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Global Studies in Culture and Power

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The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid

childhoods and the construction of epistemologies
of ignorance

Melissa Steyn

To cite this article: Melissa Steyn (2012) The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid
childhoods and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance, Identities, 19:1, 8-25, DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840

Published online: 27 Apr 2012.

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 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2012, 8–25

The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid childhoods

and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance
Melissa Steyn

(Received April 2011)

Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected

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by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theoriza-

tion of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how
an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies
at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conven-
tional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty
individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowl-
edge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value.
The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social
regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of
ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black
South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of
the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.
Keywords: whiteness; apartheid; South Africa; ignorance; epistemology;
social contract theory; subjectivity

Introduction
It has become a standing joke that since democracy in South Africa one cannot
find anyone who supported apartheid. Increasingly some white1 South Africans
claim that they did not know what was happening during apartheid; that it was
not their generation that was responsible for apartheid, but that of their parents;
and even that it was not as bad for black people during apartheid as it is for white
South Africans in postapartheid South Africa. Yet the system of racial apartheid
could not have been functional or sustained for over four decades without the
active and passive cooperation of the white population – using separate entrances,
enjoying whites only transport, beaches, restaurants and cinemas, paying submin-
imum wages to black employees employed only for menial labour, educating only
white children in the schools their children also attended, enjoying the security of
curfews, serving in the army and, of course, participating in discourses that justi-
fied the status quo. Generating what Mills (2008) has called a ‘feel-good’ history
for whites (p. 241), they create a more favourable, or at least more comfortable,
present for whiteness in South Africa (Steyn and Foster 2008). And by imparting
this amended reality to their children they are enabling subject positions for them
that will be characterized by ignorance.

ISSN 1070-289X print/ISSN 1547-3384 online

© 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840
http://www.tandfonline.com
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 9
Working with material from the Apartheid Archives project described below,
and drawing on the theorization of epistemologies of ignorance emerging from
the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ignorance contract2
lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy, such as South Africa.
It shows how ignorance functions as social regulation through forming subjectiv-
ities that are appropriate performers of ignorance. Because of the dominance of
whiteness, the terms of the ignorance contract are set by the white population,
although the article shows that both white and black South Africans constructed
their own epistemologies of ignorance during the apartheid era, for very different
strategic reasons.
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The Apartheid Archives project

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided information that could inform
an honest engagement with the past (Boraine 2000). It has been criticized, how-
ever, for its exclusive focus on state operatives and gross violations of human
rights and neglecting systemic social violations (Mamdani 2000). The hearings
of the Commission did not reveal how ordinary people experienced the quotid-
ian life of apartheid; how they perpetuated, enjoyed, suffered and resisted the
system.
The Apartheid Archive Project, based at the University of the Witwatersrand,3
was initiated by an interdisciplinary team of South African academics based
locally and abroad to preserve for future generations some of the texture of every-
day life during the apartheid years, and thus to counter loss of knowledge of the
past. The project houses a web portal, where members of the public are invited to
upload memories of specific incidents from the country’s racialized past,4 which
are then stored as an archive and research database.
The project was officially launched in June 2009 with a public event and a
colloquium, Facing the Archive, at which the lead researchers presented analyses
of the narratives collected to date. An earlier version of this article was initially
prepared for that colloquium.

Theorizing ignorance, or agnotology

The recognition that ignorance is not simply a lack or absence to be filled with
still to be acquired knowledge (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) is only begin-
ning to inform our understandings of social events and relations. Smithson (2008)
maintains that ignorance is an essential part of human relations, culture and organi-
zations, and that it is ‘a pervasive and fundamental influence in human cognition,
emotion, action, social relations and culture’ (p. 159). McHugh (nd) defines an
Epistemology of Ignorance as follows:

Epistemology of ignorance is the study of not knowing or unknowing and the study
of the generation of subject positions that are ignorant. It is also the study of the
refusal to be ignorant and the active reconstruction of one’s knowing. The study of
 10 M. Steyn
the epistemology of ignorance has been an overtly political project in the academy,
one that seeks to disrupt structures of unknowing, reveal patterns of active ignorance,
and insert Others as knowers. (McHugh, nd, p. 1)

Framing an inquiry within this problematic is, therefore, to recognize the inte-
gral connection between knowledge and ignorance, not in terms of presence and
absence, but in terms of two types of presences, both of which are products of
deliberate practices. In other words, ignorance must be studied as a social accom-
plishment, not just as a failure of individual knowledge acquisition (Michaels
2008). Tuana and Sullivan (2006) cite Proctor (1995):

[W]e must ‘study the social construction of ignorance. The persistence of contro-
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versy is often not a natural consequence of imperfect knowledge but a political

consequence of conflicting interests and structural apathies. Controversy can be
engineered: ignorance and uncertainty can be manufactured, maintained, and dis-
seminated’. (Proctor, p. 8)

