Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan D. Jansen is Honorary Professor of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and Visiting Fellow at the National Research Foundation, both in South Africa. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University and Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria. His latest co-authored book is Diversity High: Class, Color, Character and Culture in a South African High School.

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Knowledge in the Blood

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................ixAbbreviations.......................................................xiiiGlossary of Afrikaans Words, Names, and Phrases.....................xvPrologue Bearing Witness............................................11 Loss and Change...................................................242 Indirect Knowledge................................................513 Sure Foundations..................................................834 Bitter Knowledge..................................................1145 Kollegas! (Colleagues!)...........................................1456 Knowledge in the Blood............................................1707 Mending Broken Lines..............................................2018 Meet the Parents..................................................2329 Teaching to Disrupt...............................................255Notes...............................................................282References..........................................................311Index...............................................................325

Chapter One

Through a single announcement, an entire knowledge framework, a way of life and thought, was thrown into disarray.

The nightmare ... is not knowing what's true. Imagine if you had suddenly learnt that the people, the places, the moments most important to you are not gone, not dead, but what is, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?

The price of sanity for Minnie Pretorius, of suddenly seeing things the way they really are, would be complete breakdown and despair.

One country, at the tip of a troubled continent, becomes the last of the former colonies and the last of the settler states to yield on white minority rule. Some thought it would never happen; others held it would happen only through a bloodbath with innumerable casualties on both sides. The academic prophets of the time framed ominous questions: "Can South Africa survive?" "Hope for South Africa?" "Endgame in South Africa?" As the internal conflict escalated, studies warned of "time running out" and "five minutes to midnight." But happen it did; Apartheid eventually came to an abrupt and ignominious end.

As the end of the 1980s approached, the unrelenting pressure from outside and the stubborn resistance from inside forced the Afrikaner elites into negotiations as they realized that not changing would eventually cost them more than trying to sustain a system that had become anachronistic in a postcolonial world. The political scientists continue to contest what exactly brought the end of Apartheid and the transition to democracy.

It is important to remember that not too long before the 1990s South Africa was in good company. There were other states in the North and the South where racism and racial rule were enshrined in policies and laws. But times had changed. As the old order of colonial rule in the Third World and legalized discrimination in the First World started to unravel, South Africa stood alone as a "pariah" among democratic states. It stood its ground for what seemed an interminably long time, even after the independence of the last two regional states, Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1990.

Secret negotiations started with the principal liberation movement, the ANC, long before ordinary South Africans got to know about them. Quiet meetings with imprisoned black leaders inside the country and exiled leaders outside the country continued at the initiative of corporate leaders, academics, diplomats, and secret emissaries of the Apartheid government. You would not have known about these clandestine meetings at the time, for the brutal hand of state repression was still making itself felt inside the black townships of South Africa. But in addition to "secret diplomacy," the so-called go-between activities and track-two diplomacy were both crucial to the process of transition in that they "reduced threat perceptions among white participants ... and helped create a sense of negotiation possibility complementary to decision-makers' sense that negotiations were necessary."

White public anger was trained on those meeting openly with the enemy, and eventually news leaked out about the more secret meetings, but nothing could alter the fact that the Apartheid regime was talking to the banned ANC. Frederick Willem (known more commonly by his initials, F. W.) de Klerk, the last of the white presidents, did what his obstinate predecessor (P. W. Botha) lacked the courage to do: he unbanned the liberation movements, eased repulsive race laws, and freed political prisoners. In the political phraseology of the time, he crossed the Rubicon.

Many whites would like it to be known that these political reforms happened on their own terms, that these changes were possible once blacks were mature enough to rule, once black leaders accepted that violence was not the answer, and once the Communist threat was no longer real after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whites would have done this anyway; it was just a matter of waiting for the right time. This is the self-congratulatory argument of former Defense Minister Magnus Malan in his autobiography My Life with the South African Defense Force.

Of course this was a fiction, a belated justification for what had become inevitable. Sanctions worked, bringing pressure on the faltering economy of the Apartheid state and threatening the one other thing that white elites cared about: their material welfare as a group. Boycotts worked, keeping South Africa out of major international academic, social, and sporting events. To be sure, all kinds of sanction-busting activities were funded and pursued by the Apartheid state. Support started to dry up from the last of the regimes that winked at South African Apartheid. For years, the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom had complained about Apartheid racism and the exploitation of black people with a slap on the wrist for the white rulers, but they were willing to tolerate such backwardness for the sake of some broader geopolitical interests, or as some then argued, some common racial interests.

