When people tell you who they are, believe them
If South Africa is to become united and non-racial then it will be because the black elite really wants it
Editorial assistance: Richard Thompson
I became conservative when I stopped reinterpreting what black people were telling me to fit my own liberal agenda and took them at their word. I know there are plenty of Uber drivers who agree with you about politics, but they’re different from the majority of elite black opinion.
The penny finally dropped for me after a couple years engaging on a WhatsApp group for alumni of UKZN (Pietermaritzburg). The group was mainly for black students who graduated in the 80s and 90s; I and a few other whites were included as lefties who had been friends to their cause.
It was interesting eavesdropping on black conversations; it was also disillusioning trying to talk them out of their African nationalist dogmas on land expropriation without compensation (“good”), white capital (“evil”), black economic empowerment (“necessary”), white success (“the ill-gotten gains of settler colonialism”), and so on. It wasn’t a political group though; most of it was banter and silly jokes, some of it making fun of simple black folk in a way that would have been taboo if this was a white group.
Being on the alumni group confirmed what I was beginning to suspect about South Africa. For reasons ideological and otherwise, our black elite is nowhere near capable of guiding South Africa to success.
Another reason I am pessimistic about South Africa is that racial integration has failed. White lefties are as likely to live in their white bubbles as are white racists. Whites can argue all day among themselves about politics, but it’s so much meaningless theory. Left or right, you’re applying for your British passport, semi-grating to the Cape, or “state-proofing” yourself against the much predicted (by the right) and much denied (by the left) post-colonial African collapse.
I’m not saying integration is impossible; it’s happened myriad times in human history. Sailors leave their women behind, arrive on distant shores, make merry with the locals and voila, in a generation there is integration. Maybe you’d call that “hybridisation,” in which case hybridisation is the best form of integration.
Besides sharing my often-unpopular political opinions on the group, I attended a couple of in-person gatherings, almost the only non-African who did. But at the alumni gathering I attended in 2017, there was one “hybridised” person. By the time he arrived at that party I found myself in a situation I hadn’t experienced since I was at university: being the only white guy among a group of black people. Therefore, I was tuned to someone who just “felt” more like me. This “hybridised” man (let’s call him Joe) immediately struck me as being neither black nor white. If anything, by the way he dressed and carried himself, he appeared to me as an Afrikaner farmer. In how Joe related to his black brothers it seemed as if he was straddling two worlds: theirs and mine.
This hunch was reinforced when I left the alumni WhatsApp group in July 2021, in disgust at the excuse-making about the KZN unrest, when the province erupted in burning and looting after Jacob Zuma was jailed. My parting shot was to tell them I regretted having been part of the Struggle to make South Africa ungovernable … look how that turned out? Joe was the only one to send me a personal note, thanking me for my input on the group, and blaming the rampant greed of his Zulu and Xhosa brothers for the state of the country. He was from the Free State, so perhaps he was Sotho-speaking, with some white ancestry. I wanted to reach out to Joe, but his WhatsApp profile pic had a Black Lives Matter icon; I just didn’t feel up to wading through the ideological mud that today separates reasonable blacks from reasonable whites.
As for him selling his black brothers down the river by accusing them of being corrupt, It would beggar belief if no-one on this alumni group – of whatever ethnolinguistic group – was involved in racketeering. The group was a good sample of the beneficiaries of the 1994 settlement: the emerging black elite now reaping the rewards of preferential ownership and procurement schemes. Corruption was often discussed on the group, but never admitted to. In a culture that forgoes personal responsibility, the witches lurk in the shadows; evil is committed not by purposeful actors, but by amorphous entities. Yes, there were complaints about losing business to dishonest rivals who had bribed government officials; but did anyone fess up to contributing to malfeasance? Only one … me.
In league with a black empowerment partner, I had once tried to secure work from government by offering – or least at hinting at – inducements. To be sure, our business did not want free money. We wanted contracts, which we were willing to work on at market rates. If this meant redirecting 10% or 20% of the budget in bribes, then it was a risk worth taking. At the time, I mentioned the scheme to a friend of mine; he threatened to disown and denounce me should I go through with it. In the event, nothing came of the scheme. I’m relieved I didn’t degrade myself to stay in business. (The type of work I do is often degrading enough without having to bribe.)
I once asked someone, a friend with a different attitude to the one above, how it is you bribe. “It’s easy, you go up to the scaliest guy there and say, ‘How much?’” At that alumni get-together back in 2017, there was one scaly character, a sneering jackal eyeing me as if I were prey. Not surprisingly, he was an ANC official. He had a full-time job as a party organiser, but I’d bet my house that his real job was to siphon cash out of the state.
