Politikon, (April 2012), 39(1), 5 –28

Non-Racialism in South Africa:

Status and Prospects
DAVID EVERATT∗

ABSTRACT This article, based on findings from 18 focus groups staged across
South Africa in mid-2011, provides an overview of the key themes that emerged
from the discussion—many of which receive more detailed treatment in later
papers in this edition, others of which deserve close attention and further
analysis even if not covered here. (The full set of transcripts is freely available
at http://www.gcro.ac.za/project/non-racialism-ahmed-kathrada-foundation). It
appears that non-racialism, which lacks a specific meaning, also lacks any
status as a political project—it has been de-linked from the political arena,
where taking control of ‘the commanding heights of the economy’ is a priority
facing government. Non-racialism has been left as a social project for citizens
to work out for themselves.

Introduction
At the risk of trivialising a serious issue, it may be noted that non-racialism is to
South Africans what sex is to teenagers. Most are pretty sure they know the basic
nuts and bolts of how it is supposed to work, whether right or wrong; myths
abound; some are in denial, but everyone is convinced that someone else is
doing it, while they personally are often not. Some are abashed (‘Now you can
befriend a white. I went for a date with a white lady’, admitted one young
African man from Alexandra in Johannesburg, sotto voce). Men boast that they
can do it anywhere—’just chuck in some sport’ (males, mixed race, professionals
46– 55, Gauteng; repeated in virtually all male groups). Women are rather more
circumspect, with some arguing that ‘a white woman thinks and sees herself as
being better than a black woman’ whereas ‘we, black women, God has given us
strength to fight and overcome every problem we come across’ (African
females, 46 + , unemployed, rural Mpumalanga). For the poor, apparently, race
‘doesn’t matter because you are in the gutter’ (males, mixed race, professionals
46– 55, Gauteng), whereas others claim: ‘Rich people don’t care about race at
all. They don’t even feel it’ (African male, 26 –35, Alexandra). ‘Poverty’, many
people told us, ‘doesn’t have a race’—but they went on to note: ‘Rich people

ISSN 0258-9346 print; 1470-1014 online/12/010005 –24 # 2012 South African Association of Political Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2012.656910
D. EVERATT

also don’t have a race’ (coloured, mixed sex, 36– 45, Eldorado Park). Everyone
else is doing it, apparently.
As these quotations suggest, if South Africans are asked to talk about non-raci-
alism, they talk about race and racism. Democracy has democratised racism—it
has allowed everyone to believe they see it, that all suffer from it, and all can
talk about it in personal, immediate terms. It seems every South African has
tales of how racism (or the apparent ‘reverse discrimination’ of Black Economic
Empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action) stopped this or that career or per-
sonal advancement. They can reel off a litany of racial slights, real or imagined;
see positive and negative discrimination all about them; and know where they
stand in the racial pecking order which is itself reconstructed by each speaker.
Everything is filtered through a racial lens.
But (South Africans are nothing if not contrary) all this occurs as social inte-
gration and mixing (the ‘miscegenation’ so feared by the architects of apartheid)
have proceeded at a pace unthinkable in 1990, when the African National Con-
gress (ANC) and other liberation parties were unbanned, and Nelson Mandela
was released from prison. Many focus group participants talked about how
much more common dating and marrying across the colour bar had become, point-
ing to the notion of non-racialism as ‘colour-blindness’. But discussion of inter-
marrying included the comment that ‘a Sotho man will marry in another tribe
and vice versa’ because ‘there is no longer fighting among the people’ (African
male, 26– 35, farm-worker, rural Mpumalanga).
Barriers of all types—racial, ethnic, class—seem to be falling; or, more accu-
rately, eroding. But very clearly, this must speed up dramatically: the median
cost of a suburban dwelling in Gauteng is 25 times the median income (OECD,
2011), suggesting the massive challenges facing black, coloured and Indian
people trying to break out of the racially zoned spaces created for them by apart-
heid and maintained under the economics of the post-apartheid state. People are
trying to find each other in a landscape dotted with socio-cultural landmines, awk-
wardnesses, faux pas, physical barriers compounding psychological ones, and so
on. While many social scientists demand the rejection of race and ethnicity as
mere social constructs (see below), both carry significant weight in South
Africa, both are real in the lives of citizens, and far too many politico-economic
heavyweights are invested in race for it to disappear. Democracy has given ordin-
ary citizens the opportunity to bridge the gaps created in the past and reproduced
post-apartheid, even if politicians and academics offer little help, and the national
public discourse remains obsessed with race.
Non-racialism was a rallying cry of the Congress Alliance and United Demo-
cratic Front and is among the founding principles of the democratic South
Africa’s constitution, but has no real meaning. It is blurrily aspirational—the
colour-blindness many participants spoke of (see below)—but has no socio-
political or economic project driving it. The recent National Planning Commission
report Vision for 2030 (National Planning Commission, 2011) reached non-racial-
ism by page 420. While it correctly called for ‘sustained campaigns [. . .] to focus on
changing attitudes and behaviour’ and demanded that race not be swept under the

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carpet, its main recommendation was that people ‘for whom a Bantu language is not
a mother tongue’ should learn one—important advice, to be sure, but scarcely suf-
ficient to deal with the complexities of building non-racialism in South Africa.
Non-racialism emerged out of opposition to the racism of the apartheid order,
but it was awkward from the start—the ANC would not permit other races to
join the organisation until 1969, and even then only in exile, preferring to keep
separate, parallel, ‘multiracial’ structures. So non-racialism became a hallmark
of odd bed-fellows from the South African Communist Party to the Liberal
Party of South Africa (and a whole range of others both to the left, between
them, and later—when the Progressive Party was formed—to the right as well),
some of which were supportive of the ANC, others of whom used their own
non-racialism to accuse the ANC of being racist.
Only by the 1970s had ANC leaders begun to talk about non-racialism rather
than multiracialism, and even then fairly rarely. Some had used the term in the
1960s, but it remained entangled with multiracialism. Perhaps this odd political
birth helps explain why South Africa does not enjoy a discourse or praxis
around non-racialism, despite the fact that it emerged at the height of the legal
struggle against apartheid (in the 1950s) and retained its place through the years
of intensified repression and resistance. It was a key tenet of the legal internal
resistance movement, found a prominent place in the 1996 Constitution and
since 1994 has appeared repeatedly in pre-election campaigning by all (or at
least most) political parties.
It is clear that the primary goal of the ruling party and its allies is—strategically
speaking, quite correctly—to follow their political victory over apartheid with econ-
omic victory (ANC, 2009). The ruling ANC set itself five strategic goals, stating:
Building on the economic achievements of the last 15 years, we will use various measures to
build and accelerate a sustainable, equitable and inclusive economic growth path to address
these five priorities. (ANC, 2009)
Social programmes such as building a non-racial and non-sexist society, making
space for deeper-level reconciliation, or dealing with apartheid-era trauma, are
handed to under-funded NGOs—government can understand policies and legis-
lation, but the messy business of building non-racialism on the ground seems
beyond it. The complicated work of social change has been left to citizens,
while the ANC attempts to pursue its ‘historic mission’ of taking control of the
commanding heights of the economy. No wonder citizens are trying to find
each other in the dark, with no guidance from government or political parties as
to how they should proceed, when they will arrive at a point that is ‘non-
racial’, and what this might look like. There are no guidelines or signposts to
tell us when we have reached a state of normalcy—whether it is seen as
common worship and intermarriage, or redistribution and equality, how much is
enough? Do we remain in transition ad infinitum, waiting for the perfect
society, before we can lay claim to the normal? Lacking any political project or
content, non-racialism seems set to remain a perpetual work in progress. Even
the ANC’s secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, interviewed as part of the