This understanding makes ignorance an issue that profoundly concerns scholars

of social processes (Smithson 2008). Just like knowledge, ignorance can be put
in place through communicative practices and disseminated across social settings,
cultivated and nurtured intersubjectively, circulating through social networks and
activities. Reframing ignorance in this manner also raises questions of social mem-
ory and how we come to ‘forget’ what was once known (Wylie 2008). As Tuana
(2004) points out, what was once known can be ‘transferred to the realm of igno-
rance not because it is refuted and seen as false, but because such knowledge is no
longer seen as valuable, important, or functional’ (p. 195). Tronto (2003) claims
that ‘bad faith’ is involved in an unwillingness to know about the histories that
led to present structural inequalities. The management of ignorance, not only of
knowledge, therefore, is a technique of control.
Tuana’s work as a feminist philosopher has been influential in revealing the
vested interests that produce and maintain ignorances. Ignorance and domination
are often interrelated, as ignorance may be ‘actively constituted or reproduced as
an aspect of power’ (Feenan 2007), or a consequence of a refusal of multiple ways
of knowing (May 2006), given that different patterns of systematic knowledge
will produce a ‘different systematic ignorance about their environment’ (Harding
2001).

Indeed, tracing what is not known and the politics of such ignorance should be a key
element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to
reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and to provide a lens
for the political values at work in our knowledge practices. (Tuana 2004)

Systematic ignorance can, therefore, be found in the knowledge constructed from

positions of power. It is an important means for the production and maintenance
of the unequal positionalities in society, with the result that, like knowledge, its
distribution can be mapped along societal fault lines. In some instances it may
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11
be knowledge, or the drive to knowledge, that is epistemologically dysfunctional
or ethically reprehensible. Tuana (2006) includes ‘loving ignorance – accepting
what we cannot know’ in her typology of ignorance, and Townley (2006) rec-
ommends the ‘epistemic virtue’ of ‘an appropriate attitude to oneself and other
knowers’ (p. 46).

Race and the ignorance contract

As one of the organizing principles of inequality in society that ‘reproduce their
own conditions of existence’ (Cooper 2004, p. 59), race is deeply implicated in
the (re)production of our understandings of the world around us. The concept
of epistemologies of ignorance has obvious resonance with the theorizations of
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whiteness, which has been characterized as a structurally privileged positionality

(un)informed by ignorance/blindnesses – taking for granted unearned entitlements
that come at the expense of racialized others, and generally lacking insight into the
normalized racial order that shapes life opportunities and conditions impercepti-
bly around the comfort, convenience and advancement of whites (McIntosh 1992,
Kincheloe 1998, Steyn 2001). Leonardo (2009) goes as far as to identify whiteness
itself as a ‘collective racial epistemology with a history of violence against people
of color’ (p. 111).
An extensive treatment of the subject of white ignorance is found in Mill’s
The Racial Contract (1997), a political and historical analysis of the modern
world. The Racial Contract is postulated as a historically demonstrable ‘consent,
whether explicit or tacit, to the racial order, to white supremacy, to what could be
called Whiteness’ (p. 14). Its epistemological dimension involves, ‘as a general
rule’, ‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self-deception on
matters related to race’ (p. 19, italics in the original). He famously states:

On matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an
inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of local-
ized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially
functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to
understand the world they themselves have made. (Mills 1997, 18)

White ignorance thus arises out of ‘white racism or white racial domination and
their ramifications’ as an implicit agreement to misrepresent the world (Mills
2008, p. 233). This article foregrounds the ignorance ‘sub clause’ of the more com-
prehensive Racial Contract – the agreement, whether explicit or tacit – to maintain
white epistemologies of ignorance. I am calling this The Ignorance Contract.
Several important contributions towards adumbrating the epistemologies of
ignorance at work in racialized contexts appear in the collection, Race and
Epistemologies of Ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana 2007). Alcoff (2007) discusses
substantive racial ignorance: ignorance is not necessarily brought about by neglect,
but by historically generated, structural practices that may be related to our
situatedness as knowers, our group identities and our oppressive systems. Bailey
 12 M. Steyn
(2007) highlights the relationship between white ignorance and non-white resis-
tance, pointing to the strategic uses of ignorance and expressions of ignorance.
Arguing that an epistemology of ignorance is supported by an ethics of ignorance,
Hoagland (2007) sees the denial of relationality as central to practices of igno-
rance, an insight echoed in Sullivan’s (2007) notion of neglect of response-ability.
In her essay, Spelman (2007) shows that the social labour of ignorance takes ‘com-
mitment’ to the interests of a social group, citing Baldwin who identifies white
ignorance as an ‘appalling achievement’ that has as a core element that one should
not care to know: ‘It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’ (p. 20).
These writers point to ignorance as a collective accomplishment in racial
arrangements, but Mills (2008), following Cohen (2001), also points out that
racial ignorance relies on a ‘meta-rule’ that enables communal denial (p. 247).
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This meta-rule secures what this article calls The ‘Ignorance Contract’, dictating
that while in the interests of white solidarity one obeys the rules about what one
may or may not talk openly about, one is bound to deny one’s knowledge of the
original rule (Cohen, p. 65). This meta-rule is at the heart of the collusion that
keeps systemic racial stratification in place, and sharpens the question of complic-
ity. Ignorance, Applebaum (2008) contends, protects whites and the unjust systems
that operate to their benefit from interrogation (p. 293), and enables moral certainty
and arrogance (p. 295). Whites have the most to gain from remaining ignorant
and are more likely to display a ‘passion for ignorance’ rather than engage with
the ‘difficult knowledge’ of complicity in systemic injustice (p. 297). As Geras
(1998), commenting on appeals to ignorance in contexts of human disaster, notes:

Not to know or not to know enough, you have to turn aside, you have resolutely to
ignore the signals of distress that come our way. In these circumstances the plea of
lack of knowledge is uncompelling. It treats as an involuntary state what is itself
in fact a choice. To adapt the judgment of one scholar concerning the same plea by
many Germans after 1945 with respect to the fate of the Jews: those who are unaware
know enough to know that they prefer not to know any more. (p. 35)

Method
The Apartheid Archives project is both a record-keeping archive and a research
project where researchers are able to develop insights into the psychosocial
dynamics both of the past and of how the present is shaped through its constructs
of the past. The lead researchers focus on narrative as research methodology, ret-
rospective sense-making, and how people construct themselves and their histories
under apartheid.
Authors of the narratives generally provide demographic information of gen-
der, ‘race’, the region they come from and their approximate age. As this is
a ‘living’ archive to which people can continually contribute, each narrative is
assigned a number sequentially as it is received. Narratives cited in this study are
identified by this number and demographic details provided by the authors. The
narratives vary in length, ranging from a single paragraph, to several pages, and
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 13
are highly diverse stylistically. The archive does not regulate how authors should
approach recording their stories.
At the time when the original article was prepared for the Facing the archive
colloquium, there were 56 narratives in the archives. The author read all the nar-
ratives through several iterations, identifying where ignorance could be discerned
playing a role in an incident. The methodology employed was purely qualitative
and focused on questions such as: what is ignorance doing in this context; who
is ignorant of what, and why?; whose interests are being served by this ignorance
and what is at stake? The identified passages were then each analysed to elicit the
dynamic that best characterized the particular quality of ignorance evidenced, and
labelled accordingly. The analysis consisted of showing how ignorance was con-
structed in each incident, how it operated, its strategic value in that context and
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of finding the patterns between incidents and categories. Because the Apartheid
Archive focuses on adult recollections of early racialization experiences, it enables
an analysis not only of how racial ignorances operated within a white supremacist
society, but also of what people’s recollections reveal about how ignorance was
communicated and passed on in intergenerational dynamics. Finally, the different
labels were then grouped into the broad categories presented below.
Methodologically, this study differs from most studies on epistemologies of
ignorance in that it does not examine a body of historical texts to identify the dis-
tortions in a particular episteme. It also shifts from the more philosophical tenor
of the work on epistemologies of ignorance and race, as the emphasis is on voices
and telling stories about everyday life. It looks at what ordinary people who sub-
mitted their stories remember not knowing, and how not knowing was circulated
in everyday actions and interactions.

Learning to sign the contract: recollections of growing up white during

apartheid
Ignorance was both labour and product in the apartheid society. The recollections
indicate the extent to which learning what not to know, what not to notice, was
integral to being socialized into the micro-politics of the time. Racialization, one
could say ignoritization, ‘at close quarters’ (Straker 2009) is recounted in stories
of early childhood, especially in relation to a black nanny or maid. The Apartheid
Archives bear testimony to how little insight white children developed into the
worlds of black people outside of how they were defined in the white home.

