Conclusion

Democracy or Elite Cartel?

The looming disaster in this country will result from the distortion of a noble goal in favour of a short-cut route to Parliament by a handful of individuals.

Who exercises power in South Africa becomes less and less relevant for two reasons. First, the economic decline and volatile security situation have engendered widespread sentiment that anyone who can ensure development and stability ought to be given an opportunity to do so. Second, the process of negotiating the revolution has educated and changed the leadership of both the political establishment and the opposition. Increasingly, the negotiators have come to resemble each other in their technocratic outlook and pragmatic cooperation, to share a problem-solving mentality created by the accelerating crisis.

For the ANC-SACP socialism has been reduced to antitrust legislation and affirmative action. Lenin may still be quoted, but the World Bank, it seems, exerts a stronger pull. For Afrikaner nationalists racial obsessions have given way to co-optation at any cost. Even the Broederbond is now ready to admit black Afrikaners, though, significantly, not women, regardless of color. The more farsighted sections of the business elite, like Lonrho’s Tiny Rowland, ingratiate themselves with any political leadership, regardless of its democratic record, showering favors ranging from free trips in Lear jets to gifts of luxurious houses, invitations to corporate retreats and conferences in Bermuda or Davos, seats on company boards, lavish fees for speaking engagements, and preferential admission of relatives to educational institutions. Mandela’s attendance at the wedding of a daughter or the presence of a high-profile ANC executive at a birthday party becomes a status symbol of the true corporate insider. Dozens of diplomats and foreign NGO representatives wait in the wings with advice and funding of projects. It is remarkable how readily many of the once-stigmatized exiles and harassed activists have been tempted by the new access to power, though few can afford an ostentatious consumerism on meager ANC salaries. In this atmosphere of consensual lifestyles and reciprocal obligations, fundamental dissent about governing the country can hardly be expected, despite the different constituencies that corporate South Africa and the ANC represent. Ideologues deplore this informal elite cooperation as “obscuring the fundamental antagonism between our liberation movement and the apartheid regime,”^[1] but this criticism is more nostalgia and posturing than real opposition. The new South Africa is a misnomer; only more color has been added at the top of the old stratification.

Who exercises power in the “new” South Africa also becomes irrelevant in light of looming anarchy. Any power that can guarantee order and safety is better than descent into barbarism à la Yugoslavia, Angola, or Somalia. If a new suppression of white and black violent extremism were perceived as essential, a multiracial emergency coalition could crush opposition even more effectively than the old racial minority regime. After all, the ANC has tortured its dissidents and spies almost as gruesomely as the apartheid police. The reluctant partners in joint domination may both conclude that they can afford only limited democracy. Already the Nationalists and the ANC agree that their bilateral agreements cannot be undermined by third parties in multilateral negotiations—a questionable but seemingly necessary authoritarianism that lies at the root of Inkatha’s ire. The bilateral understandings, ironically, are a precondition for successful multiparty negotiations.

A pessimistic outlook views a political settlement as a necessary but entirely insufficient condition for reversing the social disintegration and economic decline. While the political leadership of the two major parties is galvanized into a negotiated compromise—driven both by recurrent crises and by the violent extremes lurking as alternatives to their own entitlement—the ultimate determinants of a successful transition are economic and social. The legacy of decades-long conflict could reach a point where even the most determined government of national unity lacks the capacity to reconstruct ravaged communities. So far, all the peace accords have been associated only with further violence, and all the well-intentioned efforts at development have failed to bridge the gulf between a growing mass of outsiders and an increasingly multiracial but still comparatively small sector of middle-class insiders. It is the magnitude of reconstruction—economically, institutionally, and especially ethically—which more optimistic analysts of political transition overlook. The culture of corruption, moral bankruptcy, and ethical decay, the pessimists assert, has so undermined the social fabric that it would be naive to expect a democratic culture of accountability and integrity to replace the social degeneracy, regardless of the government in power. There is, this view holds, little difference between the looting of the public treasury by an ethnic civil service during a half-century of exclusive political power and the sharing in the spoils of a decadent lifestyle by an alternative movement that merely wants to have its people on the public payroll. In short, these skeptics argue, a mere exchange of political administrations or, worse, an enlargement of the civil service can hardly succeed in reducing a 50 percent illegitimate birth rate or a spiraling crime rate in the absence of moral renewal and the discipline of an alternative ideology.

Moreover, high expectations, together with already relatively high labor costs, make South Africa uncompetitive in the world market, especially if expectations are further raised by a populist party in power. South Africa is therefore seen as unable to afford a genuine democracy, in which the pent-up demands would destroy the delicate balance of antagonistic forces. Given the widespread malaise, a new multiracial oligarchy may even succeed in legitimating itself democratically through referenda and media manipulation.

