory enabled me to narrate the story from different perspectives, but specifically from a subjugated position coming to voice and using that voice as data. I deployed my counter-story from my standpoint as a trans-generationally oppressed person, a category I share with the majority of South Africans. Where the literature does not provide information, I insert situated information about South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid and the continuity with the market democracy. From this standpoint, colonialism and apartheid were not only about economic dispossession, genocidal violence and racial oppression. It was also about internalised superiority and dominance based on a combination of race, wealth and coercive power. My standpoint is in addition a counter-story about intergenerational resilience and resistance on the part of the oppressed, as well as internalised inferiority, intergenerational poverty and
intergenerational trauma – the invisible, denied, soul wound about which South African society maintains a deliberate silence. These silences are pregnant with information about structural violence in the form of trans-historical inequality and its relationship to direct violence of which crime/social harm is an example.
From the standpoint of the oppressor, black people were inferior. Oppression was legalised and black people did not qualify as full citizens with the right to vote. Instead, African-black people were tolerated in ‘white South Africa’ as a cheap form of labour to generate and grow the wealth that the apartheid state believed white people were entitled
120 to. The Western Cape was treated as a ‘coloured preferential labour’ area. Apartheid’s divide and rule strategy made coloured people the equivalent of the so called ‘house Negro’ and African-black people the so-called ‘field Negro’.16 The terms ‘house Negro’
and ‘field Negro’ are ascribed to Malcolm X by Dolo (2005:80) and refer to the hierarchy of oppression by which oppressors divide and rule. I use these binaries advisedly, as in South Africa, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) which originated with Steve Biko, started a process by which many oppressed people began to understand the origin and intent of these divisive ascribed identities, and embraced their own political identity as black South Africans.
As a result of their constructed identity, many coloured17 people exhibit behaviour that can be ascribed to ‘internalised oppression’. Biko & Stubbs (1978), Fanon (1967, 1986:83-108), Freire (1974) and Memmi (2003: 163 – 184) all made reference to the notion of internalised oppression in colonised people (although not explicitly in some instances). The constructed name ‘coloured’ by the oppressor and embraced by many, obscure the links to Khoekhoe, San and African lineage for many coloureds – who prefer to remain in ignorance because of their own internalised inferiority18. Inter-ethnic
discrimination and violence is also a feature in South Africa. For example, during the xenophobia related violence in 2008, foreign nationals, as well as Shangaan people were attacked and 69 people were murdered. While colonialism and apartheid cannot be blamed for every instance of inter-ethnic violence, their divide and rule strategies have contributed in large part to the enmity between groups, as a result of the hierarchy of legislated oppression. As Mamdani (1996:1) has observed, that ‘just like colonialism, apartheid produced a dual identity: racial solidarity amongst its beneficiaries, and an
16 The mediation that I recused myself from in 2005, and that set me on a course towards this research, exemplified old apartheid mindsets. At the small, rural factory two white people sat upstairs, coloured people sat downstairs, and black people worked outside. The physical and relationship structure were steeped in apartheid more than a decade after it ended.
17I use the construction ‘coloured’ for people who embrace the term and do not identify themselves as black or African.
18 From my own accumulated knowledge growing up in the ‘coloured’ community – many coloured people
121 ethnic identity amongst its victims, each reproduced by a set of institutions’ (cited in Henkeman 1998:29).
4.5.7 Inequality and denial
In the main, most beneficiaries of apartheid appear to have lived in varying states of denial while accepting the privileges delivered by its policies and practices. Cheap black labour as nannies, domestic workers, gardeners and the employment of all forms of menial and semi-skilled labourers, enabled beneficiaries of apartheid to occupy superior positions at home and in the country’s economy. Over 100 apartheid laws and by-laws ensured that white people and black people lived separate, unequal, policed lives. The ascribed black inferiority and white superiority also led to internalised inferiority by many black people, and internalised superiority by many white people. This inferiority and superiority still manifest in the present in numerically less explicit ways, but mainly in masked, plausibly deniable forms. These phenomena intersected to normalise the perceived inferiority of black people and the perceived superiority of white people. This unequal order led to dispersed and multiple daily micro aggressions and human rights violations between race groups.
The multiple effects of such a complex toxic relationship was not swept away by political liberation, nor by the TRC process where ultimately, the abiding image that remains is that after the reconciliatory hugs, one person returned to privilege and the other to
poverty, to enjoy their newfound ‘equal’ relationship. The foundations of inequality have in no way been shaken, because the master narrative of the ‘miracle nation’ remains politically correct. It is only in recent times that some in the ANC government are beginning to acknowledge that they did not fully grasp the enormity of the economic question. Due to pressing material problems (which are exacerbated by corruption) that direct the energies of politicians, the historical trauma of ordinary citizens remain in the realm of denial. A few NGOs are trying to fill the gap with regard to trauma counselling;
however, in the absence of research, the true national effects of trans-generational trauma are not known.
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