MICHAEL MORRIS: Moving from a nasty to a necessary question - Business Day
Michael Morris
If you wanted proof of the power of a dominant idea in politics, I once pointed out that you had only to consult the straight-faced entry in Hansard, the official record of parliament, from an otherwise unremarkable day in March 1990.
I might just as well say you have only to consider the question put to judge Phillip Coppin by chief justice Mandisa Maya in his Judicial Service Commission interview last week for a position on the Supreme Court of Appeal. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
In a sense, that Hansard entry was dull, a routine accounting of race reclassifications under the Population Registration Act of 1950. The law still had a year and a bit to go before being repealed, and remained central to determining who was who. But by March 1990 — Nelson Mandela free, a negotiated settlement inevitable — who cared?
It was fascinating nevertheless to learn that in the preceding 12 months there had been no fewer than 1,229 successful reclassifications. By dint of apartheid’s dizzying ideological cynicism, the successful candidates changed from “White to Cape Coloured; Cape Coloured to White; Cape Coloured to Chinese; White to Chinese; White to Malay; Malay to White; White to Indian; Malay to Chinese; Indian to Cape Coloured; Cape Coloured to Indian; Indian to Malay; Malay to Indian; Other Asian to Cape Coloured; Black to Cape Coloured; Cape Coloured to Black; Black to Other Asian; Black to Indian; Black to Griqua; Cape Coloured to Malay; Chinese to Cape Coloured; Indian to White; Malay to Cape Coloured; Cape Coloured to Griqua; and Cape Coloured to Other Asian”.
One hundred and six applications had been turned down. As I have written elsewhere, it is difficult to imagine on what logical grounds they failed. Sadly, we can’t say it’s a relief that we don’t have to care about this nonsense any more.
Which brings us to the chief justice and her meaningful question to Coppin. Maya is reported as saying: “It’s a nasty question but a necessary one. We live in SA and this is an issue for us... You’ve described yourself as coloured in your form ... but one of the professional bodies has written in and said you’re a white male ... are you a white male?”
In a press release, my colleague Marius Roodt has already dealt with the demeaning nature of the question. Say out loud: “Are you a black female?” and it’s obvious. What interests me is Maya’s preludial framing — “it’s a nasty question, but a necessary one”. We don’t know what she meant, but we are nevertheless reminded that apartheid-era racial classification today continues to impose a heavy cost, especially on black South Africans.
As another colleague, Gabriel Crouse, wrote last week of the perversity of hitching race to empowerment, “black unemployment swelled from 23% in 2007 to 37.6% at the latest count. On the expanded definition, black unemployment has risen to 47%. Poor, black, unemployed people are the ones most clearly stuck in the shadow of apartheid, a shadow that has grown under BEE.”
What is very nasty indeed is that the penalty paid by black people will only be compounded as long as we fall for the delusion that their skin colour rather than their access to jobs, protection from criminals, good schools, reliable hospitals and better choices condemns so many millions of South Africans to being economic outsiders in their own country.
What to do about that is, without doubt, a most “necessary” question.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.