Hartford: The rainbow fades - how SA’s non-racial dream is giving way to fragmentation and fear

South Africa has reached a historic turning point, with the ideal of a united non-racial democracy under growing strain from economic decline, social fragmentation and rising xenophobia. Decades of ANC misrule have eroded the material foundations needed to sustain the Rainbow Nation vision, creating fertile ground for ethnic, racial and nationalist politics. The emergence of the March and March movement is evidence of a deeper shift in public sentiment, reflected across the political spectrum. As identity-based politics gains strength, the piece asks whether South Africa can still preserve its constitutional non-racial project or whether a more divided future now lies ahead..By Dirk Hartford.Not to long ago, still tipsy on RainbowNation KoolAid, one could be forgiven for imagining that SA’s non-racial democracy was still a shining example of DEI to a rapidly polarising white western world. After all South Africa, container of the origin story of humans on the planet, and arguably the most diverse population in the world, had not only emerged from a brutal divided aparthate past but had delivered a united non-racial democratic country.In the only place outside the Western world with a sizeable white population nogal. But after the tipping point June 30 moment, and the genie unleashed by the March on March movement, South Africa has changed qualitatively from what it has been before.The dialectic is unrelenting. Bit by bit, quantitively, over 3 decades of maladministration, the illusory rainbow’s light has been extinguished.Now black African and Asian “illegal foreigners” are conjured up as the cause of all the suffering bought on by the dimming of the rainbow light.SA is now perceived as a polarised, even hateful, dark and unsafe place. Especially if you are poor.Where women are raped and slaughtered, alcohol and drugs are ubiquitous, crime and murder is rampant, humans and body parts are smuggled, foreigners are othered, outed and murdered. The centrifugal forces at play in SA now are anathema to unity in diversity, non-racialism and democracy itself. They are forces characterised by desperation, fear and vengeful projections. One only has to spend a few hours in the SA social media mosh pit around xenophobia to feel it. Here be dragons South Africans. We have turned not only against foreigners but against each other. 500 plus registered political parties are an expression of this.The ANC’s national liberation movement itself has over the years birthed countless offshoots - the PAC, Cope, the EFF, MK, Mayibuye, the PA, Action SA, Rise Mzanzi and others. Even the Cosatu Congress, the one place where hope still resided, with people organised by class and not race, has succumbed to these factionalised forces.To resort to outdated terms, the “left” is effectively emasculated and the “right” is a Hydra with faces ranging from Freedom Front Plus (Afrikaners) to MK (Zulu’s), Action SA, PA (Coloureds) and civic actors like March and March and Afriforum. March and March is significant, and has changed the game so much, because it is the first grassroots movement to have emerged in our democracy against the status quo with such resonance.Every political party is adapting to it whether they like it or not and the issues its fighting around are such that they are being treated with kid gloves by all and sundry, including the media and the government.The active, organised opposition to March and March is, well, activists mainly. Its the emasculated left. Its not visibly mass based. Everyone else is on hot coals on the issue.A non-racial democratic South Africa was the liberatory vision of the ANC. Yet no one has been more responsible for destroying the conditions to make such a vision possible then the ANC itself. And with the breakdown of the Cosatu Congress last week the ANC and SACP effectively smashed the last possibility from the side of the liberatory forces for any kind of claw back to non-racial rainbowism .The real miracle of South Africa's transition 32 years ago was the actual creation of a united non-racial democratic society - at least so far as our lauded constitution goes. It was by no means a foregone conclusion and it still is not.Apartheid, the Bantustans, ethnic (Zulu/Inkatha) nationalism, Afrikaner nationalism - all mitigated against such an outcome. The ANC, the standard-bearer of non-racial democracy, ensured it was realised.The mass struggles in the 80s, spearheaded by the United Democratic Front and Cosatu, were a massive boost for the non-racial ideal and the ANC itself. All races were well represented in these organisations.In retrospect, the apogee of the united non-racial democratic movement was then.With the ANC coming to power one would have hoped that the inclusive energies unleashed in the 80s would be taken rapidly forward in a new democratic society, but they were not. The ANC systematically set out to look after its own interests which was money by any means necessary. For themselves alone.The fortunate few struck BEE deals with white capitalists and became millionaires or even billionaires overnight. The rest took over the state (cadre deployment) and either stole, or paid themselves enough (out civil servants are amongst the highest paid in the world), to create a black middle class in quick succession.That might have still been enough for the non-racial dream to hold if the socio-economic infrastructure on which the new society was being built was not systematically destroyed by the ANC in power itself.The infrastructure of South Africa is in ruins and we all know it. The vast majority, the poor, are who really feels and suffers it. The rich have already used their common sense and money to create their own enclaves. They will survive, and even flourish, through whatever this catastrophe throws at them.But the dirt poor vast majority, the over 90 percent of South Africans surviving primarily on the humiliating peanuts of state grants ?If one needs an indicator of how ANC rule has destroyed the non-racial ideal, one only needs to look at South Africa today through the eyes of the coloured people. Whichever way one spins it, the coloured people represent most directly the original inhabitants of South Africa, and they are the group that has benefited the least from the changes of the last 32 years.Despite playing a major role in the mass struggles that ended apartheid, the old adage "not white enough under apartheid and not black enough in a non-racial democracy" was soon tragically realised.Unsurprisingly the sentiments expressed by the March and March movement have enjoyed significant support also in the coloured community. We all need someone to blame for our misery.The fast growing PA and the National Coloured Congress would unlikely exist in the form they do today if this wasn’t the case. Likewise organisations like the DA, Freedom Front, Solidarity and the Cape Independance movement among white peopleOr Inkatha and the overnight success MK party and March and March among Zulu people in particular.There is no kind way to put this. March and March has revealed something similar to what is being revealed throughout the Western world and it's not pretty.Fear and loathing of the other and of each other have reached unprecedented levels in South Africa and its being reflected in our politics.The united non-racial ideal is cracking at the seams as the ANC goes down. Its not yet clear which way the amorphous nationalism of the rump of the ANC will turn.The only possible inclusive current antidotes to this rupturing lie in the tradition of Sobukwe’s PAC, Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and Winnie Mandela’s imagination which is represented mainly by the EFF today.Pan Africanism. Or Africa for the Africans where African is defined by allegiance to the pan-African vision and not by race.Or in the classical liberal tradition which has long roots in South Africa and is today represented by the main opposition party the DA.The DA is constantly described as a “white party” when it is in fact far and away the most non-racial political organisation in the country. Only the ANC/SACP comes anywhere close..Read more:.The day of catastrophe for a non-racial South Africa - Dave Steward.Of course the DA was gestated by whites and the liberal tradition it represents is European in its antecedents. It remains the primary go to home for white people.But it has grown to the point where it its major star, white gogo Helen Zille, might soon be ruling as Mayor in the Johannesburg/Soweto heartland of the biggest economic metropole in Africa.Whites are currently 7% of the population in South Africa; Coloureds 8%, Indians nearly 3%. In 40 years time at current trends whites will be about 2%If Helen Zille’s triumphs for the DA in Johannesburg in November it will symbolically be the biggest and most significant event since the dawn of democracy.And it might also offer the last chance non-racial democrats have of starting to turn the tide and keeping the conservative forces of separation, acrophobia and ethnic nationalism at bay..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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Hartford: The rainbow fades - how SA’s non-racial dream is giving way to fragmentation and fear

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