But even within those Western states that preferred "constructive engagement" to outright condemnation of racist rule, their own citizens were standing up and demanding that their government withdraw support and that their business communities remove investments from South Africa. Isolated at the tip of a continent, surrounded by liberated states, paralyzed by internal resistance, and under growing demand for change from Western powers, Apartheid could not hold out any longer. When F. W. de Klerk stepped up to the podium in Parliament to end Apartheid on February 2, 1990, he was not acting alone. The announcement was a calculated decision of the white elites: act now or lose everything. One thing the white and black elites feared in equal measure was what would happen if the international icon of political liberation and human decency, Nelson Mandela, died in prison. It would be the beginning of the end; a bloodbath might become a reality after all.

In the event, Nelson Mandela is released, but not before some of his imprisoned comrades are first freed—"to test the waters," some said. Initial negotiations start—"talks about talks," the overly cautious negotiators called it. Outside the smoke-filled rooms of the official negotiating forum, violence peaks—"the last kicks of a dying horse," said the expectant liberators. Yet this violence propels negotiations, underlining the risk of nonsettlement of the race question. What South Africa now becomes is neither the product of a revolutionary overthrow of the Apartheid state nor a reforming of the Apartheid system. The new country lies somewhere in between, the product of a negotiated settlement. This simple fact will determine the depth, pace, and direction of the change trajectory that follows the first democratic elections in 1994, which the ANC wins decisively with 62.7 percent of the national vote.

There are clear victors from this negotiated settlement, and as time goes by the rigid clauses and negotiated understandings that protect white privilege begin to dissolve as the new nationalists take office under the impressive leadership of Nelson Mandela. The sun sets on protective clauses, and former white rulers complain of betrayal of negotiated agreements on the part of the black elites. Eventually things settle as the terms of the endgame finally dawn on those who ruled with impunity for so long.

Within a short time, power changes hands. It comes as a huge shock to ordinary white citizens. They thought that their leaders would take them into negotiations without giving up too much; that they would continue to enjoy economic privileges, land and language rights, and educational and cultural preservation. The more ambitious among them, the hard right, even expect a "volkstaat" (a separate homeland for Afrikaners) to emerge from the settlement. White elites still quibble among themselves about who sold out whom in those short but intense negotiations.

The black elites waste no time in consolidating power. Parliamentary majorities steer through landmark legislation over the protests of the new political minority, whites. Compromise positions, such as a white second deputy president, become meaningless when the one so positioned, F. W. de Klerk, leads his National Party out of the Government of National Unity as he adjusts to the reality of political defeat. Black and white members of the ANC, on the other hand, are required to support the party line in the new Parliament; some conscientious objectors leave and others are pushed out, but the newfound power of the victors must be enforced. Few expect the overwhelming political authority the ANC will gain within the government and the country. White power, at least in the political domain, has come to an end.

Few countries produce more laws, more "White Papers," more policy positions—a raft of symbolic statements that promise to transform, at its roots, the devastating legacies of Apartheid. Money comes from everywhere to make these ambitions possible, with donors seeking a foothold in this most promising of capitalist states in the developing world. Traditional lenders, including the World Bank, push hard to secure their own influence but are held at arm's length—a cockiness that the new state with its relatively strong economy can afford. Blacks are in power, and things look very, very hopeful.

It is not enough to entrench political power in the formal structures of government, such as Parliament. It is also important to bring to life all kinds of new symbols to draw attention to the changing ownership of the state. Museums and monuments flourish, calling on the new nation to remember the black struggles of the past. New holidays come to life remembering dates in the liberation calendar: Human Rights Day (March 21), Freedom Day (April 27), Youth Day (June 16), and National Women's Day (August 9). The old holidays of Afrikaner nationalism disappear from the calendar, and even their one solemn remembrance recalling the Battle of Blood River—the Day of the Vow—is given broader meaning as the Day of Reconciliation (December 16).

Blacks are in control.

Yet all is not lost to the defeated. Whites are allowed to keep their schools, set their own fees, appoint teachers, decide on their languages, and determine their own admission policies. Museums are not knocked down; the Voortrekker Monument retains its prominence on a hill overlooking the founding city of the "trekkers," Pretoria; the monument of Cecil John Rhodes, the arch imperialist of the region, continues to overlook the University of Cape Town; and the burial sites of the Boers still enjoy prominence in Bloemfontein. Land is not seized and transferred from whites. There are no Nuremberg-type trials for the defeated, no official harassment for those who implemented the vicious policies of Apartheid. What is offered, instead, is a commission, one seeking truth and reconciliation, a necessary experiment that achieves little of either.

