South Africa is in a post-liberation identity crisis
Stemming from the contradictions at the heart of the post-apartheid political order
I have recently finished working on the South African election campaign. This piece was originally intended to be an analysis of the outcome, but it developed into something else entirely, which I think is more interesting. This is my attempt to articulate what I perceive as the root issue at the heart of contemporary South Africa.
South Africa finds itself in new territory.
On May 29, the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, lost its majority for the first time since the fall of apartheid.
The ANC has been forced into a ‘Government of National Unity’- in effect a grand euphemism for a coalition between itself and ten other parties- so that it can form a government retaining a controlling majority in Parliament.
This arrangement signs off on the ANC’s humiliation in the recent election, in which it received 40.2% of the vote after decades of mismanagement and corruption.
This election thus marks the end of South Africa as a one-party state under the ANC, ushering the country into a new and likely unstable era of awkward coalitions between ideologically ill-assorted political parties.
The present situation engenders uncertainty more than anything else. Nobody yet knows how the Government of National Unity (GNU) will function, how it will navigate its contradictions, and whether it can steer South Africa out of its present morass.
But even a functioning GNU won’t fully resolve South Africa’s malaise. The ANC has irrevocably squandered its political capital, while the country’s racial inequalities are as stark as ever. South Africa is in an identity crisis borne from its contradictions which it will now have to face.
The ‘non-racialist’ myth
In 1994, the ANC came to power with the hope and expectation that it would unite all South Africans, eliminate poverty, end racial inequality, and build a free, just and non-racial democracy.
This is obviously not what has happened.
In a tale as old as time, the liberators have plundered the people and betrayed the ideals of the revolution. The ANC has lost its formerly impregnable moral authority, and South Africa no longer has a national narrative with any meaning.
But South Africa’s crisis of identity and purpose is rooted in a deeper quandary: in its failure to resolve the fundamental question of race.
Contrary to the nascent hopes of the early post-apartheid years, race continues to be the fundamental political fault-line of contemporary South Africa, disfiguring its politics and jeopardising its future.
Importantly, South Africa’s dysfunctional relationship to race, I argue, is not an aberration or an accident but the inevitable outcome of the ideological contradictions at the heart of the post-apartheid political order.
To elaborate: the end of apartheid was a social, cultural and political revolution which fundamentally transformed South Africa’s reigning ideology from one based on explicit pro-white identity and racial hierarchy, to one based on an implicitly pro-black order of racial equality.
As part of this, Nelson Mandela and his faction within the anti-apartheid struggle beat away the understandable impulse towards explicit black nationalism and revenge, in favour of an aspirational (but as it turns out, not entirely coherent) ideal of ‘non-racialism.’
Non-racialism refers to the repudiation of race as a valid political and legal category in favour of colourblind universalism. Non-racialism has been essential to South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’ mythology; it is enshrined into Chapter 1 of the South African constitution, and apartheid-era racial classifications have been expunged from law.
But the post-apartheid order under the ANC was also deeply motivated by a competing but far less ambiguous moral and ideological imperative: the desire to attack South Africa’s racial inequalities, which were perceived as the intolerable legacy of apartheid. This sacred imperative again finds itself in Chapter 1 of the Constitution, which stipulates “the achievement of equality” as one of South Africa’s foundational values.
This has inserted a profound contradiction at the heart of South Africa, in which the state and Constitution are bound to an incompatible set of principles: between the aim to have a ‘non-racial’ society, and the competing aim to use the power of the state to equalise outcomes between the races. The former ideal abnegates race; the latter reifies and instrumentalises it.
It is no surprise then that the actual meaning of ‘non-racialism’ was always ambiguous and unclear from its very inception. In truth, non-racialism was always purely ‘vibe’ based- the expression of a high-minded but inchoate desire to define the country in opposition to the apartheid regime, which cared a lot about race.
Recognising this tension is central to understanding South Africa’s dysfunctional racial politics today.
South Africa’s supreme purpose
From the very beginning of its tenure, the ANC made it clear which ideal it really believed in: the quest to equalise racial disparities, via heavy-handed racial legislation and economic redistribution.
The ANC immediately went about legislating onerous and far-reaching affirmative action laws and quotas which implicated nearly every domain of South African life.
In the words of the longstanding South African Institute of Race Relations:
“Almost immediately, however, the government began (re)enacting race law and pursuing racial policy. The two most notable instances of this are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. Various other pieces of legislation exist among dozens of charters, plans, regulations, directives, notices, and policies that attempt to regulate aspects of society along racial lines and racialise commerce.”