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D. EVERATT

Kathrada Foundation’s broader project on non-racialism, battled to give non-raci-

alism substantive comment:
Now non-racialism is an ideal of society where colour and race do not count. We become a
normal society. Features of that non-racialism will be where people stay together, that people
will begin to intermarry, that people will begin to practice religion together, the people to
practice their different cultures within the same society. And therefore race and colour
will not be an issue. That is the ideal of non-racialism. That is the ideal [the] party still
strives for. We must have a nation we must not have races. (Mantashe, 2011, p. 1)
Consciously or not, Mantashe is veering close to the argument of Warren Beatty’s
character in the film Bulworth, that non-racial democrats should pursue ‘. . . a pro-
gramme of voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended procreative racial deconstruction’,
by which he meant that ‘. . . everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody till we’re
all the same colour’ (Bulworth, 1998). Inter-marriage is happening—but how much
inter-marriage will make us non-racial and normal? People worship together—but
again, how many need to do so before colour and race no longer counts? Race and
colour remain an issue, but Mantashe has maintained a long history of not making
non-racialism an active force for positive social change; that is, an anti-racist move-
ment. The ‘non’ in non-racialism was and remains oddly passive, quiescent, merely
denying the virulent racism of apartheid and the somewhat more muted racism of
post-apartheid South Africa, as if denial—being a ‘non’-racialist—is sufficient rebut-
tal. It is not a proactive attack on the socio-economic basis of racism and race-based
inequality, as outlined in greater detail by Rupert Taylor later in this volume.
Finally, non-racialism points to race as a key socio-political challenge—hardly
surprising, post-apartheid. But the quotations above (and below) show the extent
to which race straitjackets citizens’ understanding of freedom and democracy, as it
does for many in the academy and elsewhere. Identities are multiple and fluid.
Many of the groups, asked how they would describe themselves, puzzled over
what should come first—their race, religion, nationality, sex, ethnicity? This is
dealt with elsewhere in the volume, but it is key to note that to have post-apartheid
relevance, non-racialism must tackle the economic underpinnings of inequality
and racism while simultaneously aiming at a post-racial future, where citizens
are free to adopt multiple identities, where we are not continually filling in
forms that offer only one identity—that of our race—and where progress is not
measured purely in racial terms. South Africans, and thus South Africa, are mud-
dling their way into this complex, nuanced, inherently different future. We are
doing so with little or no leadership, whether moral or political. Perhaps this is pre-
ferable, but it has left race as the lowest common denominator—or ‘populist’, in
common parlance—where it is a weapon to silence debate and discussion, rather
than a beacon lighting our way to the future.

Methodology
This article, as others in this edition of Politikon, is derived from a series of 18
focus groups conducted around South Africa during July and August 2011.

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Focus groups seek to elicit nuanced, qualitative information from participants by

putting them in a group of demographically similar people, where they may feel
more comfortable (at least, as comfortable as they can be while sitting in an unfa-
miliar location surrounded by strangers) and ‘open up’ more than they would in a
traditional one-on-one survey or in-depth interview. Focus groups are an enor-
mously powerful research tool, best known for their use by pollsters, but useful
in most social research. Recruitment criteria in South Africa normally specify
(at least) the race, sex, age, locale, employment status and age cohort of partici-
pants, and may also include political affiliation. In this way, a group of like—
though not always like-minded—people are assembled, and soon find they have
sufficient in common to talk as easily as the unnatural circumstances permit.
Readers should be clear from the outset: focus groups are not, and make no
claim to be, representative.
Like all qualitative research, focus groups seek nuance and answers to ‘why?’
questions (whereas surveys are very good at providing answers to ‘what?’ ques-
tions), but the drawback is that the data are not representative. People are recruited
according to pre-determined criteria and, while a moderator tries to steer the con-
versation to keep it on track (at some points with a light touch, at others with a
heavy hand), it is allowed to follow its own rhythm, so some issues may be
dealt with at length, others not at all. Dominant individuals and voices can influ-
ence groups, and often the negative voice can swing a group into collective com-
plaint and drown the positives. None of the qualitative data used here are
representative of any broader population. No detailed demographic profiling of
this or that locale preceded selection—the project team, with input from
authors, set out a list of groups that the existing research budget could cover,
and recruiters visited those spatial areas and found people who both fit the pre-
set criteria and were willing to attend the discussion groups.
There is a further methodological conundrum facing this project, which is
immediately apparent: how do we explore non-racialism by recruiting people
according to race? How would respondents be put at their ease if we mixed
races? What if we mixed race and sex (and completely went against the methodo-
logical strictures of focus groups)? Did the very act of recruitment impose race
onto a supposedly non-racial project? Yes, of course it did—that much is
obvious. Mixed race and mixed race/sex groups were among the first to be
staged, to see whether or not they worked—but while they were interesting on
the whole (as the transcripts testify), participants tended to drop into safe, ‘politi-
cally correct’ positions. The uni-race groups allowed more open comments about
race and non-racialism, and respondents wrestled with issues of identity and race
rather than retreating behind the safety of the ‘we’re all proudly South African’
trope which the mixed race groups seemed to generate.
Nonetheless, positionality requires further examination. The research organ-
isers were in a position of considerable power—and thus prejudice—because
we decided (with input from authors) what types of people should be recruited,
because the budget determined how many rural or out-of-city groups were con-
ducted, and so on. For example, when we recruited young white Afrikaans-

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D. EVERATT

speaking unemployed men, we expected bittereinders of the worst sort—bitter at

the loss of status, power, privilege, protected employment and all that they would
have enjoyed under apartheid. What we got was a group of poor young white men
whose suburbs had de-racialised around them, and whose poverty had enjoined
them to join the (new) local culture of borrowing and lending, bartering and
trading, socialising and living beyond their fences and in the street—exactly
what many African participants complained whites would not do.
That this is even noteworthy reflects on the research organisers and our own
view of the world; there is little we can do other than ask the reader to be
aware that our prejudices—as authors and, prior to that, as the people who organ-
ised the project, designed the recruitment criteria, the moderator’s guidelines, and
so on—are no doubt at work. For this reason, authors have been asked to use as
much original text as possible, so that readers can make up their own minds,
and the full set of transcripts are available for download at http://www.gcro.ac.
za/project/non-racialism-ahmed-kathrada-foundation.
The focus groups generated literally hundreds of pages of transcripts, and the
points above regarding the positionality of authors are key when assessing author-
ial attempts to summarise and analyse what some 200 people said in multiple
groups around the country. What one author finds important, another may take
for granted or entirely disregard: readers are asked to be aware of this, and the
inevitable presence of subjectivity when dealing with these issues. From the
framing of the project, to setting the recruitment criteria, to designing the modera-
tor’s guidelines, to analysis, subjectivity has been unavoidable, as it is in most
social research projects. The project, this edition of Politikon and other outputs
from the project are all regarded as a first step, and readers are encouraged to
return to the primary texts and see an unfiltered representation of what the
focus group participants had to say.