Yet, even though a few ANC activists break up meetings of political opponents, just as the early National Party of P. W. Botha did thirty years ago, the new rulers at least hold out the promise of democratic accountability. The knowledge of atrocities in the ANC camps notwithstanding, the newcomers can be taken at their word on human rights and accountability that a strong civil society will insist on retaining. Above all, they can claim a much broader mandate; they do represent the aspirations of the deprived majority. Deviating from the promised course would jeopardize a precious legitimacy on which the ANC depends more than its discredited partner in domination.

The prospects of South African democracy will depend heavily on the economic performance of the new regime. This does not, however, imply favoring business interests over labor at all costs, as many authors now argue. In the comparative literature on transitions, democracy is principally cherished as a means to protect human rights rather than to achieve material gains for disadvantaged groups. “In the interests of democratization, the corporate demands of business and the state may have to take precedence over those of labor,” writes Giuseppe Di Palma, author of To Craft Democracies.^[2] A reviewer of this work concludes: “In the U.S. social science literature, arguments for the feasibility of combining political reform and redistributive economic policies are increasingly difficult to find.”^[3] It is doubtful that such narrow definitions of democracy can be applied to South Africa.

Democracy without material gain would surely delegitimate a liberation movement that not only fought for symbolic equality but also raised expectations for greater wealth and material equality. Yet the democratic dilemma lies in the fact that a “democratic oligarchy”—an authoritarian order with a semblance of popular participation—is likely to perform better economically and to attract more foreign capital at lower labor costs than a genuine institutionalization of the popular will. The accumulated demands that real “people’s power” would attempt to answer would at the same time drive away manifold vested interests on whose cooperation the performance of the new order depends. That predicament does not bode well for the prospects of genuine democratizers beyond the ritual of manipulated popular endorsement.

The elites of the newly enfranchised will face their real test when they are unable to satisfy the heightened expectations. Do they cancel the accord and join the dissatisfied masses in renewed struggle? Do they join in a new multiracial clampdown in the name of restoring law and order as a precondition for economic growth? Or do they patiently explain their predicament and educate their constituency in the political art of the feasible, as the ANC attempted to do in selling power-sharing? A split in the fragile movement is most likely when some of its acclaimed leaders conclude that liberation has been won while others assert that liberation has been betrayed. South Africa promises to remain an intense political battleground well beyond the clear-cut front lines of the apartheid days.

Within the ANC-SACP-Cosatu coalition, the new faultlines divide those who, not being part of the new deal, view transitions as “mass-driven,” with permanent people’s mobilization, and those who practice normal elite politics with minimal dependence on grassroots support. Even within the SACP the old contradiction between a guiding vanguard and people’s choices has not been resolved. While all pay lip-service to democratic socialism, following the disaster with the East European bureaucratic version The African Communist now also cautions against “a lazy left-wing opportunism telling the people what they want to hear.”^[4] Already oppositional civics, an alienated youth, frustrated union leaders, township warlords, tribal and religious authorities, oppressed women, and several other dissatisfied constituencies vie for more influence.

Similar new faultlines characterize the establishment camp. The loose alliance between white and black separatists against a centralized state runs counter to traditional lineups. With roughly 25 percent of national support for the NP, 45 percent for the ANC, and 10 percent for Inkatha in 1993,^[5] the NP made the pragmatic choice to abandon a losing anti-ANC coalition with Inkatha and instead aim at establishing a strong center with the ANC, against traditional ideological leanings. Only in the Western Cape does the NP command a clear majority, while in Natal a combined Inkatha-NP coalition would hold majority support, with the ANC securing less than 25 percent of the vote in both regions. Should these regional interests not be accommodated in a federal constitution, breakaway movements could well gain ground. Natal, with its highly successful but vulnerable 20 percent Indian minority and the “European” Western Cape, with a 56 percent Coloured population, could emerge as the Croatia and Slovenia of South Africa. Rapidly increasing regional differences, however, could be accommodated in a federal system through equalization payments and revenue sharing. Otherwise, booming high-security enclaves of residual capital and tax benefits, such as Cape Town’s world-class waterfront or obscene fantasies like the “Lost City,” would thrive more and more uncomfortably in a sea of surrounding poverty.