This is why South Africa today has a higher number of operative parliamentary acts explicitly relating to race than it did during apartheid.
Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BB-BEE) effectively forced the widescale transfer of ownership of the economy and capital to a (often politically connected) minority of black citizens. BEE operates by giving a compliance score to all businesses above a certain size score based on key metrics like their share of black ownership and management, which then determines their access to government tenders and private sector opportunities- effectively forcing all medium and large sized companies to comply.
In addition to BEE, a raft of laws and quotas exist to forcibly engineer proportional representation across every domain of public and private life.
The 1998 Employment Equity Act and its amendments mandate (among many other things) that the public and private sector workforce reflect the demographic composition of the country, irrespective of the demographic distribution of skills or competency.
Beyond the workplace, the state enforces racial parity in sports, the arts, culture, in university admissions and beyond through hard quotas and discriminatory hiring.
All foreign companies seeking to operate in South Africa must also comply by these racial laws. Elon Musk’s Starlink is actually banned from operating in the country (where many citizens cannot afford broadband access) for its unwillingness to do so.
Ultimately, South Africa’s non-racialist civic religion and Constitution was undermined from the very beginning by the ANC’s extensive regime of race-based legislation.
A predictable outcome
Of course, these laws are justified on the basis of redressing racial inequalities.
In 2024 this justification has lost all credibility.
While there has been some progress, the basic distribution and magnitude of South Africa’s racial inequality is largely unchanged from 1994. In some ways, outcomes (for all groups) have actually declined, as seen in the graph above.
As detailed by The Economist in this great article, the benefits of redistributionist policies like BEE have disproportionately accrued to the top ten percent of black earners, while largely failing to benefit those below.
Beyond failing to achieve what it set out to achieve, South Africa’s system of total affirmative action has been materially harmful to the country, in a variety of ways.
Firstly, it has systematically and profoundly degraded the capacity of the state, both by functioning as a fig leaf for the political corruption of the state via ANC cadre deployment, and by significantly reducing the quality of the public service through systematic non-meritocratic hiring. As a result, the state today functions as an extended branch of the ANC, whilst also being unable to perform its basic functions due to endemic corruption and a pronounced human capital deficit.
Secondly, it has materially damaged South Africa’s economy by functioning as a hard clamp on the freedom and efficiency of the private sector, harming the country’s long-term growth, private investment (including foreign direct investment) and productivity. This has no doubt played a hand in the stagnation of South Africa’s economy, which peaked in size in 2011. GDP per capita has actually retracted by almost a third since 2011. Even the EU has publicly called on the South African government to relax its BEE laws.
Much more can be said about the flaws and failures of South Africa’s affirmative action system, but ultimately it is a universal consensus that, beyond making a mockery of the concept of non-racialism, it has ultimately failed in achieving its intended goals of widespread economic transformation in favour of black and coloured South Africans. Instead, it has created a relatively small black elite, while preserving a vast underclass who continue to live in abject poverty.
A political system stunted by zero-sum racial politics
Meanwhile, race continues to be the main driver of the electoral politics of South African democracy.
Voters predominantly behave as racial or ethnic blocs. Black people have the ANC and the EFF; white people, Jews and Asians have the DA1; Zulus have the IFP and now MK; Afrikaners have VVF+; coloured people now have the PA; Muslims Al Jama-ah- and so on. South African elections are in no way non-racial.
And as this election has once again demonstrated, South African politics is consumed by a zero-sum mentality in which service to the nation is supplanted by loyalty to a racial or ethnic in-group.
The supremacy of in-group loyalty has the effect of fostering systematic voter irrationality, in which citizens vote on the basis of identity rather than merit, competence or even ideology. This has deranged the usual electoral mechanism for providing democratic accountability, as demonstrated by the fact that many South Africans continue to vote for the ANC purely on identitarian lines despite knowing that the ANC are responsible for the country’s decline.
Even in this election, the ANC lost significant vote share to parties which lean even further into identitarianism, such as the Zulu nationalist MK party and the radical black nationalist EFF. The fact that 14.5% percent of voters chose to vote for Jacob Zuma- the man most responsible for the country’s downfall- underscores again how identitarianism fosters self-defeating irrationality.
Identitarianism has further hamstrung South Africa by preventing it from adopting economically rational pro-growth policies, in which the fixation on achieving desirably egalitarian outcomes between groups has supplanted a universalist platform for growth and wealth creation. As a result, the country is more concerned with redistributing existing wealth than creating wealth, to the long-term detriment of all South Africans.