Overview
This article analyses focus groups convened by the Gauteng City-Region Obser-
vatory and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (see Appendix A for the recruitment
criteria and Appendix B for the moderator’s guideline) to hear South Africans’
opinions on non-racialism. The transcripts of these groups form the basis of the
articles in this edition of Politikon, and will also inform the work of the Ahmed
Kathrada Foundation as it seeks to build non-racialism in practice.
This opening article seeks to delineate the key themes that emerged from the
focus group discussions, some of which are analysed in far greater detail in
later articles, while others require further analysis and discussion. The article is
both a ‘scene-setter’ for the rest of the edition and a critical analysis of the state
of non-racialism in South Africa today in its own right, though based on qualitat-
ive and unrepresentative data. The reason for commissioning the project from
which the articles in this edition emerge is that non-racialism—invented by
South Africans in the face of apartheid—has no real post-apartheid meaning,
and questionable relevance as headlines scream ‘It’s war on whites’ (Sunday

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Tribune, 11 September 2011) and African nationalism, confronted by ongoing

economic inequality, is seen at the root of battles rumbling within the ANC.
While some have sought to lay blame at the door of various political parties
(not necessarily wrongly), the approach taken here is the reverse: namely, to
find what ‘ordinary South Africans’ are doing for themselves, or at least how
they understand and approach non-racialism.
There is also a methodological point at issue, namely obliging scholars to con-
front primary data, instead of either free-floating in theoretical clouds or focusing
only on the easy, obvious targets presented by political leaders. The media
recently enjoyed a brief flurry of articles in response to Samantha Vice’s article
‘How do I live in this strange place?’ (Vice, 2011), but even this piece begins
with the methodologically remarkable notion that ‘I talk from a personal, but
what I hope is still a fairly representative position’ (Vice, 2011, p. 323, emphasis
added). This position is later reduced to that of white people who are not avowed
racists (p. 326). In this, Vice is no better than any other political leader or com-
mentator who claims to speak on behalf of an entire group—and in an article
that deals with ‘eradicating racism’ (p. 323), the claim is even more breathtaking
in its assumption that merely because the author is white, she is somehow allowed
to talk on behalf of most or even some whites.1
It is remarkable that an article in an academic journal should find itself on the
front pages of newspapers, the cause of fist-fights and talk-shows; for that alone
Vice is to be congratulated. But she should not be surprised that pundits pick
up on her work and assume to tell ‘whites’ what to do and how to do it, the
first being Eusebius Mckaiser, who told Mail & Guardian readers:
Her reflections drip with an intense honesty that is too rare in the South African academy.
Sadly, it is an honesty often culpably missing from the lives of too many white South Afri-
cans. (Mail & Guardian, 9 September 2011)
He went on to claim that ‘Vice’s reflections should resonate with whites in
general. But they will not’, without a blush at the irony of a single person arrogat-
ing the right to criticise another entire group (or race) for their lack of humility.
Any notion of representivity, or of testing the accuracy of views put forward
through any type of primary research, representative or not, was jettisoned in
favour of a quick headline. Representivity, like virtue, is not within the purview
of the speaker to claim, without some externally verifiable evidence to support
the assertion.
Social scientists have also been at fault. It is easy to complain (as many do) that
there is no scientific basis for race, that race is a social construct, that our genetic
make-up is 99+% identical, but it is also deeply naı̈ve. A decade ago Maré wrote
that ‘The ‘race question’ is . . . too often being used to silence argument and delib-
eration’ in South Africa, but went on to note that ‘race is rewarded’ (Maré, 2001,
p. 88– 89). Perhaps the intervening decade has made it more apparent that there
are far too many political and economic players (of various political and racial
hues) with interests deeply vested in race for it to be wished away. For some,
race is an easy route to political and economic resources (enhanced by struggle

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D. EVERATT

credentials, whether real or claimed), and this has become more markedly the case
over time (in ironic disproportionate distance from the era of struggle).
As struggle recedes, so may its ideals—even undefined ones such as non-raci-
alism. This may be the cause or result of an often brutal assault on one of the holy
cows of social science, its denial of race as anything beyond a social construct.
One of the better-known examples of this may be ANC Youth League President
Julius Malema’s shouting down a BBC journalist and ordering him out of a
press conference for being a ‘bastard’ and a ‘bloody agent’, spiced with a
parting observation that ‘That which you have covered in this trouser is
rubbish’ (Forde, 2011, p. 190). Forde reconstructed the event, adding a tart obser-
vation that the young white male BBC journalist interrupted Malema with cheap
point-scoring remarks in a way that was ‘difficult to imagine one of South Africa’s
young black journalists addressing the Tory youth leader at Millbank in London
. . . and getting away with it’ (Forde, 2011, p. 192). But her apparent perplexity
at the strength of Malema’s outburst remained, even after he explained to her:
‘I saw some young boy who is white, who is demonstrating some white supremacy
to me. I wanted to kick him’ (Forde, 2011, p. 197). Her perplexity is itself
perplexing.
Social scientists and citizens have failed to mount a significant challenge to the
ongoing use of race as a category of analysis in South African life and discourse.
The status quo—the replication of race and racial classification—described by
Maré (2001) a decade ago is even more strongly enforced. South Africans still
loyally fill in countless forms that demand details of their race—the same race
ascribed to them by apartheid—from birth to death, and an entire industry has
sprung up around checking the race credentials (the Black Economic Empower-
ment and later Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment criteria) of anyone
wanting to do business. A horde of public officials in schools, libraries, univer-
sities, government departments, the private sector and elsewhere ensure that
South Africans’ race is obsessively captured. The focus group participants were
quick to point this out. As one coloured respondent from Eldorado Park sarcasti-
cally put it, ‘The only time you say you are South African is when you fill in a
form’, while an Indian woman from Lenasia complained that ‘[w]e are not classi-
fied, we classify ourselves’. Form-filling has ‘brainwashed us’, complained an
African woman from Nelson Mandela Authority; such brainwashing ensures
that when probed about identity, she put her race first.
It is barely surprising that citizens think and talk about race when the entire
bureaucracy of society, in its state and non-state forms, insists on race as a
primary indicator. Schoolchildren—who many participants see as the saviours
of South Africa because of their supposed ‘colour-blindness’—are faced with
exactly the same racial imprinting from their first day at school. As noted
above, if divide-and-rule was a goal of apartheid, it needed no armed fist to
achieve this; merely passive citizens and all-too-willing bureaucrats, Arendt’s
‘banality of evil’ compounded by the longevity of evil. Beyond that, non-racialism
remains a historical relic, and academics offer little more than a limp denial of the
validity of race. The career of someone like Julius Malema is testament to the

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failure of this denial, and the need for solid rebuttal and action; the option pro-
posed by Vice, that ‘whites would try . . . to make themselves invisible and
unheard’ (Vice, 2010, p. 335) is as deeply implicated in the racial discourse as
any other contribution.
Although non-racialism is trotted out by (almost) every political party come
election time, in the face of a triumphalist African nationalism, it has not so
much been hollowed out as punctured, and the hot air that kept it inflated for
decades has fizzled away—among politicians, if not among citizens. Citizens
may not know what non-racialism means, nor how to provide a robust definition
of the term, but they know intuitively that it is the only route to a secure future for
all South Africans.
They also know that inequality and poverty underpins the present, and has to
change if we are to reach the future unscathed. This article and others in this
edition outline the ongoing anger of many, and the new hurts, slights, insults
and misunderstandings that many ascribe to race or assumed racial superiority.
The articles also point to an acute awareness of the economic underpinnings of
racism and its obverse, as stated by a woman from the Eastern Cape:
It is just so embedded in us that we can’t let go, the black people still, no matter how suc-
cessful we are we always have the inferiority complex that we were seen at the bottom and
we don’t want to let go, we talk about it every day, white people this, white people do that, it
is so embedded in us, I don’t know how. (Females, 36 –45, professional, Nelson Mandela
Authority)
With these come the dehumanising impacts of race, as another woman in the
same group put it:
When a white person comes you still feel there is a white person, you don’t see a human
being, you see a white person. (Females, 36– 45, professionals, Nelson Mandela Authority)
But side-by-side with these deep-seated angers, fears and hurts is the acceptance
that acceptance is required. Black participants are aware that—yet again—more is
expected of them than of whites. They have to succeed in a world largely con-
structed and ruled by whites, both locally and globally. No wonder Vice echoes
other students of ‘whiteness’ when she asks: ‘Is it possible [for white people] to
live well?’, because ‘[p]art of eradicating racism would be to eradicate the
forced identification of oneself as a particular public and political product’
(Vice, 2010, p. 323). But the issue is far more complex than what whites should
do, or what blacks feel, because the more one digs the messier our public and
the more fluid and multiple our private identities appear to be, and the more
complex resolution becomes. Talking (only) race is reductio ad absurdium if
we wish to understand and plot a course through the complexities of post-apart-
heid South Africa.
For all that, focus group participants were self-consciously trying to find ways
to reach out to other races, often recoiling at what happened when they did so, but
not giving up. And so this article concludes that the visible if slow movement of
South Africans toward each other that is indicated by focus group participants—

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D. EVERATT

albeit beset by misreading of cultural codes and denial or the simple inability to
see the structural basis of racism, the confusion, anger, bewilderment, embarrass-
ment, barely repressed rage and more—will occur at a faster and faster pace.
People—the ‘ordinary’ people so beloved of politicians and commentators—are
looking for some kind of non-racial peace, which they instinctively understand
requires non-racial equality as well. And they do so despite our political leaders
and social scientists and analysts and newspaper editors, not because of them.

