South Africa

At The Mail & Guardian Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya undertakes a pretty sound (and enjoyable to behold) thrashing of Connie Mulder’s Freedom Front Plus party’s claims for special recognition for Afrikaners  from the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO). Here is a taste:

What freedom is Mulder and his chommies asking for? From whom? Freedom is the antithesis of restriction. It is always essential for freedom fighters to identify their cause and their oppressor.

Don’t hold your breath hoping that the FF+ will spell these out coherently any time soon.

The Afrikaners are not unfree or restricted in any way. Sure the SABC is no longer called the SAUK, but as recent events show, there are much more important issues we should worry about relating to the public broadcaster.

Incidentally, the same broadcaster still has more news, drama and content in Afrikaans than the Shangaan, Venda, Ndebele and Swazi put together. This, and the many cultural festivals that dot the arts calendar, don’t justify Mulder’s talk of linguistic and cultural marginalisation.

Do Mulder and those in whose name he acts not know that they and their children are still allowed to pursue their education, including higher education, in their mother tongue?

Other than English first-language speakers, no one else in this country enjoys this privilege.

One of the more ironic aspects of Mulder’s entreaties is that he seeks victim status and thus special protections when for so long Afrikaners not only derided such claims from others, but perpetrated the grossest of systems designed to abnegate the identity of the masses of South Africans. Huge swaths of the Afrikaner community reject affirmative action in almost every other form, except of course the affirmative action that was endemic in the South African system for generations.

My work is a bit complicated. The best way to describe it is that I explore race, politics, and social movements in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. I wrote the following recently, which mostly involves the issue of race in the United States. I hope you will find it to be of some interest:

We are beyond race.
That is the comfortable little myth that many of us white folks like to spew to make ourselves feel better about a history that clearly indicates that we are not at all beyond race. These people (We?) like to believe in an accelerated curve, a Whiggish and inexorable belief in improvement on the one demonstrable blotch on our national escutcheon, that has somehow innoculated us from centuries of reality. The candidacy of Barack Obama allows even those who do not, will not, support him to claim perfectibility on the one issue about which Americans have been sadly, tragically, imperfect.
Unfortunately there are times when reality kicks us in the teeth, or at least ought to. What to make, after all, in this supposedly color-blind society, about the fact that our misguided drug wars disproportionately effect African Americans? What does this tell us about our racial myths, and more importantly, how we deal with them?
Many of us are wary of decisions, supposedly race-neutral, on, say, voting rights in light of America’s still demonstrably not race-neutral policies. Many of us are wary of claims that we live in a time when race is no longer a factor, because of the relative successes of Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama. Indeed, we are wary precisely because of the facile ways in which we allow the prominence of a miniscule number of black Americans to substitute for a real discussion of the country’s racial past.
Conservatives call such concerns “race hustling,” a phrase notable only for its cynicism, vacuousness, and, yes, racism. And yet how many other issues in American history actually manage to sustain as relevant without actually being relevant? Issues that do not matter fade into obsolescence. This one continues to vex precisely because it matters. Would that we had an honest discussion about it, as Obama has done more honestly, and more frontally, than any American in the country’s history has undertaken.

We can pretend that it does not matter. In fact nothing has ever mattered more.

If this is self indulgent, or if it strays from my mandate of discussing and commenting on African politics, I am truly sorry. I hope this will help establish my bona fides on this issue.

[Crossposted from the Foreign Policy Association Africa Blog and dcat.]

At The Mail & Guardian Adriann Basson uses the racist response ( “Daai boy is so goed, hulle kan hom nou maar wit verklaar” [”That black boy is so good, they can certify him white now]”) of a fellow Afrikaner to a Bryan Habana try to explore race, and racism, in South Africa.

I’m always astounded when [white] South Africans try to pretend that racism is a thing of the past. Then again, I’m always astounded when white Americans do the same thing.

Last week Roger Cohen wrote a column in The New York Times in which he used his childhood in South Africa as a way to frame his thoughts about Barack Obama’s (to my mind pitch-perfect) speech on race last week. I am afraid that in the United States right now we are going to start seeing a slow bleed-turned-deluge of stories that will allow lots of white folks their excuse not to vote for Obama without appearing racist per se even when their motivation will be not to vote for the black candidate.

There are those who say that there is no place for politics in sport, or for sport in politics, but such people are knaves or fools. Sports and politics have always been linked, and those who decry the politicization of sport tend to have their own political axes to grind. Opposing the global boycott of South African sport during the apartheid era, for example, was itself an insertion of politics into sport. The idea that somehow boycotting sport was political but that playing games against a pariah state’s segregated sports team– that allowing sport to go on amidst people’s clear opposition to a noxious racist regime — was not represents a form of intellectual chicanery that warrants little more than scorn.