Ordinary white South Africans are not fooled. They no longer have exclusive power. Jobs favor blacks. Promotions favor blacks. Appointments and contracts in the public sector favor blacks. The pressure on companies and universities to hire blacks over whites is unrelenting, and potentially costly. Stories are legion of better-qualified whites being overlooked in favor of less-qualified blacks. It is, after all, a black country.

Of course, the consequences of the negotiated settlement are more nuanced than often presented by the defeated. Whites remain better qualified, on average, than blacks. White graduates find jobs more easily than black graduates. The private sector remains dominated by white economic power. Boardrooms remain overwhelmingly white, and decisions about employment and directorships still favor whites (and white males in particular). Whites have accumulated assets on the back of race that yield advantage to successive generations into the foreseeable future. Whites remain, at least in economic terms, much better off on average than black people—a completely foreseeable outcome given the soft terms of transition.

But the empirical status of transition is not what impresses whites. It is the psychological state of being defeated that clouds any interpretation of what is happening in a country where everybody—the black peasant and the white capitalist—has the same vote.

The little twists and turns of the transition compound the feelings of defeat. It is the odd provocation by a leading voice in the presidency claiming that the struggle was about black people in general and Africans in particular. It is the occasional statement of the minister of land affairs about the need to redistribute farmlands to black farmers that raises vivid images of the collapse of Zimbabwe right next door—and that under a black government. It is the constant reminders of black sports administrators and black politicians that quotas must remain in place and that not enough is being done to transform sports such as rugby, touching one of the most sensitive cultural properties of white emotion. It is the pressure on schools to integrate, on universities to appoint more black academics, on boardrooms to hire more black directors. It is a presidential initiative called "the Native Club," where the black intelligentsia assembles to complain about the still-enriched white minority, that raises fears and compounds loss.

When these things happen, feelings of defeat are magnified, and any calm and reasoned appeal to the statistics on race and employment has little meaning when the emotions of loss and change are so palpably felt among the defeated. The victors, on the other hand, are caught up in the throes of winning; nobody pays attention to the pain of losing. "Why should they matter?" assume the victors. "This is our time." Whites were rotten, they brutalized the original peoples of the land, they mercilessly stood by as their leaders with their armies of police and infiltrators deprived mothers of their children, men of their wives, families of their loved ones, all to keep in place an evil system called Apartheid. "They had their time. Who cares about their loss?"

Slowly, even the symbolic recognition of whites through public acts—such as the ground-moving gesture of Nelson Mandela to pull the white captain's number 6 rugby shirt over his head at the emotional Rugby World Cup finals in Johannesburg in 1995—begins to fade. Streets, towns, and cities become unrecognizable as African names displace Afrikaner names. Objections are lodged inside Parliament, and whites take to the streets to protest—something new to most white South Africans, still unaccustomed to the liberties they now enjoy in a democratic state. Those who now object against Afrikaner-to-African name changes often forget that such changes happened in the reverse throughout the 20th century; the protests are about the here and now. But it does not matter; a majority of blacks in the new Parliament ensures that a preferred policy or law or even street name is eventually pushed through.

To be sure, there is recourse to higher authority, and some landmark court reversals of decisions of black political and administrative authority make headlines. But such victories are few, and they are reversible as new laws and refined political strategies overcome temporary reprieves. In the end, the legal challenges do not matter much, for the courts are reluctant to involve themselves in "administrative matters," the things governments are responsible for.

There are those among the new black elite who remember what it means to be politically powerless, and who try to give expression to an inclusiveness that soothes white fears. Some of them even suggest that employment equity, South Africa's version of affirmative action, might require a termination date. This kind of ideological slippage is cannon fodder to black nationalists eager to enhance their political reputations among the majority; discriminating in favor of blacks cannot have an end date—ever. How can a system of white power and privilege that took three and a half centuries to entrench itself be overcome in slightly more than a decade?

Whites read the signs and recognize that the game is up, that with the passage of time their privileged position will be lost forever. Their claim to political voice is already permanently silenced in the new arrangement. Truth and myth mix readily in these narratives of defeat, producing a compelling story about loss.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Knowledge in the Bloodby Jonathan D. Jansen Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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