Problematic
The term non-racialism was invented by South Africans opposing apartheid,
although it will not be found in any dictionary (personal communication,
Rupert Taylor). It found its way into the global lexicon via the domestic and
then the international anti-apartheid struggle. But it was not given any substantial
ideological content. At best, such content had to be intuited from the fact that non-
racialism described a way of organising in which people of all races enjoyed equal
membership—which is why, when asked what non-racialism meant, so many par-
ticipants responded, ‘being colour-blind’ (echoing Mantashe, 2011). This way of
organising was pioneered by the Communist Party of South Africa in the late
1920s, once the Comintern had decided that the CPSA needed to support dom-
estic, African nationalist organisations in support of a two-stage revolution (first
nationalist, then socialist). The re-formed South African Communist Party
(SACP) remains a loyal ANC ally, although quite when the rampant capitalism
of South Africa will be ripe for a socialist revolution is unclear to most observers
not in the SACP.
This non-racial form of organising was not replicated until 1953, when the
Liberal Party of South Africa (LP) did so (this was the same year that the South
African Communist Party (SACP) re-formed underground, still on a non-racial
basis, after voluntarily closing down before being outlawed by the apartheid gov-
ernment—a global first for a communist party). In 1952 the Congress Alliance had
begun to take shape, as the Defiance Campaign raised political temperatures (and
ANC membership figures) and the African/Indian alliance (formalised in 1947.
though deeply strained by anti-Indian rioting in 1949) was extended to whites
and coloureds. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was appar-
ently exempt from racial singularity, and activists of all races could be members.
That aside, the Alliance had a multi-racially structured set of parallel, uni-race
organisations. The ANC insisted on a multi-racial approach, where each ‘race
group’ or ‘nation’ – the apostrophes indicate the tortuousness of the arguments
justifying the approach – would be organised and mobilised by their own kind,
and would meet and work together only in co-ordinating committees (Everatt,
2010).
This is because the ANC was and is an African nationalist organisation. During
the anti-apartheid struggle, non-racial unity was a globally compelling symbol
around which people and organisations of varying political persuasion could con-
gregate. Although ANC leaders such as Chief Albert Luthuli were deeply

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committed to non-racialism and opposed extreme nationalism (and other

‘extreme’ ideologies such as communism), the core thrust of the ANC remained
a nationalist victory. Ronny Kasrils, former ANC Cabinet Minister and SACP
member, managed faux-surprise when he noted recently:
Those suspicions about Mandela the nationalist who was anti-communist . . . never really
went away . . . you are looking at Mandela as essentially a black nationalist. (in Forde,
2011, p. 113)
Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, the widely hailed architects of
South Africa’s democracy, cut their political teeth as ANC Youth League
(ANCYL) leaders trying to expel communists—regarded as stooges of the
white left—from the ANC. Their attitudes may have matured, as their various bio-
graphers, autobiographies, hagiographers and others suggest (or faded, or mel-
lowed, or been put aside for strategic, tactical or expedient reasons—again
depending on the source). But the need to keep the ANC clear of ‘foreign
bearers of foreign ideologies’ never disappeared. The successive ruptures of the
ANC—from the 1956 adoption of the Freedom Charter (drawn up in 1955) to
the final breakaway of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959, and at
regular intervals during the years of exile—all revolved around firstly the place
of whites (in particular) in the ANC, and secondly around communism, the
‘foreign ideology’ that would deny the African bourgeoisie leading the ANC
their day in the sun. The two-stage revolution demanded first the victory of the
national bourgeoisie, and that is what we are living through now.
That Mandela should be considered an African nationalist can only be surpris-
ing to a political naif. The same three activists (Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu), with
other highly capable African nationalists of the 1940s, had written the
ANCYL’s ‘Manifesto’, issued in March 1944, which criticised the ANC as an
organisation ‘of gentlemen with clean hands’ (ANCYL, 1944, in Karis, 1973,
pp. 304– 305) who had failed to organise the mass of the African population.
The ANCYL, it stated, had been formed as ‘a protest against the lack of discipline
and the absence of a clearly-defined goal in the movement as a whole’ and was
committed to ‘rousing popular political consciousness and fighting oppression
and reaction’. More significantly, it stressed that ‘the national liberation of the
Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves. We reject foreign leadership
of Africa’ and ‘the wholesale importation of foreign ideologies’ (p. 308), while
emphasising African pride and self-sufficiency.
Mandela was a nationalist long before he became a non-racial Congress man.
The fact that non-racialism survived the internal ructions of nationalist politics
at all, let alone the violence, torture, murder, assassinations and other offerings
of the apartheid regime, is near miraculous. As Hilda Bernstein noted in 1990,
after a life of political activism at the heart of Communist Party and Congress
activities:
. . . the strongest and most enduring idea that has impelled the liberation struggle forward, is
not so much the concept of non-racialism but the persistence of nationalism as expressed by a

15
D. EVERATT

sense of national pride and national identity. And that non-racialism emerged, often slowly
and with difficulty, for a variety of reasons, not the least being practical experience of
struggle; it had to be fought for, explained, taught. (Quoted in Ndebele, 2002, pp. 134 – 135)
When asked about non-racialism during his exile in the 1970s, Oliver Tambo
stated: ‘We mean non-racial – there is no racism’ (quoted in Maré, p. 248), but
that was a decades-later attempt to inject anti-racism into non-racialism, which
is not necessarily visible in today’s ANC discourse. When Tambo claimed that
the term non-racial was chosen but ‘[w]e could have said multi-racial if we
wanted to’, he was being somewhat economical with historical facts, given that
the ANCYL spent the 1940s fighting for a strong, African-only ANC and then
(as ANCYL leaders became ANC leaders) spent the 1950s fighting to keep the
Congress Alliance multi-racial and rejecting non-racialism out of hand (see
Everatt 2010).
The ANC leadership had to balance African nationalism and non-racialism.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they left non-racialism as a passive, moral assertion that
stood in obvious, unifying opposition to racism, while the engine that drove the
liberation struggle was African nationalism, the foot-soldiers overwhelmingly
African. What matters is that in the face of virulent attack from more extreme
nationalists, Congress leaders held fast to non-racialism.
Non-racialism was an enormously powerful symbol and found its way into the
Constitution as founding provision 1(b) alongside non-sexism (Republic of South
Africa, 1996, p. 3). Unfortunately, the drafters of the Constitution took no time to
define what non-racialism meant, how it ought to be realised in practice, how
behaviours needed to change or—most importantly—how to amend the economic
underpinning of both racism and apartheid, a necessary precondition for realising
any kind of non-racialism in practice. If this was too much to expect of the con-
stitutional drafters, it is noteworthy that these lacunae remain in the National Plan-
ning Commission report of 2011. It has been left to South Africans themselves to
try and muddle their way across racially defined residential segregation, centuries
of colonial exploitation, the legacy of Bantu education and any number of other
potentially lethal social landmines to try and find one another. The ‘miracle’ of
the (somewhat less than) ‘new’ South Africa will be the emergence of a united
nation.