Inevitably sport reflects the societies in which it is played. Not surprisingly, then, racial transformation in South African sport is and will continue to be a contentious issue as two fundamental sides face off: One arguing that issues of race and transformation have no place on the sports fields and one asserting that the days of protecting and privileging the white minority should be long over and that conscious efforts to transform the South African sporting scene are overdue.

My own take is that the most important progress will happen at the developmental level, where sport is about far more than “merit” and winning or losing. But at the highest level there still should be a conscious effort made to field competitive, world-class teams while still pushing for inclusiveness in sports that intentionally were exclusive for decades. All things being equal, in other words, give the edge to the person who would not have been allowed on the team in the bad old days.

This debate is all over the sports pages of South Africa these days, no matter how stubbornly some believe in building a wall between sport and the real world, as if these are different things rather than sports being a component of the real world. Thus race arouses controversy in questions over Springbok selection (present but also past, as if the two are separable in the context of South Africa),  the increasingly controversial composition of the Proteas, and among the chattering classes of the sports commentariat, who make arguments criticizing “short-sighted administrators who, 14 years into democracy, continue to confuse transformation with discrimination” as if fourteen years represents a long period of time and under the presupposition that the ongoing attempts at transformation represent prima facie cases of discrimination, the apparent belief being that whites are entitled to spots on the country’s national and professional teams unless black players can prove otherwise.

Transformation of sport in the country is not going to happen without both concerted effort and the ruffling of feathers of those who feel entitled to spots in the country’s sporting elite simply because they have always held those spots.  Cynical knee-jerk invocations of “discrimination” should not successfully prevent necessary changes from taking place. South African sport is strong enough to endure these necessary adjustments that will do nothing more than make the games South Africans play (and the society in which they play them) better.

I have been silent on the fiasco going on at the University of the Free State largely because some stories almost write their own commentary. Mix Afrikaner racism with white and black college students and the possibility of a combustible mix will be present. The Mail & Guardian’s “Thought leader” has had a couple of worthwhile pieces if you are in search of commentary, including pieces by Christi Van der Westhuizen and Michael Trapido.

The outrage is warranted and necessary and anyone who downplays what happened at the Universiteit van die Vrystaat is either hopelessly blind as to South Africa’s lingering racist history or is simply a fool. And we ought not to suffer either gladly. Nonetheless, we should not be surprised precisely because of the country’s racist legacy. And Afrikaners, not all of whom are racist by any measure, nonetheless have a great deal to account for when it comes to the country’s racist past. If events such as those at UFS manages to remind South Africans of the reality of race, then it will have served a purpose, which is not to say that it was necessary or good, but rather than from the terrible comes the hope for redemption.

The sun will rise, the sun will set, and South African sport will exist in a perpetual case of turmoil. Or so it seems. Winning the Rugby World Cup last year does not seem to have provided a balm to SARU’s (usually self-inflicted) wounds and in many ways seems to have rubbed them raw. Even the hiring of the first black coach in Springbok history has not alleviated the racial pressures that threaten to tear apart South African rugby. And the national cricket team has been the target of finger pointing and accusatory words as the result of the Proteas’ racial composition. Race and sport are deeply intertwined in South Africa, and the country is going to have to continue to wrestle with these issues, which rarely have easy solutions even if some have facile answers.

In fact, the hiring of Peter De Villiers may simply have exposed some of the uglier politics in South African rugby’s seemingly atavistically racist culture. Jake White, who led Amabokoboko to the world championship last year, believes that the politics that always threaten to tear apart what should be a thriving rugby infrastructure may cost De Villiers his job sooner than anyone imagines. A  t almost the same time as White was making his ominous prediction, Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile had some strong words of his own, warning that the government will not sit idly by if it perceives that South Africa’s sporting community is rife with racism. 

South Africa will be dealing with the turmoil of transformation, racial and otherwise, for some time yet to come. And that transformation will not always be easy. Sport carries such symbolic and cultural resonance in South Africa that it should not come as a surprise that the national teams are a flashpoint for political issues. Romantics and fools might argue that politics has no place in sport and vice versa, but sports history, in South Africa and worldwide, have always played a political role. Sports sometimes lead societal debates, sometimes follow them, but are almost never exempt from them. Some might wish that sport existed in a hermetically sealed universe. It does not, and wishing for something different will not make it so.

If’s a busy news cycle right now in Southern Africa. here are a number of stories that caught my eye in today’s chock-full Mail & Guardian and elsewhere:

As the thirteith anniversary of the murder of Steven Bantu Biko at the hands of the security forces approaches different South Africans remember Biko’s life and death differently.

the Zimbabwe crisis continues unabated. The economic calamity has opened the door for corruption. Some maintain hopes  that South African-brokered talked will lead to a resolution of the political elements of the country’s conflicts, but it seems that  this may not be the time for whistling past the graveyard.