Regardless of the future political faultlines, there remain some fundamentals that allow a far more optimistic outlook for South Africa than can be ventured for other divided societies. While South Africa will remain a largely multiracial rather than nonracial society, it has good prospects of relatively harmonious race relations and even some minimal nationhood. Although twice as many whites (77 percent) as black Africans (37 percent) express support for the South African flag and Springbok emblem in international sporting events, an almost equally high percentage in both groups (87 percent blacks versus 93 percent whites) feel proud of being South African.^[6] It should not be too difficult to find common national symbols and to forge a common identity for South Africans when pride in the land is already shared. Large majorities of over 70 percent in all groups, including ANC and NP supporters, agree on foreign policy: that a democratic South Africa should rejoin the Commonwealth (77 percent), that the international community can play a role in the transition (74 percent), that South Africa should become a peacemaker in the region (72 percent), and that the country must cooperate with its neighbors (83 percent).^[7] In 1992, South Africans of all groups even shared old myths born out of successful indoctrination: 62 percent overall and 53 percent among ANC supporters respond with “no” to the statement, “The communist threat against South Africa is over,” with some of the ANC-SACP supporters probably implying that the battle for socialism has not yet been won. The political consensus extends into the common consumerism of a modern Western industrial culture, where middle-class ideals predominate as much among blacks as whites. For instance, black parents stress “good manners,” “tolerance and respect,” and “neatness” as the most important values to be encouraged in children.^[8] Despite largely separate and unequal schooling, the identical values inculcated, the authoritarian modes of instruction, and the rote learning, as well as the use of English in black higher education, further reinforce a common outlook, at least for the educated. Amazingly, even the mode of standardized universal testing in countrywide matriculation examinations has been accepted, despite an average African pass rate of less than 50 percent, compared with over 95 percent in other ethnic groups. From all these indicators an adherence to common values can be deduced, in contrast to the cleavages in other divided societies. A shared political middle ground has emerged at the elite level, in contrast to the kind of divided society that led Judge Richard Goldstone to comment, “Take Israel, you couldn’t find a single Jewish judge, or Arab lawyer, who would be acceptable to the other side.”^[9]

The fundamental cleavages in South African society, therefore, do not concern issues of culture or race and identity, but social equity and increasing intraclass divisions, particularly in black society. In all surveys blacks and whites differ markedly in their assessment of their economic life chances, their grievances about unfair treatment, their hopes or anxieties about their material security, and hence their satisfaction with their quality of life. Rather than ethnicity, it is “class” (jobs, income, property) that matters most to blacks and whites. In an index of twenty-four policy issues with conflict potential compiled by Schlemmer, the greatest discrepancies between the racial groups occurred in affirmative action with regard to job replacement in the civil service, land redistribution, and higher taxation to support the poor.^[10] Symbolic issues such as official languages, flags and anthems, change of place names, school integration, or black retribution for mistreatment (Nuremberg trials) ranked low in conflict potential. Schlemmer diagnoses black rank-and-file attitudes as inclined toward compromise on symbolic issues about which whites feel strongly, particularly Afrikaans as an official language. However, there is greater adamancy for demands on economic equality. Schlemmer concludes that the “results suggest that culture and identity may not be as divisive in South Africa as the current experience in Eastern Europe would lead one to expect.”^[11] Our analysis confirms this finding and suggests that, paradoxically, in a society with the most open racial oppression, race relations may be far more harmonious under certain conditions than in the United States, Israel, or other divided societies. The reasons for this optimistic assessment of the promise of relative nonracialism lie mainly in a different psychological predisposition of the colonized in an industrial settler society.

American and European socio-psychological research findings about the psychic scars of oppression have often been uncritically applied to South Africa. It has been assumed that the victims of a legal system of racial domination would show its marks, such as self-hatred and low self-esteem, and that the “identification with the aggressor” Bettelheim diagnosed among some inmates of Nazi concentration camps would characterize the marginalized objects of decades-long apartheid domination. Yet in many ways apartheid has had the opposite effect, serving as a protective buffer against the psychological damage in discriminated minorities observed elsewhere. In legally equal societies the victims easily blame themselves as individuals for failure; in an institutionalized apartheid order of collective discrimination, the “system” was clearly at fault. Because the apartheid state lacked worldwide legitimacy, its victims responded with resistance rather than identification. Where “passing” was legally excluded, it made no sense to strive for assimilation and to choose the oppressor as the reference group.

The dominant mindset of active, resilient protest rather than passive acceptance of subordinate conditions was further reinforced by numerical majority status. It makes a crucial difference for self-perception whether the discriminated constitute an indigenous majority or an imported minority. Moreover, numbers and self-reliant institutions enforce relationships of objective interdependence, which minorities dependent on goodwill or their special skills lack. A sense of confident self-legitimacy is enhanced by the retention of pre-colonial language in South Africa. Unlike African-Americans, all South African blacks speak an indigenous mother tongue through which they retain a vital link with the land of conquest, which New World slavery destroyed. South African subordinates therefore show little of the ambivalent identity that characterizes minorities elsewhere, who are made to feel that they do not belong. South Africans of all races lack such self-doubts and confront one another as equals. This perception of equality remains an important precondition of successful negotiations and pacting, and perhaps even a minimal sense of common nationhood. The chances of a future South African democracy and stability do not falter on incompatible identities but depend mainly on the promise of greater material equality in a common economy.

Notes