The weakness of virtue

Adults in the focus groups talked of how their children mix freely and ‘don’t see
race’ – which was a coda for ‘we still live in times when we know this is a
‘coolie’, that’s a ‘darkie’, and that’s a ‘boer’’ (coloured, mixed sex, 36-45,
Eldorado Park); and that while non-racialism may be a generalised good, it is
not something participants necessarily wanted happening in their own homes!
Many younger participants in the focus groups emerged as somewhat perplexed
about all the fuss. The adults, however, are aware that they are imprinting their
own race-based judgements on their children, and the younger people are fully

16
 NON-RACIALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

aware of the economic, social and other inequalities inherited from the past. More-
over, they are not passive victims of the past, but are more than capable of navi-
gating democracy to suit their needs, as one young man from the Eastern Cape
explained:
We always hide behind the democracy. If a young person today does something wrong at
home and needs to be punished, we start hiding behind democracy and our rights.
(African, male, 18 – 25, Nelson Mandela Authority, suburbs)
His comment is important in reminding us that analysing non-racialism—or
racism, or race—is not a hand-wringing exercise concerned with worrying
whether merely using the word ‘race’ is to use unscientific terminology, to step
beyond the bounds of the academy into bigotry (to be on the wrong ‘side’), to
force concepts onto a passive landscape, or to invite the moral outrage of the
past onto present shoulders. Citizens are smart. They are actors. They talk and
live race, and they are looking (in the main) for paths to non-racialism, which
they regard as ‘a good thing’, although they are fully aware of ‘the past, just
the past and the pain’ (African, female, 36– 45, Nelson Mandela Authority).
And this is compounded by wealth and inequality. ‘We used to fight over race
issues’, said an African man from Ndwedwe in KwaZulu-Natal, ‘but now it’s
money because they [whites and Indians] always want to be above us’. But citi-
zens live in a landscape which is dominated by race and where race is a tool
that can be used for advantage and manoeuvre. Good social science should
embed itself in the everyday in order to illuminate social process and praxis,
and ideally paint a pathway towards a better future. It will not do so by denial
or hand-wringing.
Non-racialism is widely accepted as ‘a good thing’—but like so many other
virtues, it is fuzzily understood, rarely practiced, and more often the recipient
of lip service than of action. In large part, this is because it has emotive and sym-
bolic, but no substantive, meaning. Suttner (2011, p. 1) has argued that ‘A defi-
nition of non-racialism is not a priority in that this creates boundaries and limits
the scope of the concept’. Perhaps. But the complete absence of meaning or
content is as unhelpful as the strictures of over-definition.
The problem is that non-racialism has been used as a slogan for decades, but had
an odd double life as the slogan of an African nationalist liberation movement sup-
porting non-racialism at a time when most anti-colonial movements were very
clear that (white) colonists should be driven into the sea. But the ANC did not
take up the anti-white call, even though it cost the organisation in terms of
splits, divisions, and breakaways. To the left of the African National Congress
were those demanding a non-racial class struggle, who offered a withering critique
of the ANC’s insistence on national having to precede class liberation (see for
example No Sizwe (Alexander), 1979). To the right, non-racialism touched raw
nerves in the ANC, as evidenced by the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress in
1959, which rejected the supposedly over-weening role of whites generally and
white communists specifically in ANC affairs, reflected (they argued) in the
Freedom Charter’s statement that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it,

17
D. EVERATT

black and white’. While this article takes issue with the post-1994 ANC govern-
ment for failing to tell the citizens it ruled how to be non-racialist, it remains stead-
fast in admiration of the stand taken by the ANC, and the Congress Alliance in
support of non-racialism, in the past decades.
Democracy has not ushered in the non-racial nirvana of a ‘Rainbow Nation’. It
has at least maintained divisions between races by splitting the unity created
among some sections of the oppressed (Africans, Indians and coloureds) by the
black consciousness movement of the 1970s, which fed the inclusiveness of the
United Democratic Front in the 1980s, and extinguished the optimism of
(some) whites in 1994 that genuine reconciliation was possible. In survey after
survey, racial polarisation has repeatedly been found to be deepening, or at best
remaining static; the murderous outburst of xenophobia in May/June 2008
showed just how thinly veiled violent tensions really were (and still are—Mozam-
bicans and Somalis were again singled out for complaint by focus group partici-
pants); and in the 18 focus groups conducted for this project, the success of the
apartheid project is horribly visible. The distance still to be travelled to reach
the ‘Rainbow Nation’ is made apparent in the following sequence (among
Indian women from Lenasia, aged 46+):
R: . . . now my husband he has got curly, curly hair but he is Indian, I mean he is an Indian,
they had a lot of problems at the time getting into an Indian school, whatever, whatever, so
[when] I got married to my husband I had hell, I had hell because of the way that he looked
on the outside, I come from a full gospel Christian home, very well off in Pietermaritzburg,
they didn’t accept my husband, took me out of the wills whatever, so I had to stay in Johan-
nesburg, have his children one after the other and then when they used to see, I am talking
about my family looking at the children with a nose like this and hair like that, I was always
left aside. So here comes my son and he is like 23 now, and anyway he is dating but his hair is
now a little straighter, curlyish, whatever, and if he goes out with an Indian girl, the father
and mother don’t want to accept him.
M: It is still happening?
R: She has been subjected to it (all talking)
M: Do you think you would experience the same thing from your friends okay, if your son
brought home a girl any other race group other than Indian?
R: From friends, yes.
R: The friends will.
R: My brother has got children from a coloured lady and my mother never ever accepted
those children.
M: So it is still happening now? It is still happening in your community?
R: Exactly.
R: And I think amongst the Indians it is the most.
R: It is the most.
M: The most (all talking, inaudible)
R: I just want to give you an example, my eldest daughter is married to this very light Muslim
man, I am just going to give you two examples, anyway she is my complexion, my husband
is a little lighter but his hair is curly, her father in law refuses to accept her, he calls her coco,
he calls my daughter coco and she had a baby and throughout her pregnancy he said to the

18
 NON-RACIALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

son, imagine that baby is going to be coco and god made it, when that baby was, my grand-
daughter she is fair . . . my daughter said she is now milky bar she is not coco (laughter).
M: And this is happening now?
R’s: Yes. (All talking, inaudible)
M: Can you give me another example.
R: My son refuses to date an Indian girl, why is he only going out with coloureds? And he
said mummy please listen did you see my hair, do you want me to be criticised what you and
daddy went through, I wouldn’t.
M: Hang on if he married a Coloured girl, wouldn’t you be criticised in any case?
R: No.
R: The community accepts.
R: I am a pure Indian like, purer than pure I am, but I was never accepted because of my
husband, now my son because of his hair.
M: He is also not accepted.
R: So he only dates coloureds because of his hair.
Families continue to be divided over the texture of hair, the lightness or dark-
ness of skin, the degree of cross-racial mixing, the self-identification with Indian
or African or coloured groups. As with other race groups, white families split over
the mixing of younger whites with other race groups, to the chagrin of their
‘trapped white’ parents (as one focus group respondent described his parents,
trapped in an African country they don’t feel they belong to or want to belong
to). One young white male from Johannesburg confided: ‘My step-father hit
me, when he noticed I was friendly with a black man’. Black, coloured and
Indian parents also complained of the influence of ‘other cultures’ on their chil-
dren who are now at mixed-race schools. South Africans can talk for hours
about race, but for only a few minutes about non-racialism. Tragically, the intern-
alisation of apartheid seems complete and, more worrying, unbroken since 1994.
That said, many of the ‘ordinary citizens’ in the focus groups appear to be trying
to find ways to inch towards each other in a context marked by the complete
absence of significant leadership—whether individual or organisational—to
help them do so. One male from a mixed race group of professionals in Johannes-
burg tried to articulate the challenge:
R: I would say that one of the problems we are encountering we don’t have a common value
system yet, we are in this transition of creating this new democracy and feeling our way
around try to get to understand each other, building, bridging those gaps on cultural differ-
ences and understanding why Themba would do something different to the way that I would
do it, the way that he would entertain differently to the way that I entertain, or why we would
drink our beer out of a can as opposed to a glass, those sorts of cultural differences, they are
differences that have accrued over years. Why in the black community Zamalek [Black
Label beer] is the approved beer as opposed to perhaps Heineken, which is becoming the
approved beer, things like that. But these are things that we are learning about each other,
and we are learning about ourselves.
The language stumbles awkwardly around perceived cultural-cum-racial differ-
ences, with the tentativeness of someone trying to find a dance partner in the dark.