There was another character who unnerved me that day. S’bu (not his real name) was younger than me, so I hadn’t known him at university. He was strapping and charismatic; Xhosa-speaking, I think. He immediately put me off by saying, “Hey, what’s this umlungu doing here?” He punctuated his arguments by poking me in the chest. For some reason S’bu felt a need to impress me, while dominating me at the same time. He boasted about his great herds of cattle, his vast tracts of land, his rich white friends, and the fact that even – perhaps especially – when high on cannabis he was the “smartest guy in the room.” There was also his Porsche, which drew the admiration of the other men at the party, who gathered around it to admire the fruits of S’bu’s self-confessed genius.
Why am I telling you this? It’s because I’m desperate to tell every umlungu in the land that we misjudge our black brothers at our peril. What was clear by the posts on that WhatsApp group, reflected in social media comments and in radio phone-ins, is that the vast majority of black influencers care more about being black than they do about being South African. It’s as if they’re black/African first and South African second: race first, country second. An accusation they level at us too, I admit, with our European values, our West-leaning opinions about geopolitics, our monolingualism, and our British passports. I’ve heard it said a few times about this collapsing state: “You whites are lucky; you can get out.”
The reality is that millions of whites don’t have foreign passports and cannot easily get out; we owe it to each other to make this place work. I used to scream this out on the WhatsApp group, but of course it made no difference. Black pride is much stronger than white reason. Black pride, as a sectarian ideology, is not only destroying South Africa, it also threatens the US, corrupting its institutions through critical race theory and “black lives matter.”
Is that a coincidence? Black South Africans often look to African Americans for cultural inspiration. Not surprising, given that African Americans are the world’s most economically successful black society. Ideally we want South Africans to aspire to South African role-models of whatever race; but that’s not how it is. In the real world, politicised black South Africans don’t want to build a proud South African state, they want to build a proud black state. They want Wakanda, not the non-racial, united republic of South Africa: rather fantasy than middling functionality.
When the people governing the country are more interested in their race than they are in the country, then it is over. The ideal of a unified non-racial South African state is dead because they don’t really want it. I understand that there are some whites, coloureds and Indians still involved in state-building; far fewer than there were in 1994, but still some. What about them?
One was at that alumni get-together, the other white guy there. He was John Jeffery, the deputy minister of justice. I remembered him well from my university days in the late 1980s, as a most committed UDF activist; highly intelligent and driven, also aloof and opaque, which was common among lefties like him. He was less aloof and opaque now, puffing away at his ciggies and chugging back the booze. Something was making him unhappy.
He must have known that I did not approve of Zuma (who had appointed him); he eyed me with that cunning half-smile of his. But this didn’t stop him blurting out one of the most extraordinary comments you will hear from a deputy minister of justice. The subject was South Africa’s notoriously criminal taxi industry. The black brothers were offering the standard platitudes, but then the deputy minister of justice cut through: “I just think South Africans are impossible to govern; it’s like we are a lawless people and no matter what the government does, people will simply carry on doing their own thing.”[1] What?!
Jeffery made sure to deracialize his comment by unfavourably comparing South Africa’s level of compliance, not to Europe’s, but to other African countries. But still, coming from him it was an admission of failure so great that it proved to be a milestone in my abandoning the idea of a “non-racial, united South Africa,” that clever piece of Struggle propaganda to destroy white hegemony.
Why is John Jeffery still lending credibility to the criminals who call themselves “government”? How long can he keep distracting himself with cigarettes and alcohol from the tragedy of his broken ideals?
When I was a student I once drove with him to some UDF (United Democratic Front) conference across the country. Before we left he needed to go to someone’s house and fetch a cassette tape; an album he simply had to have for our long journey. It was Modern Times by the UK band Latin Quarter, who you may know from their 1983 hit “Radio Africa”. I heard that song often during our four-hour journey.
The haunting chorus goes I'm hearing only bad news from Radio Africa; I'm hearing only sad news from Radio Africa. The well-intentioned lyrics revisit liberal tropes about what troubles Africa. You guessed it, it’s not the Africans themselves, but interfering foreigners: exploitation by means of trade and finance by the capitalists (independence has a hidden expense when the hands of the purse strings are white); and exploitation by means of military adventure by the communists (There's more tanks than food in the Ogaden, it looks like Moscow got it wrong again).
What does the song say about South Africa? They've still got trouble with a monster in the South; Heads buried deep in that lion's mouth; Like a jaw snapped shut, it keeps them apart; If that jaw got broken it would be a start.
John Jeffery helped to break the lion’s jaw of white supremacy. He now lends his credibility – not that he has much left – to some form of black political hegemony, if not outright supremacy. The news coming out of radio South Africa is not good because people like him and the band he loved misdiagnosed the illness. The problem with Africa has everything to do with misgoverning local elites and nothing to do with foreigners. South Africa is only the latest bad news story in a postcolonial litany of failure. If South Africa is somehow to become united and non-racial, whatever this means, then it will be because the black elite really wants it. But I’m not going to close my ears when they tell us otherwise.
[1] Words to this effect.