At that time my only personal encounters with black people were our maids and gar-
deners. The fact that my parents had a full time maid when they weren’t particularly
well off themselves is telling in any event. But the point is that I cannot recall ques-
tioning this as a child and I don’t believe that I characterised this suburban world
as racist (or even had knowledge of this word). Certainly, neither my parents nor
their black employees gave me any idea that this is what it was . . . . I was taught
as a child to always be polite to the domestic workers and can certainly remember
being fond of all the women who worked in our house . . . I didn’t know much about
 14 M. Steyn
the black people that worked in our house. At most, an English first name is what I
can recall. I wasn’t encouraged to be curious although I was by nature an inquisitive
child . . . a kind of detachment was either what I learnt from my parents or decided
for myself was the only viable way of relating and this is what allowed racism to go
unquestioned. (N50)

Such stories foreground the pivotal role the family and intimate relationships
played in securing the racial order. Well out of sight of the state and its legisla-
tion, ignorance is shown to be an essential component of controlling the social
arrangements in which ordinary white households were implicated. The child was
mentored into repressing the impulse to question, thus minimizing opportunities
for misgivings about the racial and political realities being played out in his home
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and beyond. It names one of the instruments, and effects, of this repression: deny-
ing the child the language with which to think the dynamics in which oppression,
affection and indifference are ambivalently enmeshed, foreclosing the child’s sub-
jectivity into a world where the other’s reality is hardly known or even entirely
absent. The confines placed on the collective understandings of the young person
growing up under conditions of whiteness can be understood as a form of epis-
temic injustice (Fricker 2007), restricting the child’s grasp of reality to within the
hegemony of a white worldview and suppressing knowledge of the conditions on
which his whiteness is based (Leonardo 2009).
This exclusive world of white privilege exists in a parallel universe to the
degradation it creates; its inevitability seemingly corroborated by the material
arrangements and servile black subjectivities that are themselves the products
of the same social processes. One narrator recalled being told by a black per-
son that the leaders at his church had taught them that God created black people
to serve whites (N48–53). The ignorance, therefore, is not experienced as a lack
because it is accompanied by the production of other ‘knowledges’ that Leonardo
(2009) refers to as white racial knowledge – plaids of misinformation, justifica-
tions and evidence that can provide the satisfaction of certainty and mask what is
obfuscated.
All knowledge exists in a pool of ignorance; as some articulations gain accep-
tance and come to be taken for granted, alternatives are omitted or displaced
(Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). A telling example occurs when one male nar-
rator reflects on how the knowledge young white boys held about the Other was
rehearsed even in the absence of actual referents; the socially communicated and
shared set of ‘facts’ about blackness displaces and substitutes for the real human
beings it purports to represent:

The fascination with a kind of denigrated, objectified blackness was often evoked in
bodily kinds of ways, in the repetitive games and gestures of adolescent boys. Certain
facial expressions, affected accents, ways of talking, referring to others, playing out
this denigrated blackness, performed. So to mock a fellow student you repeated his
words more slowly, in an affected ‘African’ kind of voice, to make him sound like
he didn’t know what he was talking about, as if he was stupid. That was enough –
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 15
the mere evocation of a caricatured black voice speaking in English was sufficient
to imply someone was unintelligent . . . . There were also facial improvisations, flat-
tening one’s nose, spreading one’s lips as wide as possible, making them as thick as
possible, sufficed to mimic blackness . . . . In short, a series of racist stereotypes and
bodily evocations became part and parcel of the repetitive play of white adolescent
boys, vital instruments in the ongoing in-group/out-group identity practices of who
was cool and who wasn’t . . . the oddity of the situation was there were no black
pupils, and very few black people present at the school . . . . There seemed to me a
kind of ongoing need to invent the object that racism was about. (N53)

The certainty generated about the meaning of blackness passed for knowledge not
because of the accuracy of its truth claims, but because it afforded the group con-
structing the knowledge some advantage. The ignorance is integral to the (know
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all) certainty of white racial knowledge that does not need to know itself as con-
tingent, as open to revision or contestation, as unstable. Far from being empty, the
epistemic spaces of ignorance in the example above were clearly densely populated
with personas that emanated from the confidence these young boys felt about their
understanding of blackness, and how its degradation elevated their whiteness. The
corpus of ‘truths’ about whiteness and blackness that held together the young boys’
world and shaped their behaviour was integral to constructing the actual group they
understood themselves to be part of, its boundaries and its identity. Tellingly, the
boys knew what they could do with the discourse; its efficacy was anchored in
the intuitive understanding that the evocation of blackness was a mechanism that
could be wielded to construct not only ‘outsiderness’ but also ‘second classness’
(Kitch 2009). What is, therefore, profoundly known in these rituals of identifica-
tion is the distorting effect that the episteme can bring about in the relationships
between implicated groups. As the boys playfully, joyfully, rehearse the dynamics
of demeaning and disempowering a marked target, the ignorance notably resides
in unawareness of the ethical questions raised by their behaviour. Consequently,
they also acquire what Hoagland (2007) calls an ethics of ignorance.
Another narrator recalls how as a young girl she had been asked to take
something to drink to black workers in the yard:

I had watched my mother and our nanny setting our trays with drinks or tea countless
times before. So I put on the kettle, found the tray, a tray cloth, the cups and saucers,
the silver teaspoons and sugar bowl, the teapot and milk jug covered in a pattern del-
icate roses. At this point my mother came into the kitchen, I could see her becoming
inexplicably angry as she looked at the tea tray, laden with the ‘best’ china. ‘Don’t
be ridiculous!’ she may have said – or words to this effect. (N29)

Both this and the previous narrative draw attention to the performative aspects of
knowing and not knowing. In getting the racial etiquette of discriminating with
crockery wrong, the young girl has clearly performed an imperfect iteration of
the unwritten rules, which momentarily makes them hypervisible. Her mother’s
anger, at least to some extent, resides in having to make the rules explicit, in her
own discomfort at having to transgress the meta-rule that proscribes admitting to
 16 M. Steyn
knowing the original rules of discrimination. Recollections such as these indicate
how oppressive systems are able to produce gendered and raced subject positions
for the privileged through cultivating a sense that it is appropriate to deny relation-
ality; as people become sutured into a tiered social arrangement, response-ability
between those who are advantaged by the societal arrangements and those who
are oppressed is removed. Potentially truncating her emotional and ethical devel-
opment as she internalizes the message that some people should fall outside of
her regard, such moments not only educate the child into shame for not having
performed her whiteness appropriately, but also teach anaesthetizing the sense of
shame one brings on oneself when one degrades another. The numbing enables not
feeling relationship, not desiring to know. (Boler 1999)
A shocking example of how ‘successfully’ disconnected from a sense of rela-
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tionship such a subjectivity can become is exemplified in a young person’s ‘white’

neglect of developing racial understanding (Leonardo 2009):

In the early 1990s I shared a house with 4 people in the 20s and early 30s. One
morning I arrived in the kitchen and saw one of my housemates with the newspaper.
‘The armed struggle is over’ declared the headlines. ‘Great news! The armed struggle
is over!’ I said. ‘What armed struggle?’ she said. (N55)

Such ‘blank spaces’ in white awareness are enabled through the psychological,
emotional, discursive and ethical distortion developed and taught to make it pos-
sible to live comfortably in a world dislocated from those we oppress. Protecting
the emotional well-being of the subject is necessary in a context that, if responded
to honestly and accurately, would produce a great deal of personal anguish, guilt
and shame. What we recognize in these accounts is therefore also a careful educa-
tion of subjectivity to provide the preconditions for not knowing injustice, into
appropriate containers for ignorance of other people’s struggles, pain, joy and
accomplishments, of their common human worth, and for this to become internal-
ized into systems of self-regulation and policing. A telling example is recounted
in a narrative told by the daughter of a miner. A white miner, trapped underground
after a rock fall, had been saved by a black miner at great personal risk to his own
life. The narrator tells us:

The black miner received the highest bravery award. The white miner was also at
the ceremony but refused to shake the hand of the man who saved his life when the
black miner was subsequently congratulated by hand-shaking all round by the top
management.

This was the most unexpected shocking display of ignorance and prejudice by the
white miner with his refusal to act courteously to a man on whom his life had
depended. (N52)

This man had experienced, and been the beneficiary of, an act of astonish-
ing humanity, yet he denied their common humanity through his racist distaste
of touching his co-worker, an attitude well inculcated through the apartheid
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 17
prohibitions on interracial contact. The (ac)knowledge(ment) of his debt to a
black man – implicitly also recognition of his moral worth (and perhaps superi-
ority) – would have been emotionally untenable, probably a shaming humiliation.
Cognizance would come at too great a price, destabilizing his subjectivity. The
incident indicates just how stunted the emotions and ethical sensibility may need
to become in order to maintain racial epistemologies of ignorance. It underscores
that this maintenance takes commitment to white dominance, even in the face of
possible personal error or doubt. As Spelman (2007) has observed, white people
need not actually believe the ignorant misrepresentations required for the entrench-
ment of white supremacy, but must be committed to their being true in the interests
of white solidarity, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
The account of how a white farmer was unfazed in cheating a struggling black
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father desperate to educate his children further illustrates trained indifference:

Our parents could not afford to take us to university, I had the princely sum of R300 in
my pocket, half of the R600 my father got from selling his tractor. My sister at college
had to go to Perseverance at the same time and my father could not get an overdraft
or a loan from his bank. The white man he sold the tractor to knew exactly in what
predicament my father was but nevertheless brought down the price of the tractor
which was worth nearly three times the amount settled for. He profited from a black
man desperate to provide for the higher education of his children. (N54)

Such indifference allows ignorance to shade into deliberate conspiracies of silence,

where the collective guards the culpabilities of their system, in silent collusion.