19
D. EVERATT

But the quotation above also indicates the extent to which participants feel that the
‘common value system’ of post-apartheid South Africa has to be created by them,
on the ground. Government has not taken the space, and citizens are doing it for
themselves.
It seems from the groups that if a non-racial democracy – not formal equality,
but non-racial ‘colour blindness’, an ease and comfort between all citizens – is to
take root in South Africa, it will do so despite political parties and their leaders, not
because of them. The divide-and-rule policy of the past—favouring whites absol-
utely, though with ethnic divisions among them carefully maintained, and then
differentially (and minutely) privileging Indians above coloureds, coloureds
above Africans, and Africans not at all unless they were willing to play stooge
in the Bantustans of the apartheid planners—has proved remarkably resilient.
The ‘armed fist’ of troops in the townships and states of emergency does not
seem to be required for South Africans to continue seeing themselves and
judging each other through a racial lens. In the focus groups that inform this
article and most of the papers in this edition of Politikon, South Africans
emerge as a people that see race first and (sometimes) ask questions later.

What did participants have to say?

Participants reflected confusion about the meaning of non-racialism that is to be
expected, given the context painted above. Some dropped into legalese, citing
equality (‘equality for everyone no matter what their colour’, as an Indian respon-
dent from Phoenix put it), respect, freedom of choice, dignity, non-discrimination,
equal opportunity, ‘human rights’ and a general sense that ‘[t]he laws of democ-
racy apply to all races’ (African male, Ndwedwe, 36 –45). Many went the route of
the ANC Secretary-General, talking of a general ‘colour-blindness’—to ‘not look
at colour’ (female, African, 36 –45, Ulundi), disucussing ubuntu, or just talking
about how important it is ‘to get along with people, no matter what race they
are’ (white, male, Afrikaans-speaking, Johannesburg southern suburbs). Perhaps
this author is being too strait-jacketing, and non-racialism is all of these things,
and more?
Others took the Shylock route (‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle
us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we
not revenge?’, from The Merchant of Venice), with one young white male from
Johannesburg noting:
. . . my parents were racist, and I don’t know how it feels for them. But for me it feels wrong
of them because people of colour have the same blood as us. He ha[s] the same pain as we
have. (White male, 18 –25, Johannesburg, unemployed)
The participants’ use of legal terms to describe (or define, in their view) non-
racialism may be a result of our reminding participants that non-racialism
appears in the Constitution, and the moderator using the translation of non-
racialism from the Constitution into whatever language the groups were using
(to ensure consistency across different groups). Importantly, however, the

20
 NON-RACIALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

most cited term was equality—a critical point, given that the socio-economic
inequalities of the past underpin racism. South Africa and its main cities are
the most unequal places on earth, and the fact that participants honed in on
equality as the cornerstone of non-racialism should give us some sense of
where to start injecting meaning into the concept.
It also, however, reflects the lack of content that is a problem of non-racialism—
and the academy is as much to blame for this as any other sector. Non-racialism is
apparently a social phenomenon for the ANC as for participants, it is about
‘colour-blindness’ (and more or less inter-marriage), but not necessarily about
economics, politics or power. But while this is fine as a goal, it tells us nothing
about how to achieve such a state, has no active (or activist) content—is it anti-
racist or passively denialist about race?—and completely ignores the economic
underpinnings of racial inequality and racism in South Africa. This absence
should form the core of a political programme around non-racialism. The focus
on equality is a route toward injecting a political programme (and an urgency)
into non-racialism.
Many participants were quite clear that inequality remained a key, unresolved
issue. For one, whites ‘don’t care about ruling the country because they have the
money in their own hands’ (African male, 26– 35, Alexandra). Another member of
the group noted that ‘[i]t’s almost 100% white people who have the money. It’s
only 2% who do not have money’, while another noted that
. . . the root of all the problems we have is money. Money causes racism as well. . . . We are
poor as blacks. I am poor. I was born poor and I am still poor up till now.
In one mixed race group it was noted that black economic advancement ‘has not
gone as fast as it should, black society is still lagging behind’, to which a white
member responded that the next generation would have to sort it out—’you see
we are old, we are from the old school, the younger kids that are fresh from
varsity, they have accepted each other’ (male, mixed race, 46 –55, Johannesburg).
But some gave non-racialism credit—an African male from Alexandra
commented:
. . . if non-racialism was not there, a white man doing the same job as I, would be getting a lot
more money than I do. With gender equality, women doing the same work as men, will get
the same amount of money.
The equality discourse mingled various concepts, but core notions were the
need to tackle economic inequality, and the need for a recognition of our
common humanity—’So the next person I see, be it of any race, I see my
brother’, explained an African man from Ndwedwe. ‘We should love one
another as South Africans’, added a young African man from Nelson Mandela
Authority. While there was a degree of wishful thinking behind these sentiments,
only a few argued that ‘these days the whites, we may be running democracy but to
them we are still black and we will stay black forever, it will not change’ (female,
African, 36 –45, Nelson Mandela Authority) Virtually every other participant saw
glimmers of hope and agreed on the need for respect across barriers of race and

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D. EVERATT

ethnicity (not, sadly, extended to non-South African Africans), as summarised by

a farm-worker from Mpumalanga:
. . . it means doing things despite your race. Hold hands and not pull the other way when the
other races are pulling one way, so as to live in peace in our South Africa. (African male, 26 –
35, Mpumalanga rural)

The kids will save us

There is a clear understanding by some that economics underpins inequality and
drives racism:
If we can’t be one in our economy, we will never be one as a nation. I will always have ill
feelings towards people in power. If I live in a shack, and am unemployed and do not even
have medical aid. If these things are not in place we will always be divided. The government
needs to address the basic needs of the people. They are walking around with weapons. I still
do not know whom we are at war with. They spend millions on weapons, but can’t even build
proper houses. Ministers can stay at hotels that cost R8,000 a night, but people don’t get
houses. (Coloured male, 26 – 35, Paarl)
Trying to pigeonhole non-racialism solely as an economic issue, however,
neatly sealed off from, say, political or social intercourse, may soothe politicians
but does the reverse for citizens:
There is poverty, unemployment, yes our brothers and sisters they are in the gravy trains and
whatever, but for us down [here], it is still poverty, we are still struggling, so though they are
there we don’t blame them for not giving us these things – we are still blaming apartheid.
Although we are declared democratic and we are equal but at the back of our minds we know
that they have got money and savings and everything that they have, you see, so we think
differently to whites and others. They are not really like equal to us although they are
declared as being equal to us and they will never be equal to us because they have got the
money and whatever. (African female, 36 –45, Nelson Mandela Authority)
It is quite remarkable that non-racialism, as articulated by both ANC leaders
and many citizens, somehow floats above the brute rule of power and money.
For many participants, however, whites—and white privilege—were still the
problem:
We are still working for white people as we are struggling and money goes to the whites too.
(Female, African, 46 + , rural farmworker)
The truth is that we black people accept these other races with open hearts, but it’s difficult
for them to accept us as fellow citizens. (Male, African, 36– 45, Ndwedwe)
It’s the white people who are excluding themselves. (Male, African, 18 –25, Gugulethu)