Meanwhile, transformation isn’t always easy. Members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) are up in arms over the Tshwane metropolitan council’s reported ban on white businesses. If the allegations are accurate, the DA would certainly seem to have a case that they will bring before the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile in a  pronouncement that is likely to be equally tendentious, the Black Management Forum  (BMF)  has argued that white women should be removed from the list of groups previously disadvantaged ”in terms of . . . employment equity legislation.” It is a bit hard for white women who benefitted in every imaginable way from apartheid suddenly stepping forward to claim their lots alongside the black South Africans on whose backs the Apartheid system built white privilege.

Finally, the M&G’s longtime rugby columnist Andrew Capostagno has a nifty piece on how this Rugby World Cup represents a “big chance” for the Springboks. He concludes his historically astute article by arguing that if the Boks achieve their considerable promise and “Win this one” South Africans “can forget, for a long, glorious moment, about politics.”

There has been a perplexing story unwinding in South Africa over the course of the last few weeks. The Springboks are gearing up for their World Cup run later this year. The start has been promising — two South African teams, the Bulls and the Sharks, made the finals of the Super 14 with the Bulls pulling off the win. The annual Tri-Nations clashes, pitting the national teams of traditional powerhouses New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, will provide the usual measuring stick for where the teams are. Then will come the World Cup, which South Africa has only hosted once, in the epochal 1995 victory in which Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and for a brief moment the supreme icon of Afrikaner nationalism, the Springbok, became a symbol of reconciliation.

 But in the midst of the preparations for the World Cup a peculiar story has bubbled that reveals all of the fissures in South African society, but in a bizarro world sort of way. The controversy involves team selection. South Africa’s national sports teams bear the burden of trying to compete at the highest level while at the same time helping to make a transition from apartheid sport in which black athletes were inelegible to compete on the national teams. The processes of trying to promote inclusion have led to some tense moments and have brought affirmative action into the public dialogue in a way that tends to reveal deep-seeded politics rather bluntly.

The most recent controversy involves the inclusion of Western Province Stormers flank Luke Watson on the Springbok squad. The solons of South African rugby want him on the team. The coach, Jake White, does not. Watson is a good player — he was Vodacom Cup player of the year last year. But White argues that Watson is not big enough for the style of play — brute force upfront, a traditional Springbok hallmark — that White hopes to implement.

But the twist is that Watson is white. Though he also unabashedly claims to be African. And to make matters even more inscrutable, some, including Western Province ANC Premier Ebrahim Rasool, have taken to calling Watson a “black” player.

The further twist is that Watson is the son of “Cheeky” Watson. Watson and his brother, Valence, were sterling rugby players in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. But they chose to turn their back on the white rugby establishment, and thus the Springboks, in order to play with black players in the townships under the old South African Rugby Union (SARU).  The Watson brothers’ stance — Cheeky turned down Springbok selection in 1976 because of the country’s racial policies – made them virtual pariahs in white South Africa. Many observers believe that their stand so many years ago provide the foundation for the opposition to Luke Watson by many in the current rugby structure. In other words, the Watsons’ anti-apartheid activism might be harming Luke Watson so that even though Luke Watson is white, racism plays a part in this imbroglio. SARU deputy Mike Stofile, for example, accused White of being prejudiced against Watson because of his father’s fight against rugby racism during the apartheid era. Furthermore, some of the black members of the rugby hierarchy, particularly Springbok manager Zola Yeye, are old friends with the Watsons, and thus the politicization of the sport takes another bizarre turn. 

Coach White insists that Luke Watson’s inclusion is not a problem on the squad. Watson will not be on the roster for the test match against England, the defending world champions, this weekend nor will he don the Springbok jersey for the second England match, but he will appear against Samoa on June 9 in the last test match prior to the start of the Tri Nations series. 

The Watson case has drawn a tremendous amount of attention across South Africa. The odds are that it will not abate soon. The controversy over Watson has overshadowed a host of other stories regarding the maekup of the squad. Perhaps the biggest irony is that lost in the shuffle has been that the national governing body imposed another player, the Sharks’ Odwa Ndungane, onto the squad over White’s preferences. Ndugane’s inclusion (he will join his twin brother Akona on the squad) may well have represented an attempt at racial balancing.

If nothing else is clear amidst this muddle, there is no doubt that rugby, race and politics create a peculiar, vexing, and fascinating mix in South Africa.  It is likely that by the time of the World Cup this controversy will be long past, though the Watson backstory will probably prove too alluring for it to recede too deep into the background and race will continue to be an issue in the sport for so long most closely associated with white supremacy in South Africa.

Over at The Boston Globe Derrick Z. Jackson reminds readers that among Jerry Falwell’s many loathsome views, the recently departed openly and unrepentantly supported Apartheid South Africa. While it may not be especially edifying to dance on a man’s grave, there also are few reasons to celebrate Falwell’s life in which hatred was couched in a flatulent and warped version of Christianity.