My father’s brother (my Uncle in English) who was staying on another farm had
visited my father’s family one afternoon. He went home after the visit but could
not reach his destination because some white youth caught him on his way and
beat him up so badly that he lost consciousness. He was found on the side of the
dusty farm road the following morning by someone who knew him. He never fully
regained consciousness. The mode of operation of these white guys was very similar
to the much talked about lynching of Black people in the United States of America.
To this day those boys were never brought to book although they were known in the
community. (N44)

Because secrets such as these recounted above remain unconfessed to this day,
the ignorance contract remains intact and white people in current day South
Africa can insist that they ‘didn’t know’ about apartheid injustices and brutality.
Many white people growing up during apartheid were handicapped in learning
critical skills needed for relationship, and indeed for civic life. When young white
children were taught not to sit at the same tables as black people (N6, 29) and
to sit in the front pews of the church (N13), they were simultaneously taught to
ignore the indignity such segregation and exclusion visited upon black people.
When they were socialized into believing that all good shoes belong to whites
(N14), or that it was not a problem if there were no black children in their schools
(N7, 27) or if black people were excluded from clubs (N17), they were being
 18 M. Steyn
taught to ignore social injustice, to collude with structured ignorance and take the
good life without thinking too much or inconveniencing themselves. And given
that the dominant groups’ knowledge becomes public knowledge, and public
policy (Hoagland 2007), they were schooled into subjectivities and assumptions
of citizenship that were predicated on the erasure of black people as subjects
and citizens (Hoagland 2007). In short, they were being taught to sign up for the
ignorance contract and take the ensuing dividends; the lot of black people was
not, and did not need to be, their problem.

Counter ignorances: recollections of growing up black during apartheid

The two preceding incidents, recounted by black adults, reveal the ‘double con-
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sciousness’ (DuBois 1994 (1903)) that black people developed during apartheid,
becoming adept at reading the ignorance contract that secured the whiteness of
their compatriots. Interestingly, the archives show that people oppressed in such
racial hierarchy are agents of their own varieties of ignorance; they too have
commitments to constructing not-knowing, necessitated by the social distortions
caused by the Racial Contract. Alcoff (2007) indicates that while oppressed peo-
ple may have greater reason for critical awareness into the social orders in which
they live, they may need ignorances for their ‘overall mental health and functional
social relations’. (p. 44)
A common thread that runs through many of the narratives told by black
South Africans is how the dominant ignorances became internalized ignorance
experienced as normality also for black South Africans:

This blatant discrimination did not matter then, or shall I say that it was so rife that
it looked normal and natural to be handled that way. In fact I can’t remember myself
or anybody for that matter asking why it was that we bought things through that
shop window while whites had better access. Nobody asked why the ticket examiners
behaved in the manner in which they did towards us and not to their white peers.
Nobody asked as to why we were huddled together in buses without seats while
whites who dared to visit QwaQwa used the better and smaller section of the bus
which had seats and curtains. Nobody ever asked as to why we did not have high
schools nearby while our white counterparts could literally walk to their high schools.
Nobody ever asked as to why was it that the majority of the black kids we started
substandard A with, never went beyond standard six education. In fact, nobody asked
why was it that none of my standard six classmates ever went to any high school at
all, to further their education. (N44)
At that time the children thought it was normal that the police vans came into the
area on a regular basis to catch people. (N48–53)

These accounts reveal how the world of childhood is experienced as ‘the way
it is’, as people simply accept their lot, the formative broader social, political
and economic dynamics rendered invisible at the level of ordinary, daily life.
Such ignorance of the relationship between white privilege and black subjuga-
tion may have the function of defending the oppressed from painful consciousness
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19
and political choice, especially in contexts where extreme disempowerment is
pervasive, thus producing subjectivities shaped within conditions of learned help-
lessness. As Fricker’s (2007) work on epistemic injustice argues, a second class
voice is not expected to have legitimate knowledge, and one’s ignorance can keep
one from being punished, like the averted gaze of a slave could deflect the mas-
ter’s wrath (Hooks 2003). For some this may lead to choosing denial, internalized
subjugation and even collusion with the ignorance contract, avoiding the emo-
tional cauldron that accompanies developing an ethics of moral outrage. When the
oppressed are ignorant of the dominant ignorance contract, society functions most
comfortably for the oppressor; to keep the ignorance of white people intact, its
best society produces ignorant black people.
An allied type of ignorance cultivated by some of the oppressed could be called
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aspirational: refusals, intersubjectively developed and promoted, to confront fully

how they were positioned within the society, identifying rather with the white-
ness that held out endlessly deferred promises of healing the lack that it begot.
Accounts of how resolutely committed their upbringing was to the collective denial
of the racialization that positioned them outside of white privilege but above the
least desired and most abjected black Africans recur in the narratives of some
coloured people, especially. This version of the ignorance contract seems to have
been underwritten, for some, by an internalized evaluation that it was somehow
insulting not to be white; for others, it appears to have been more a case of settling
for the relative privilege not being black African:

