If all whites had left and their wealth divided among the poor, poverty would hardly have been dented, says Ferial Haffajee in What if There Were No Whites?
SHAUN DE WAAL reviews WHAT IF THERE WERE NO WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA? by Ferial Haffajee (Picador Africa)
Ferial Haffajee came to the Weekly Mail, as it was then, as a trainee in the 1980s. She left and returned once or twice, eventually settling in for a stint as editor of the Mail & Guardian in the later 2000s, then leaving to become editor of City Press, where she still presides.
Having worked with her for all those years, I might have to make a declaration of interest before getting on to her book, but it’d be fairly simple: we worked together and, yes, we had some disagreements (particularly about design and typography), but we’re still friends and I have a high regard for what she has done in the South African media.
Haffajee talks in her book of those early days at the Weekly Mail and her progress from there; she speaks of her younger self, coming from a poor Bosmont home, going to Wits University and getting politicised, becoming a journalist. There’s an amusing passage in which, as a young journalist for the Weekly Mail, dressed in a Che Guevara T-shirt to visit the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, she is instantly recognised as being from the Weekly Mail. (It’s especially amusing when you call to mind the glamorous Haffajee of today.)
The autobiographical line stretches throughout What If There Were No Whites in South Africa?, for Haffajee is questioning what she believed, as a fighter for nonracism, back in those days – a fight that seemed to have been won in 1994. She sets those ideals against what she’s hearing today: the continued resentment against and blaming of whites for being the “haves” while most black people are still “have-nots”, and the discourses of blackness and whiteness.
This is not the Africanist question raised by the Pan Africanist Congress and others who set themselves up against the communist-influenced (and thus white-influenced) ANC of the early 1960s, but rather a neo-Bikoism developed by the likes of Andile Mngxitama, to mention only its most vociferous proponent. It redefines the content of these apparently racial categories: “blackness” becomes a term for all the oppressed and exploited, and “whiteness” is the word used to describe all the white (Western?) privilege that still exists and the inherited economic structures that perpetuate it, as well as the kind of government (the ANC, obviously, for Mngxitama) that, apart from a bit of deracialising of capital, rules in a manner not at all unlike a colonial regime.
Is this the death of the “rainbow nation” dream? Why are so many people so angry and so engaged in this battle, if, as Haffajee points out, the past 20 years have seen significant advancement and upliftment for black people? Why are so many people (including, often, the ANC) acting as though the apartheid state were still running everyone’s lives?
Haffajee explores these questions in a novel fashion, convening discussions with key players and thinkers on the matter, recording their dialogues and relating the arguments that take place to try to unpack or unpick the issue.
She’s given to “Oprah” moments a little too readily for me, but many readers will find her approach a useful and even heart-warming way to reopen and reformulate the conversation about race and power, and to ask, as we have to do repeatedly: Where to from here?
For full review by Shaun de Waal see Mail & Guardian
PHOTO CREDIT: City Press editor Ferial Haffajee poses all the white questions in her book. (Nick Boulton, Gallo)
