MICHAEL MORRIS: ANC scandalously sustains apartheid legacy of racial laws - BusinessLIVE
Michael Morris
A long march of time separates SA’s Mines & Works Act of 1911 and its Foreign Service Act of 2019. The circumstances in which the first was conceived and drafted were a universe away from those in which the 2019 law came into being.
Life in the early 21st century would have been barely imaginable in the first year after union, and it’s probably fair to say most of us would struggle to gain a real sense of what it was actually like to be alive in 1911.
But there’s one baleful constant, and it’s a not especially esteeming reflection of our world and what it’s like to be alive now: the Mines & Works Act of 1911 was the first of 313 racial acts of parliament adopted since 1910, and the Foreign Service Act of 2019 the most recent.
It is nothing short of scandalous that no fewer than 116 of those 313 racial acts of parliament have been adopted since 1994, and that all of 132 are still operative.
I am indebted for this data to my colleague Martin van Staden, the SA Institute of Race Relations’ deputy head of policy research, who on Reconciliation Day last year — December 1 — launched the “index of race law”, which aims to be the first comprehensive record of SA racial legislation.
Why it is scandalous ought to be plain from the fact that, as Van Staden points out, the “racial categories of the Population Registration Act [1950] continue by convention under SA race law now, comprehending blacks, whites, coloureds, and Indians/Asians”. However, as that hated law was repealed in 1991 and not replaced, “the system relies upon the self-classification of the legal subject”.
Beyond this demeaning imposition “another popular classification”, Van Staden writes, “is to simply divide South Africans between whites and blacks, with coloureds and Indians/Asians being regarded as blacks ... similarly to how diplomats and trade partners from East Asia were designated as honorary whites on occasion during the previous dispensation”.
Legally irrelevant
In 2023 it is perverse that democratic SA — boasting its credentials as a constitutional state — should remain attached to the brutalising logic of exploiting appearances.
Under common law, as Van Staden says, “the race of a person is legally irrelevant”, but can be “made relevant by statutes (legislation), regulations, and judgments of the superior courts”. (And, for the purposes of the index of race law, it is when an individual’s race is made relevant that the “instrument through which that is done or enforced, is ... [termed] ‘race law’”.)
That we are still playing in the racial space contradicts the constitutional values on which most South Africans actually pin their hopes. The institute’s latest, 2022, survey shows that 73% of black, 86% of coloured, 83% of Indian, and 89% of white South Africans agree that people of different races “need one another for progress and that there should be full opportunity for people of all skin colours”.
Instead, statutes on employment “equity” and black “empowerment” stand in the way of what most South Africans want, which is due acknowledgment of who they are, not what they look like, and an honest, fair assessment of competence and virtue.
As Van Staden argued last week: “The struggle against apartheid was a struggle against injustice, a lack of freedom and racial oppression — a struggle of substance rather than appearances.”
The tyranny of apartheid, not the whiteness of its rulers, is what mattered. It is hard to believe this is a lesson we are still learning.
• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.