Afrikaners, Nevertheless
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Afrikaner, nevertheless: Stigma, shame & the sociology of cultural trauma Boersema, J.R. Publication date 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Boersema, J. R. (2013). Afrikaner, nevertheless: Stigma, shame & the sociology of cultural trauma. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:25 Sep 2021 PART 2: Afrikaner Men at Work 5. Responding to Racial Redress 5.1 INTRODUCTION In Part 2, I compare how upper- and lower-middle-class Afrikaner men respond to the emergence of racial redress programs and how this relates to questions of class, masculinity, and ethnic identity. I do this on two levels. The first level is that of organizational discourses. I compare the cultural discourses of the former Afrikaans chamber of commerce, Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, with those of Solidarity, the former Mine Workers’ Union (MWU). The second level I analyze is that of individuals. I compare the culture discourses and emotional lives of entrepreneurs against those of Afrikaner men employed at former state companies Eskom and Telkom. In this theoretical introduction, I shortly summarize the general trends in the transition of the political economy of South Africa after apartheid and the effects on the economic place of whites after the transition. I show that most political economists depict 1994 as an elite transition from apartheid to neoliberalism, during which Afrikaners continued their economic dominance. But these scholars hardly consider changes at the level of the experience of work. The literature on the white community’s response to racial redress is also silent on this question, in part because it is survey based. Experiences of real people are not even central among scholars interested in questions of race and identity in relationship to the political economy, as they prefer to analyze policy discourses. I argue that the neoliberal economy, together with racial redress programs, have created a radically different context at work for racial integration and identity construction for upper- and lower-middle-class Afrikaner men. Building on the sociological literature that relates work and identity more closely, I present a nuanced approach to the influence of work on issues of class, race, and gender, and how the experience of work shapes how people see and experience the world and themselves. RESPONDING TO RACIAL REDRESS : 56 5.2 THE NEOLIBERAL TRANSITION AND RACIAL REDRESS More than a decade after the transition to democracy, there is a consensus in the political economy literature that during the transition, the ANC government was persuaded to give up its communist and socialist roots and adopt neoliberal economic policies that largely benefitted the affluent white minority. Indeed, the brokered economic agreements between the ANC and the National Party firmly ingrained a set of capitalist principles like private property rights in the constitution. Furthermore, the ANC adopted a pro- growth strategy named GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution), which are a limited set of social policies, including stable interest rates, tight control of government expenses, an independent national reserve bank, and the privatization of various public companies. Consequently, the transition to democracy is dubbed an “elite transition,” which denotes that white business and political elites struck a class compromise with the ANC (Bond, 2000, 2003; Gumede, 2007; MacDonald, 2006; Marais, 1999, 2011).1 Proponents of this elite transition theory emphasize that the economic policies of the ANC have generally served whites and a small black elite well, while doing very little for the poor black masses. This conclusion is certainly true for whites on an aggregate level; as a racial group, they profited from strong growth in income and held low unemployment when compared with the other racial groups (Bhorat, 2004; Leibbrandt, 2010).2 However, income disparity has risen within every racial group and declined between racial groups since 1975 (although inequality between groups is still very high) (Bhorat, 2004; Leibbrandt, 2010).3 Indeed, rising inequality within the white racial group and the overall rise of unemployment should qualify statements that all whites have done well since the transition.4 However, the tale of the elite transition is only half the story of the political economy’s transformation; the other half deals with racial redress. BLACK ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION From the inception of the ANC, black economic empowerment was a cornerstone of their strategy to deracialize the economy. However, during the transition, the ANC’s central challenge was to balance the demands of the international financial markets and those of democracy (MacDonald, 2006). When the ANC took over from the Government of National Unity in 1996, the new government installed more sweeping forms of racial reparation. Initially, racial redress policies relied on an approach of persuasion and targeted large state-owned companies and companies that relied on the state for orders, like mining companies. The national telephone company, Telkom, for instance, introduced racial redress policies in 1994. Yet, the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act (No. 53 of 2003) and the BEE Codes of Good Practice (also known as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, B-BBEE) in 2007 transformed the program into an RESPONDING TO RACIAL REDRESS : 57 inclusive and assertive effort.5 It now envelops a broad section of the economy, including medium and many smaller enterprises. Enterprises are rated based on various scorecards to see how their ownership, management, and employees represent the South African racial demographic. The law stipulates certain percentages to be granted government projects. Racial redress is also pursued at the level of the individual through affirmative action policies. Affirmative action originated in the United States after the civil rights movement and aimed to compensate disadvantaged minorities. In South Africa, however, it is currently used to address a disadvantaged majority (Kennedy-Dubourdieu, 2006; Sowell, 2004).6 The program was meant to serve multiple purposes, including overcoming resistance to racial integration by a civil service dominated by whites, increasing response to the needs of the black community, and a more participatory form of public service delivery, also in which the black community had a say (Ndletyana, 2008). Affirmative action officially came into law under the auspices of the Employment Equity Act (EEA) (No. 55 of 1998) and is now pursued more rigorously through yearly reports and targets, which are based on demographic representation.7 The response of the white community has been much more welcoming to BEE than to affirmative action programs. Indeed, there is little evidence that the white business community ever openly protested BEE. Little resistance was also found among large white-owned corporations to broaden the recruitment pool by including qualified blacks and women (Adam, 1997). Some large BEE deals have been a great source of scorn in the (white- dominated) media, but overall BEE has been met with cooperation. Whether the inclusion of medium and small business has changed this cooperative spirit remains to be seen. By contrast, survey research indicates that a large majority of whites are unwilling to support either general redistribution measures or further racial redress, and their opposition had been consistent over time (IJR, 2003a, 2005, 2011; Roberts, 2006). An HSRC survey found that 78 percent of white Afrikaners and 77 percent of other white people disagree with the statement “People from previously disadvantaged groups should be given preference by employers when they hire and promote workers” (1999 HSRC survey, quoted in Rule, 2000).8 The picture of broad opposition to affirmative action is further underlined by the critiques of a variety of former (white) politicians.9 5.3 RACE, CLASS, AND MASCULINITY AT WORK In the United States, where affirmative action became law in the early 1960s, there has been a long debate about white resistance to affirmative action and its relationship to racism. However, survey research has been inconclusive on the question whether resistance was rooted in racism, traditional values of egalitarianism or in something else (Bobo, 1998; Sidanius, Pratto, & Bobo, RESPONDING TO RACIAL REDRESS : 58 1996). Historic sociological research on whites’ opposition to the civil rights movement and affirmative action suggests that class plays a large role in shaping resistance, as the (perceived) burden of integration and affirmative action