Whites—when I say whites I include Indians—they are, shall I call them, anti-ANC people.
(Male, African, 26 – 35, Alexandra)
A young woman from a mixed group in Johannesburg (all of whom were in pro-
fessional employment) saw it as clearly from the other side of the fence when she

22
 NON-RACIALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

noted that ‘. . . it is . . . coming to a stage where it is not as much racist as it is clas-

sist’, a point her whole group endorsed. Of course there were also voices talking of
‘reverse discrimination’ in all three of the ‘minority’ groups—whites, coloureds
and Indians—with whites claiming reverse racism while coloureds and Indian par-
ticipants generally complained about not being black enough to fit job specifica-
tion requirements. Among the unemployed, southern suburb-dwelling white
males, who of the ‘minority’ groups were living closest to poverty and in racially
heavily integrated areas, however, was a clearer understanding: ‘We are getting
the shit they did get those years ago’.

Race or class?
If there is a more or less clear sense among some participants that economics lies
somewhere near the heart of the challenge, and that ‘whites are still in power
because they have the money’ (female, African, 36– 45, Ulundi), it is followed
by a sloughing off of responsibility to others—mainly to the next generation.
In most groups, other races were blamed—all were blamed at different points,
in more or less strong language; each was accused of being ‘the most racist’ in
a pecking order of racism, although Indian South Africans seemed to generate a
degree of anger that stood out in its ferocity. With whites, according to a
woman from Johannesburg, ‘you know where you stand’ but ‘the other races
are perceived as being two-faced’. Coloureds were accused of trying to ‘associate
themselves with whites’ (male, African, 26 –35, Alexandra) while Indian women
from Lenasia complained that coloureds
. . . can’t be recognised because they are fence sitters, they could never take a stand they
couldn’t be black when the blacks were black and they can’t be white now when the
whites are white, and do you understand they are a bunch of fence sitters.
The same group also noted that racism ‘among Indians . . . is the worst’. As we
noted above, racial division has been internalised, and is being reproduced with
remarkable efficiency 17 years into democracy. So too is ethnicity—’We first
had two Xhosa Presidents and now we have a Zulu one’, noted a young Mpuma-
langa male (forgetting President Motlanthe in the process), which he viewed as a
‘good example of tolerating others’.
We can be in little doubt that race matters; and it matters a lot. But all races
matter, in the splintered post-apartheid pecking order; ethnicities matter, and
black foreigners have now assumed a position at the bottom of the socio-economic
and cultural pile.
Politicians of course were blamed, as were employers (of all races), and so on.
Many groups also accepted their own racism—’acceptance is happening for the
past 17 years, the acceptance is there among the Indian and the black children,
but it is the adults’ (female, Indian, 46 + , Lenasia)—but skirted around it by
looking to the next generation as the saviours of the non-racialism project: ‘I
think in this generation of ours . . . there is still a lot of work that needs to be

23
D. EVERATT

done, but it is only in our children’s generation that we will really see the differ-
ence’ (female, mixed, 26–35, Johannesburg).
This view is somewhat naı̈ve about young people. As we noted earlier, younger
respondents are certainly more open-minded than their elders about race—but
they are also absolutely clear about how to use the rules of the new democracy
to navigate their own course through it, using whatever tools are at hand. And
watching their political leaders they learn that race can be a tool—one that can
be used with real efficacy—to attain advancement.
The issue is analysed in detail elsewhere in this volume, and so will not be
probed deeply here other than to argue that the notion that children are ‘a
mixed nation already’ (mixed race/sex, Cape Town suburbs) is to both excuse
one’s own racism and to ignore the entire socialisation process, whether it takes
place in the home, the classroom, the playground or the streets. It is also to side-
step African nationalism, the phase of the National Democratic Revolution
through which we are living. ‘Africa, I understand’, said a man from Alexandra
in Johannesburg, ‘is for black people, not whites. This thing [whites] was not
here before’. There is an under-current of anger and bitterness, directed at all
races higher on the economic ladder. Some of the anger is directed at the ANC,
for not following through with full liberation—that is, redistribution.
But this is not widespread racial anger. There is a clear sense that racial peace
was a prerequisite for moving forward, and that the superimposition of race classi-
fication on post-apartheid is deeply resented by many: ‘[I]f we need to fill out
forms . . . how can you build a nation if we are still putting an identikit on us?’
asked a coloured male (a policeman, perhaps unsurprisingly) from Paarl. ‘When-
ever I see a white person’, a young African man from Gugulethu observed, ‘I
become furious because I still have this grudge in me against them. I just can’t
take them with all my heart’. This was a view held by some, but by no means
all, African participants. From the student perspective some miles away in Stellen-
bosch came a different view—’[t]he whole racial factor to an extent is removed
now’—leaving, they went on to observe, poverty and inequality as the key chal-
lenges facing the society. No racial anger, no racial problem, just the analytic cat-
egories of poverty and inequality, in which real people do not reside.
Perhaps there is no widespread racial anger, and perhaps there is some relief
from whites that ‘the racial thing’ has been ‘removed’, but an undercurrent
swirled throughout the groups which commingled African nationalist senti-
ments—the notion that South Africa is African and black, and everyone else is
a new arrival, an interloper—with a recognition that ‘we have this problem that
whites have more money, and this makes us feel inferior to whites’ (African,
male, 18– 25, Gugulethu).
In many groups, this was the point at which participants veered off into debating
who was more racist. It is perhaps noteworthy that African and white groups rarely
mentioned each other (although whites came in for a fair degree of criticism), but
coloureds and Indians were savaged by various groups (Indians by themselves as
much as by others). The only Africans to be criticised—by Africans as well as
whites, coloureds and Indians—were ANC politicians in general, and ANC

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Youth League President Julius Malema in particular. No participants regarded the

singing of ‘Kill the boer’ as anything other than an act deepening racial divisions.
While Malema may be regarded by commentators as positioning himself as the
spokesperson of the uneducated ‘masses’ (Forde, 2011, Mbeki, 2011, and
others), this may reflect more on the social views of the commentators than the
predilections of the ‘masses’. The pecking order of racism is a neat sideshow,
implanted by apartheid and segregation and bolstered by the failure to redistribute
wealth and the ongoing insistence on racial classification, that ensures the longev-
ity of apartheid’s divide-and-rule policy toward different race groups.
Non-racialism emerges from the focus groups as oddly divorced from power,
from economics, and even from racism. It was argued earlier that non-racialism
is terminologically passive, more a denial of racism than a proactive assertion
of anti-racism. It may be argued that given the origins of the term the anti-
racist slant is self-evident, but the focus groups suggest this is far from true.
But if non-racialism could be injected with a post-apartheid political project—a
combination of opposing racism and understanding that doing so requires a funda-
mental economic transformation—then it could truly take its place in the pantheon
of genuinely ‘good things’.

