30 May 2000
Director of ceremonies
Honoured Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
You have had a full day now of deliberations; you are full of food and wine-and probably also full of irritation at this interruption. You had a speech from Nelson Mandela last night - I have the unenviable task of following, a day off the pace, in his rather formidable footsteps. In placing Mr Mandela on the program yesterday, I fear that the organisers have followed the Biblical principle: serve the best wine first and hope that the jolly guests will afterwards be too pissed to notice the plonk that you are serving later on.
The Americans among you will be wondering how its is possible to be both jolly and pissed at the same time. Because to you, to be "pissed" means to be angry, while to the tradition of British English, which tends to be more influential with us here, to be "pissed" means, rather more happily, to be drunk. But I suspect that this clash of meaning might itself be a happy coincidence, given our subject to night. Because it seems to me that this tragic nuisance of racism, which has been with us so stubbornly for so long, has always lurched between drunkenness and anger, again and again, down the long years of our past. Drunk with white supremacy, intoxicated by what they called the guiding light of civilisation, Afrikaner Nationalism inflicted the flailing blows of apartheid upon us, bringing domestic violence into what ought to have been a happy national family home, and in the process spiritually maiming themselves. Their drunken violence had, as is the way with such binges, its hangovers, its overhang - its legacies that remain with us even today.
Before the 20th century Afrikaner Nationalists came the Europeans in the Cecil Rhodes tradition, intoxicated by a sense of their own racial destiny, to civilise Africa at gunpoint, exterminating the indigenous people, the Khoi and the San, in the process. The ground under your feet right now was Khoi turf; San turf - yet no Khoi, no San is here with us tonight, other than-for a few of us and probably not for myself-in the anonymity of our commingled parentage, our partially known and unknown ancestors, who made love furtively across the colour line, or were raped across it, and trembled in silence rather than telling the tale.
The colour line. It still divides us, even now. It is almost exactly a hundred years since WEB Du Bois made his prophetic comment that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the colour line. And it is still with us - in all its laughable absurdities as well as its anger-creating inequities.
For much of the last century, these absurdities cut across ideological lines of left and right. The Eastern block visited its depredations upon Gypsies, black African students and assorted ethnic minorities, while the countries of the Western Bloc (which never called itself that) consistently marginalised the dusky people within their borders and bombed the dusky people outside those borders, people who live in exotic places like Libya, Iraq and Argentina. There is no ideology of left or right that has automatically insulated itself from racism. An American historian has noted that certain early Alabama communists habitually referred to black colleagues as "comrade nigger," highlighting the stubbornness of race-consciousness even towards the far end of the progressive spectrum.
David Rediger, the labour historian, points out that American advocates of black-white labour co-operation in the United States were forced into quite impressive rhetorical gyrations in order to keep the whites on board while preventing employers from lowering aggregate wages by pitting black labour against white. Here are the words of one prominent white New Orleans organiser in 1907:
"I wasn't always a nigger-lover. You made me work with niggers, eat with niggers, sleep with niggers, drink out of the same water bucket with niggers, and finally got me to the place where if one of them copes to me and blubbers something about more pay, I say, 'Come on, nigger, let's go after the white bastards.'"
This white labour organiser is rhetorically appealing to the racial solidarity of white employers to suggest that they have betrayed white workers, so that the white workers will not bolt from the labour fold when they realise that they are de facto in league with blacks - such are the gyrations that the colour line has imposed over what ought to be a straightforward issue: the alleviation of poverty, whatever the skin hue of the poor. And we in South Africa had much debate in our own Communist Party of the Thirties, on the question of whether white working class solidarity should be the first priority, with racial justice (which might undermine white solidarity) left for some vaguely deferred future time. So racism has always been both hideous and absurd, tortured in its manifold turnings, making us both pissed and pissed - making us at once angry as well as and delirious in its surreality.
I am asked to speak on "Racism in Education" but this is a misnomer, isn't it? Because racism is in itself an education; a continuing education, it is a life's work of self-taught prejudice. And undoing it is a life's work too.
Imagine yourself a medical student at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1960s. You are black, so there are not many of you; you are an exception to the apartheid rule; you have sought and obtained special permission because you are Indian (no Africans were allowed) and now you are set to chop up cadavers in your anatomy class, along with your merry band of student-medic friends.
But wait. You must leave the hall because this particular cadaver is white. Blacks may not learn medicine upon the white cadaver.
So you leave, and hope, another day, that the cadaver will be black. The people who made these rules; the university administrators who implemented them - they must have all been very very drunk; but the rest of us, even now, ought to be pissed.
If you think that this talk of cadavers is merely political memorabilia - the sort of thing that cannot happen today, let me remind you that at Ben Viljoen school in 1996 33 children were taught in a separate classroom from their white schoolmates, were not allowed to wear the school uniform, and followed a different timetable. At Hoërskool Balfour three years ago, a black student was beaten by children while a white teacher watched. And my department can supply you with a long list of such incidents.