Despite the awareness of the inequities and indignities suffered, my parents like many
of my peers’ parents remained resolutely opposed to politics and political discussion.
In part they feared for the lives of their children, but it became painfully clear that
they could not contemplate an alternative to being governed by anyone else that white
people. Besides, the elders would be heard saying, ‘the white government has been
good to us, look how badly they have treated the blacks’ intimating that coloured peo-
ple should be thankful for the relatively marginal way they were being discriminated
against. (N42)

The narratives expose a pressure towards a subjectivity of racial respectability

within a ‘somewhat whiteness’, internalizing an ironic form of racial ignorance
characterized by a range of feelings – all coupled with an element of dependency
and need – compromise and relief, desire, even gratitude to whiteness for offering
salvage from being black African.
Some other black people actively participated in manufacturing ignorances
that would suit their own purposes. Probably most of the varieties of ignorance
within the black community appear to be protective ignorance, evident particularly
in intergenerational dynamics in the archives. Parents would protect their children
from the pain of full knowledge of the indignity imposed upon their lives under
the apartheid regime. Mediating their world to keep them innocent of things such
as why they were not allowed to enter towns at certain hours or sleep in hotels (N6,
26), to visit only designated beaches (N1) or sit on certain benches (N17), or why
 20 M. Steyn
they had to use separate entrances (N48–53) and ablution facilities – the many
quotidian manifestations of apartheid discrimination – parental concern allowed
children to develop a sense of their value still undamaged by the white society’s
estimate of them. One narrator recalls the moment at which he first saw through
this protective ignorance:

At that moment of his sick joke, I, an 11 year old boy in 1979, understood why my
father usually bought what we needed at the cooperative store himself. He wanted to
save us the routine humiliation meted out by Nico and his overweight farmer friends.
(N54)

The corollary of this veil of protective ignorance is shown in how young people
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who were engaged in the unrest of the 1980s would hide their political activ-
ity from their parents. They understood the form the meta-rule takes for those
positioned as the oppressed. Knowing too much about how the white world oper-
ated was perilous; especially self-destructive would be to reveal that you knew
about the ignorance contract. The meta-narrative applies thus – if you see through
the rules that are responsible for your oppression, don’t let on, as that would
reveal that whiteness has been critically scrutinized. Double consciousness had
to remain implicit, communicated openly only amongst those who shared the will
to undermine or resist the racial order, or wanted to pass awareness on for others’
enlightenment. For the parents of young revolutionaries to know of their activi-
ties would be to invite them to try to restrain these activities or draw them into
circumstances where they could not say they did not know if questioned.
Ignorances of resistance were able to capitalize on the lack of cross-racial
relationship and the concomitant lack of knowledge on the part of the white cen-
tre. Reminiscing on how children overcame racial strictures, one black narrator
chuckles at how they turned the system back on itself in acts of micro-resistance:

My parents had been blissfully unaware of the many times myself and a few fairer
skin friends had entered the white public swimming pool in our neighbourhood, only
to laugh at the cashier who could not tell the difference between a coloured and a
Portuguese child. (N42)