The zero-sum mentality of South African democracy can even partly explain its widespread corruption, whereby public officials have tended to treat public office as an opportunity for self-enrichment, which can be rationalised on the grounds of racial redistribution or historical recompense.
Ultimately, it is the poorest and most disadvantaged South Africans who bear the brunt of this broken racial politics, their plight having seen far too little material improvement since 1994.
An Impossible Ideal
As such, in 2024, non-racialism is completely discredited. South Africa is a wholly and hopelessly racialised country.
This leads to absurdist political theatre in which South Africa’s politicians continue to pay lip service to the platitude of ‘non-racialism’ while overseeing one of the most race-conscious political regimes in the world today, underpinned by a regime of systematic race-based affirmative action.
But in truth, non-racialism never stood a chance.
The equalisation impulse was always a more concrete and potent motive for the ANC, which views the country’s existing racial inequalities as the direct legacy and assertion of apartheid. This meant that any kind of racial inequality which disfavours the black majority, across any facet of public or private life, is interpreted as de facto illegitimate, necessitating forceful state intervention. The attempt to abnegate race was thus doomed from the very beginning, subordinate as it is to the post-apartheid regime’s higher desire to equalise racial outcomes.
But non-racialism was also doomed for further, deeper reasons.
Firstly, racial and ethnic identity is central to how most people understand and organise themselves, especially within multiracial societies with a history of intergroup conflict like South Africa. The way that South African democracy has splintered into ethnic and racial blocs is testament to this fact. A political system which neglects this reality will ultimately lose its relevance, like it now has.
Secondly, South Africa’s civic religion of naïve non-racialism fails to take seriously South Africa’s thoroughly racialised origins and history. Apartheid South Africa was a European country built for and by European people in southern Africa. This system lost its viability and moral legitimacy within a hostile environment of international liberalism and domestic black nationalism, which defined itself in opposition to white supremacy and racial hierarchy.
It was completely natural and inevitable then that the left-liberal, black-identitarian regime which supplanted apartheid was primarily concerned with reconfiguring the country’s racial outcomes in favour of the racial majority.
Ultimately, South Africa can probably never be ‘non-racial.’ Its transition into what it is now- an African ethnodemocracy- was largely predetermined by the interplay of its demographics, ideology, and democracy.
A Cautionary Tale
South Africa’s trajectory following the end of apartheid compels us to confront the hollowness of the post-apartheid political dispensation and the incoherence of its national mythology.
Under the ANC, the country has failed to fulfil the narrative of progress and justice that the world expected it to take after 1994, while the lofty ideals of non-racialism have shattered against the intractability of South Africa’s inherently racialised nature.
It is now clearer than ever that South Africa is simply not a cohesive polity, but rather a collection of different racial and ethnic groups animating the skeleton of a political and economic construct originally created by Western Europeans.
This has forced post-apartheid South Africa into a crisis of legitimacy, as the vacuity of its foundational values is thrust into the spotlight. As a result, existential questions of national identity now dominate political life, as aptly described in this guest essay for the NYT:
“South Africa […] once proceeded on assumptions of common citizenship; politicians disagreed on questions of governance and distribution, but there was a shared [...] commitment to the democratic process and belief in each South African's membership in the polity. Now the so-called national question dominates the political spectrum. The question of who we are has superseded more programmatic questions of what kind of society South Africans want to live in.”
For the meantime, the current order survives. But I believe South Africa is now in the early stages of a transition phase in which the old gods of the liberationist era will be abandoned in favour of an ideological order which will more honestly cohere with what the country actually is.
This may well involve South Africa ultimately rejecting its membership and fealty to the West entirely, as the ANC have already begun to do. Or it could see South Africa come to terms with the failures of the post-apartheid dispensation and abandon the politics of racial redistribution and representation which have failed the country so badly.
It remains to be seen how the story of South Africa will transpire. South Africa desperately needs new leadership and a new ideology; the fundamental challenge for the Government of National Unity will be whether it can free South Africa from the shackles of its broken ideological regime.
The odds are against it.
Ironically, it is the Democratic Alliance- widely maligned for being the white party- which continues to make the most sincere appeals to the ideal of non-racialism, which is reflected in its voter base. White people constitute 7% of the population, but 21.8% of voters voted DA in this election, meaning that the DA actually has the least racially concentrated voter base of all the major political parties. The powerful stigma attached to the DA for its white identity reflects how the country is still haunted by the spectre of apartheid, whereby any political organisation involving white people is reflexively stigmatised.
Thanks for this sad but frank assessment..... It seems Mandela's vision is dead.