It is important to be careful, however, about the message that we take away from such incidents. I doubt that anybody, even the very excessively pissed, would suggest that "nothing has changed" since the election in 1994. Much has changed and is changing and, in a perverse sense, the very proximity of black and white in our schools has provided the opportunity for these residual skirmishes.
There can be no black-white schoolchild skirmishes unless blacks and whites are schooling together. 28% of South African schools were considered to be "racially integrated" in 1997.
But I do not want to reduce my comments tonight to a mere bulletin of all the good that has been done in the eradication of education in South Africa since 1994. That information is easily available to you from my office. Instead, I want to do as I have been asked and focus on the more intractable reaches of our problems; the attitudes that clog questions of racism, making them more difficult to address. I want to take my cue from the West Indian calypso singer who once said: "Had I been a bright student at school/I'd have learnt more and turned out to be a fool."
Much foolishness walks the halls of our public debates in South Africa today, especially among the mis-educated privileged, who have been so badly mis-taught about our African realities, over decades. The real challenge is to change the fabric of our understanding, the instincts that drive us and shape how we see things. This is a task almost spiritual rather than technocratic; it requires of us moral and political commitments; an existential re-making rather than a new set of regulations. The guiding spirit here is surely the organic, Gramscian approach of the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. We must keep him in mind at all times, even though methodologies and technologies have advanced dramatically since his day.
New regulations, policies, legislation - these are the indispensable skeleton architecture of our future. And it is on these that I spend my waking hours, day after day. But without belittling that hard slog, I want to talk, in our more sociable circumstances here tonight, about the background habits and institutions that constrain policymaking.
A major constraint on us as policymakers and legislators is the fact that talking about race gets people pissed, in the American sense; people get angry and would prefer to evade such discussions. As Toni Morrison has said, "the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous , liberal gesture. To notice [race] is to recognise an already discredited difference.
According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse." So that is the first problem: the instinct to say "Just shut up about it and it will go away," an attitude that the noted African-American lawyer Patricia Williams calls the "'I think therefore it is' school of idealism. 'I don't think about colour, therefore your problems don't exist." This leads to the hoary idea of colourblindness, a concept that has died a thousand deaths only to be revived again, lunging upwards from the grave. In short, what champions of colourblindness are really asking for is that we turn a blind eye to history. They are blind drunk, not pissed. They are pissed off with transformation and with corrective action when in fact, as one participant said at this very conference two years ago, they ought to be pissed off with history.
Another constraint on deracialised policymaking is the chameleon-like quality of our historical inheritance. Decades of apartheid and centuries of colonial history before that have built up what one scholar calls a property right in whiteness. The illegitimate origins of current wealth distributions are lost to the dark recesses of the past. So the beneficiaries of apartheid get pissed (in the American sense) if you question current resource allocations. Yet in 1994, the pre-democratic government was still spending R5 403 per white learner compared, for example, to R1 053 for every black African learner in the Transkei. There are material realities that we must rebalance, or else our existential aspirations will outstrip our hard skills, as individuals, communities and ultimately as a country. The recent Report, Values, Education and Democracy by a working group chaired by Wilmot puts the point movingly: "A vocation us a mission in life and not just another job. When the vocation is the education of the young, the responsibility of guiding the development of the emotion and the intellect to our unusual human ability is awesome.
The exercise of that responsibility requires a strong sense of commitment to some core norms of behaviour and conduct."
Education is not just another policy area afflicted by racism; it is also the name of the process by which racism has been transmitted, passed down the generations; it is therefore the place where the bitter cycle can and must stop. That is my mission and I know it is yours. We want to unteach the mis-taught to give change another chance.
At our recent century's end a Constitution was born her on the southern tip of Africa, just up the road from where we sit now. And in presenting that Constitution to the country and the world on May 8, 1996, Thabo Mbeki gave answering voice to the challenge that Du Bois had posed at the century's beginning. He spoke of himself as an African not in any exclusivist sense, but an African compound of all the disparate legacies that have come this way, for better or worse - the Khoi, the San, Malay slaves as well as the people of Hintsa and Cetshwayo; the Boers as well as those who came from China and India, those who laboured and those who traded here. It was a speech of spiritual and material reconstruction.
Where Du Bois foresaw the violent vagaries that the colour line would bring, Mbeki surveyed the aftermath of that same battlefield, and as he ends his famous speech you can hear him gathering himself for the next exhausting chapter in our long climb away from bigotry. Let me leave you with those words tonight:
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the strong appropriate to themselves the prerogative to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image. I know what it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had imposed themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy . . .
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a superhuman effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda-Glory must be sought after. Today it feels good to be an African.
What Du Bois discerned in foreboding, Mbeki confronts as fact, weary with knowledge. And that is I think the gist of education-it is the way that we teach ourselves to find within us the unsuspected resources that enable us to move beyond weariness. Because all that is given to human beings is time and the ability to think. And time minus thinking is a horror - the horror of which Joseph Conrad wrote.