An Inappropriate Text for an Appropriate Evening (Alan

Paton Award 2015)

During a public meeting with the then Minister of Finance he was asked whether
a post-Truth and Reconciliation plan existed to get from whites what was needed
to repair the past? He answered: even if we take everything whites have, it will
never make up for what they did. What we need to address inequality is a 6%
growth rate.
This was of course the truth. Nothing could ever repair the damage of three
centuries. But in another way it was also a mark of a general unwillingness by all
of us, to do some hard thinking.
For example: it would have been important for whites then to have heard the
conditions under which they were to be accommodated or rejected: we dont
want any whites here; or we want whites, but only poor ones - or only rich ones;
or we want whites willingly to take the blame for centuries for all failings; or the
country has invested its best and most powerful resources in you, so for three
generations you will use your accumulated skills, knowledge and resources to
eradicate for ever the Verwoerd education system, or mend the distorted
transport system, or build an appropriate health system; or perhaps even: every
white should report to a township school and assist with rendering services from
cleaning toilets and safeguarding buildings and people, to teaching and marking
as and when necessary.
However problematic or unpractical these examples might sound, they would
have focused all of our minds on what kind of society we wanted to live in. And
what we were willing to pay for it.
Whatever was negotiated and understood, misunderstood or taken for granted
was there anybody in South Africa who thought that the country materially had
to stay as it was with all the resources remaining in specific areas and with
specific classes? Did whites really think that setting matters right stopped at
charity, NGOs, philanthropy, paying domestic workers more than a living wage
and allowing a black middle class to grow?
At this post-Marikana stage we have to engage in brutal public conversations. It
is especially time for anger. I respect anger. Anger is often where important
change begins. Not the anger of blind destruction, but the anger which brings
clarity of direction, lucidity of purpose. When someone in anger says: We must
kill the whites, so that. Then it is time for real responses: how? OR: on what
principle? OR more importantly: And then what? This is not to play around
irresponsibly with fears, rage and desires, but to bring into the open what is
being murmured under angry breaths, what festers in horrific killings, emotional
repression and violent neglect of human dignity. It is time to discuss and argue
these things. How do we get to radical change? How will the means influence the
outcome? We have to start looking at different scenarios. If there are race-

killings, expropriations, squattings as a consequence of unrelieved poverty and

dashed expectations of change what will happen?
In the absence of a plan to get what is needed from whites and the absence of
new content to the pronoun us, a question: most South Africans older than
thirty two, would probably name one or two visual images which brought home
like a thunderbolt a profound moment of radical change: Mandela taking the
salute or Mandela with his deputy presidents or in a springbok jersey.
So what should a frame look like in terms of white radical change?
Of course, many whites are doing things. Wonderful things. (So do black people,
but the frame needs the input from whites!) Many people, old and young, are
being assisted by whites, many lives are being saved, talents nurtured and
sponsored, and every person assisted is a person assisted, whatever the motives
or the affluence from which it originated. So why dont whites have an image to
put in here? Is it just bad PR or is it that charity and aid often immobilize efforts
of radical change while simultaneously allowing government to ignore the poor.
What was promised in 1994 didnt happen. A systemic fault line prevented the
momentous emblematic political transformation from being complemented by an
equally momentous emblematic socio-economic transformation. Did we think it
was enough that affirmative action was meant for those already employed, not
the unemployed? That BEE was for those mixing with the elite and not for the
fifty percent on the margins of destitution?
In ones frustration one is pushed to wonder whether the empty frame calls for a
two year Radical Reconstruction Period in which all energy, resources, every
South African is used in order to achieve massive structural change. The image
that comes to mind is of a particular kind of scrambled egg made after the yolk
and white has been fried hard. Everything is put on hold, salary increases, price
increases, even the constitution is used to take us towards systemic changes,
until the collective spatula has cut the whole lot to pieces for a proper, fairer mix.
Perhaps even that wont do as the rhetoric of freedom and justice has
evaporated increasingly into shabby talk about a developmental state by
ministers seemingly without the will or grasp on self-discipline to operate within
defined moral contexts.
Freedom from apartheid has been reduced to freedom to shop and freedom not
to be accountable. When last did we hear anybody talk about a just society, a
better life for everybody, suggesting that enough was a feast? In strikes and
wage bargaining one no longer hears the words: justice, fairness, empathy for
all. And why would we? Being bombarded by the vulgar excesses of celebrity life
and vainglorious luxury on television, billboards and magazines, young and old
often have no other thought than demanding their right to consume.
But let us return to the seemingly impossible image of the hard fried egg.

The essence of colonialism is space - the expropriation and personal consuming

of space. The colonial and apartheid worlds, were worlds divided and dividing.
Therefore decolonisation must mean the making whole, the recreation, reappropriation and reconfiguration of space. It means more than simply
eradicating the lines of force that keep zones apart; it requires fundamental
social and economic change. Again, a maybe: during this suggested two year
Radical Reconstruction Period all suburbs and farms are given two years of free
range to scramble themselves. Every house in the suburbs should be confronted
by the fact of shackness, every park filled with squatters, every street with
vendors. Every home and land owner, every suburb, every farm free to negotiate
a living space with whomever moves in.
Liberation remains incomplete when the colonial or apartheid city is not
reorganised, but simply taken over. A ban should be put on changing the name of
any town before the town has fundamentally, practically and collectively
prioritised the poor with deeds. Those who finish their studies, and those who
have retired, should work for a year in the town or city of their birth to remove
backlogs and shortages in courts, hospitals, schools, administrative offices,
infrastructure support, corruption investigations, child care etc. For no salary. The
town will provide food and a place to sleep.
We are facing a disaster in the absence of a crucial social unifying vision of a
liberated humane society. The times are pitiless. No vision is coming to save us.
Let us dirty our hands with the tactics of communality needed to create openings
into which new rhythms, new language and new modes of being human can be
poured.
We did it once. We surprised ourselves in doing what was not thought
possible (a political transformation despite our historical and current
political context). The times are demanding from us to do so again:
bringing about the impossible: an economic transformation despite a
neo-liberal context and a rotten leadership. But in order to pull it off,
we need to have all the conversations, deferred from 1994, with as
much courageous imagination, new vocabulary and wild dreams as
possible.