Moneyweb (Johannesburg)
Tim Wood
9 November 2001
opinion
Johannesburg — The SA embassy in Washington DC e-mails SA's foreign correspondents from time to time and the latest missive was a copy of Dr Dlamini-Zuma's parliamentary speech on the Durban Racism conference.
There was little remarkable about the speech apart from the congratulatory self-assessment that the conference was an indisputable success. It was definitely not a success by any common definition and everything it represented and produced was disputable. Indeed, a Freudian slip in the opening paragraph of the speech is telling: "my colleagues who spent long hours hammering consensus in the different committees." Was it ever hammered.
My eyes rolled and my head shook at the never-ending stream of obnoxious race and class warfare code like "indigenous peoples" and "Islamophobia". There was even the predictable cheap shot fired at the United States and Israel for walking out on the conference, although there was no courage to say it outright.
That is just petty mindedness and hurt pride relative to an intriguing statement on reparations for slavery and, indirectly, colonialism.
Dlamini-Zuma said: "All we wanted, and I am happy to tell the House we did receive at end, was that those who committed an affront to our dignity to squarely look at the damage they caused and own up to it."
That was not the initial position of the African delegation which wanted slavery declared a crime against humanity and for reparations to be paid.
The delegation had its blinkers firmly secured. It wanted to focus only on the trans-Atlantic trade and only on the buyers. Not a word about intra-African slaving; nor about Africans who happily kidnapped and sold kith and kin into slavery; nor about the role Arab countries played in pioneering African slave trading and in abolishing the small mercy of manumission. Arab slave trading continues today in Sudan and Mauritania and it is entirely about racial superiority ? the slaves are all black.
But then the Arab states were effectively running the Durban show with their anti-Semitic demagoguery so it's hardly surprising that everything had a specific tint.
But Dlamini-Zuma's comments change the tint somewhat. She is not entirely honest in that verbal apologies and sobbing cries of "shame" have never been enough in the SA context. Affirmative action is about reparations for past injustices ? a financial cost determined in quotas; but now the beneficiaries are dark-skinned.
Affirmative action is also SA's most failed ideal. It was a habit before the colonists arrived although they refined it considerably until the National Party gifted the world its most institutional form.
It always fails because its very utopianism breeds corruption resulting in more costs than benefits. It consecrates a culture of victimization that is a deathblow to hard work and entrepreneurship. Affirmative action is such a shibboleth for SA that it even slid into the new Constitution despite being a clear violation of the principle of equality before the law. The end result is always race police sticking pencils in people's hair and writing writs according to skin pigmentation.
It's the most perfected recipe for disaster, but SA insists on cooking the same dish despite endless centuries of flops.
Reparations might be a way of ending the stupidity. It is tasteless and the short-term cost would be daunting, but it is a superior alternative to the corrupting impact of affirmative action. We all pay off some debts that we were not responsible for creating; in this case it's a gesture of responsibility and accountability that could finally wipe out the national scourge. To pay reparations in exchange for absolute Constitutional colour blindness would put SA on a different path.
That is what the transfer of power from the minority to the majority should have been about. Instead it was about securing the jobs of politicians who make their living by maintaining the politics of race and retribution. Until the original transferors and transferees are replaced by something representing the sensible majority, bitterness and poverty will be the permanent inheritance.
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