The anecdote intimates the relationship between the trickster and self-
preservation; in order for a sense of possibility to survive under such suffocating
domination, whiteness was not taken on its own terms, and an ethic of opportunism
was developed to take advantage of its blindness. A thought-provoking example of
such a dual/split subjectivity is given of a black farmer in Namibia (N54), who
would flatter a particular white farmer by obsequiously calling him ‘baas’ (boss)
to get discount on goods. He was actually a member of the underground SWAPO
resistance movement, working for the liberation of then South West Africa from
white South African control. The joke was on the farmer, who would never have
credited the black man with the skill to live a double life, and to keep him igno-
rant of activities happening on his own property. For people in subjugated groups,
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 21
managing the communication of knowledge about ‘inside’ their cultural spaces
in obfuscating ways may be strategic (Banks and Banks 1995). The crueller the
master, the slyer the slave.
To some degree or another, the ‘counter contract’ epistemologies of ignorance
cultivated in the spaces of the oppressed could probably all be characterized as
survival ignorances, developed and circulated from positions of diminished choice
and necessitated by the overarching power structures. They entailed inculcating
in oneself or one’s loved ones elements of invulnerability to the impact of the
privileged upon the oppressed. The analysis has shown that some of these forms
of world knowing furthered their own oppression, while others were more clearly
liberatory.
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Conclusion
Much has been said about the ignorance of the racial order that tends to accom-
pany whiteness. This article has brought the connection between whiteness and
ignorance into sharper focus by employing the notion of epistemologies of igno-
rance. It also contributes to agnotology, the study of not-knowing, through showing
some of the ways in which ignorance is actually constructed in social interaction
for social purposes. It further extends the discussion by showing that ignorance
is both a function of and functional in racialized societies. Indeed, the ignorance
contract may be regarded as a subclause of the racial contract.
The evidence from the Apartheid Archives in this article shows a web of
interwoven ignorances that sustains a society predicated on non-relationality. Not
only do the oppressor populations need ignorance to shield them from knowing
the realities of the injustices that undergird their privileges for their psychologi-
cal well-being and for the perpetuation of privilege to remain unquestioned, but
the oppressed also need to construct their own systematic ignorances to manage
their condition within unequal power relations and keep body and soul together.
Ignorance thus provides an important ‘insulating medium’ for the reproduction of
a hierarchical racial order, both a consequence and cause of non-relationality, of
living past each other.
The analysis shows pervasive ignorance as a social accomplishment and a
function of discourses constructed within contested relations where different
groups have different interests at stake in what they, and others, are to know or take
as known. Social groups may embrace ignorance even when ‘facts’ stare them in
the face. Rather than a mere failure of objectivity, or methodology, it is integral to
world-making in a fuller sense. For dominant groups especially, it is not as much
about accuracy as about how they would like the world to be, and having the power
and resources to impose their desires, drives and will upon the social field and to
effect social control, that is, to institute an ignorance contract. White knowledge
tends, therefore, to be expansive, to claim to know all about the other, without rec-
ognizing what is not known about other world makings. For oppressed groups, it
is also less about absence of knowledge than the need to defensively manipulate
 22 M. Steyn
the social field over which they have unequal influence, so as to create spaces
cocooned from dominant world-making in which to survive relatively unwounded
and perhaps even score some victories over it. Ignorant knowledges may need to
be acquired in order to provide emotional nurturance – the challenge for some, it
seems, is how to not-know the world of the dominant group.
It would be a mistake, however, to see the making and ensconcement of igno-
rance in a racial hierarchy as purely a function of intellect or cognition. The
signatories of an ignorance contract need to be properly schooled. This article has
demonstrated how subjectivities are shaped within, through and into epistemolo-
gies of ignorance, and also that for both dominator and dominated, appropriate
affective organization and ethical orientations have to be acquired that will sup-
port the ignorant epistemologies. Being ignorant is therefore quite a complex state
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of being. In large measure, the issue is one of how much we care to know about
each other’s lives, past and present, and where we recognize the limits of our legit-
imate claims to knowledge of each other to end. Choices around ignorance, to
know or not to know, are deeply implicated in choices to take, or evade, respon-
sibility in relation to others (Smithson 2008). We do not, in fact, want all the
knowledge we potentially could have because there are costs to having knowl-
edge and shared intercultural or interracial meaning, a consideration which has
not often been recognized.
For South Africa, the site of this analysis, the challenge is how far the differ-
ent racial groups have come in terms of reaching into the spaces of not-knowing
created in the apartheid era. The implication of this study is that unless subjectiv-
ities change, they will remain prone to recycling ignorance-making. This is why
the availability of corrective knowledge, which abounds in postapartheid South
Africa, is not sufficient to stem the circulation of ignorances. It may be that in
different degrees, the moral choice is being made not to ask what can be learnt
from our relational ‘sins’ of the past, but rather to add new layers of ignore-ances
characterized by refusals to acknowledge past suffering and gross injustices and
how these are perpetuated into the present. As Mills (2008) puts it:

there will be both official and counter-memory, generating, in the case of race, an
intimate relationship between white identity, white memory, and white amnesia,
especially about nonwhite victims. (p. 241)

This article intimates that the ignorance contract of apartheid continues, albeit
reframed, within epistemologies of ignorance being generated and entrenched in
postapartheid South Africa. Further work needs to explore the ignorance contract
within this, and other, interracial contexts.

Notes
1. I am using the apartheid-era racial categories, which still have traction in South African
society. The term ‘coloured’ refers to the creolized people who were regarded as ‘mixed
race’ and were semi-privileged during apartheid.
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 23
2. I am indebted to Haley McEwen for our many enriching conversations that engendered
this phrase.
3. See the website for details: http://www.apartheidarchive.org/site/index.php?option=
com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=7
4. The website provides the following instructions: Your story should describe your ear-
liest and/or most significant experiences of race, racism and life during apartheid, and
should contain:

(1) the approximate year in which you were exposed to the experience reflected upon
(2) the place
(3) the key people involved
(4) the impact, if any, this incident may have had on your views of yourself and your
relationships with others today
(5) some personal details that will be removed from the story if it is dissemi-
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nated publicly, such as previous ‘race classification’ during apartheid, approx-

imate age at present, region/province from which you originally come from,
region/province where you currently reside and gender

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MELISSA STEYN is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of the

Witwatersrand
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
2050, South Africa
Email: melissa.steyn@wits.ac.za
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