Conclusion
This brief introductory essay has sought to give the reader a flavour of the fervour
of many focus group participants—indicating both their anger at past and present
injustice and their search for a way toward a non-racialism that they are defining
every day as they make their way through the post-apartheid landscape. The essay
has also sought to identify some key themes, many of which are developed by
other authors in this edition. These include the acceptance of racist tendencies
by adults and their hope (dream?) that their children will not do as their parents
have done; the virulent racism expressed by all groups towards those seen as
closest to them (and thus their closest competitor) on the economic ladder; and
ongoing anger at whites from some, but acceptance from others. One theme
which has not been dealt with in any detail is the paucity of opportunities to social-
ise across races and break down barriers. These are limited to taverns and bars,
sporting stadia and shopping malls. Residential segregation remains partly in
place, people do not mix outside of work, and in some cases—such as rural
farm-workers in Mpumalanga—only black and white lived in the area. No
Indians or coloureds lived in their locale, and as such non-racialism evoked
more bewilderment than anger.
When asked what could be done, respondents were introspective. Many spoke
of the need to acknowledge their own racism, and try to stop imprinting it on their
children. But even as they did this, races blamed each other—a group of African
and white women complained that coloured and Indian ‘are doing nothing’
(female, mixed race, 26– 35, Johannesburg). This same group, as well as the
unemployed young white men from southern Johannesburg, noted the need to
‘stand up to those racists’:

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D. EVERATT

. . . if you see racism, take those people and make examples of them so they will know in the
future and won’t be racist any more. (Male, white, 18– 25, Johannesburg)
As the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation looks to take forward its project of building a
non-racial future, it seems clear that the first step is to give non-racialism content
that goes beyond the fuzzy feel-good sentiments currently associated with it. The
focus groups make clear that there is an enormous amount of work to be done to
help deal with the anger, pain and hurt of past racism and to begin to deconstruct
the ongoing obsession with race and constructing racial pecking orders.
But the project must go further. Racism and race obsession is fuelled by
inequality—social as well as economic—and if the non-racial project is not
about redistribution and attacking inequality, it will fail. At the same time it
needs to be anti-racist, not merely seeking some colour-blind space where inter-
marriage and common prayer resolves the problems facing us. It has to attack
xenophobia as much as black/white racism. Non-racialism needs to be active,
proactive, and attack the current status quo, which is economically, socially and
culturally unsustainable. If South Africa really does belong to all who live in it,
black and white, then all those who live in it, black and white, need to be equal.

Note
∗
Executive Director, Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a partnership of the University of Johannesburg, Univer-
sity of the Witwatersrand, and Gauteng Provincial Government, South Africa. Email: david.everatt@gcro.ac.za.
1. When asked about the claim to representivity at a seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand, Samantha
Vice—many of whose arguments I agree with—pointed to her own whiteness, and that of her friends, as giving
her some kind of claim to representivity, while Eusebius McKaiser repeated his notion that ‘everybody knows’
how whites behave and that no measurement was required.

References
African National Congress (2009), ‘Manifesto’, http://www.anc.org.za/docs/manifesto/2009/manifesto.pdf
African National Congress Youth League (1973), ‘‘Manifesto’’, in: T. Karis, Hope and Challenge: 1935-1952
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press).
Arendt, H. (1968), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Revised edition (New York:
Viking).
Bulworth (1998); a film by Twentieth Century Fox.
Everatt, D. (2009), The Origins of Non-Racialism: White Opposition to Apartheid in the 1950s (Johannesberg:
Wits University Press).
Karis, T. (1973), Hope and Challenge: 1935-1952 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press).
Mail & Guardian (2011), http://mg.co.za/article/2011-07-01-confronting-whiteness
Mantashe, G. (2011), Confronting Whiteness, interviewed by Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (mimeo).
Maré, G. (2001), ‘Race Counts in Contemporary South Africa: an Illusion of Ordinariness’, Transformation, 47,
pp. 75–93.
Mbeki, M. (2011), interviewed on Radio 702, 21 September 2011.
National Planning Commission (2011), National Development Plan: Vision for 2030 (NPC: Pretoria).
Ndebele, N. (2002), ‘The African National Congress and the Policy of Non-Racialism: a Study of the Member-
ship Issue’, Politikon, 29(2), pp. 133–146.
Republic of South Africa (1996), The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996.
Sizwe, N. (Neville Alexander) (1979), One Azania, One Nation: the National Question in South Africa (London:
Zed Press).
Suttner, R. (2011), ‘Understanding Non-Racialism – More Questions than Answers’, input to Ahmed Kathrada
Foundation Symposium on Non-Racialism (mimeo).
Vice, S. (2010), ‘How Do I Live in this Strange Place?,’ Journal of Social Philosophy, 41(3), pp. 323–342.

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Appendix A: Recruitment criteria

Province Site Race Gender Employment Age

Gauteng – venue Northern suburbs Mixed Male Professional 46–55
Gauteng – venue Northern suburbs Mixed Female Care-givers (nurses, 26–35
etc.)
Gauteng – venue Alexandra formal African Male Employed 26–35
Gauteng – venue Southern suburbs White Male Unemployed 18–25
Gauteng – venue Lenasia Indian Female Employed 46 +
Gauteng – venue Eldorado Park Coloured Mixed Unemployed 36–45
W Cape – in home Paarl Coloured Male Unemployed 36–45
W Cape – in home Stellenbosch White Mixed Students 18–25
W Cape – venue Gugulethu African Male Employed 18–25
W Cape – venue Suburbs Mixed Mixed Employed, 36–45
professional
E Cape – venue NMA – African Female Unemployed 36–45
Motherwell
E Cape – venue NMA – suburbs Coloured Female Employed, 36–45
professional
E Cape – venue NMA – suburbs White Male Employed 18–25
Mpumalanga (host Farm workers African Male Employed 26–35
home) (rural)
Mpumalanga (host Rural African Female Unemployed 46 +
home)
KZN – venue Ulundi area African Female Unemployed 36–45
KZN (host home) Ndwedwe African Male Employed 36–45
KZN – venue Phoenix Indian Mixed Employed 26–35

Appendix B: Focus group guidelines

[Reminder: confidentiality, purpose of recording, may be viewed, no-one will be identified, no right or wrong
answers, all to participate, etc.

0. Introductions etc. [Go round the room, get everyone to speak]

1. We have been a democracy in South Africa for 17 years. Some people say that many things have changed,
including how we relate to each other as people; others say that not much is different, and others say things are
worse. What do you think?
[Moderator: if no-one has talked about race, racism, etc., prompt]
2. In your view, what holds us together as South Africans? And what tears us apart?
3. The Constitution tells us that South Africa is based on values including human dignity, equality, non-racial-
ism and non-sexism. What does non-racialism mean to you?
4. Do you think we are succeeding, as a country, in building a non-racial society? Why do you say that?
5. Some people think that South Africans are more united now as South Africans and race doesn’t matter. Others
say that race matters a lot. What do you think?
6. Do you think that some people find it easier to get on with people from different races than others? For
example, do women have more in common as women than they do as whites or blacks? Do you think race
matters less for the rich than for the poor? Or do the poor of all races have more in common with each
other, regardless of their race?
7. How often, if ever, do you socialise with people of different races outside of work—whether at a party, or at
dinner, having a braai [barbecue] and so on? How easy or difficult do you find it to genuinely relax with
people from different races? What kinds of places bring people of different races together socially—not at
work, but where else do you interact positively with people of other races or cultures?

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D. EVERATT

9. Do people think of themselves as South Africans first or as other identities (such as Indian, African, Griqua,
Greek, Xhosa, Jewish, etc)? Thinking about your own friends and family, how would they describe
themselves?
10. In South Africa, with such large gaps between rich and poor, do you think we can build a non-racial society?
What should government do? What should we as citizens do?
11. Finally, what do you think [Moderator: use race group in your group] whites/Africans/Indians/coloureds
should be doing to build a non-racial society? And what should [Moderator: now use other races not in
your group] do to build a non-racial society?
12. End: Postcard: Please write a message to the person you think can do most to help build a non-racial South
Africa—write down who it is for, and what you think the one main thing they can and should do to help us
build a non-racial South Africa.

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