Daily Dispatch: Tribalism’s rot bared

http://www.dispatch.co.za/tribalisms-rot-bared/

Tribalism’s rot bared

Dawn Barkhuizen

THE habit of Jew-baiting by the Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Marius Fransman, is a dangerous one, but it should be seen as part of a wider problem manifesting in South Africa.

The head of the ANC’s ethics committee, Ben Turok, last week highlighted the issue of ethnic prejudice after writing to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe to ask that Fransman be disciplined for baseless claims that 98% of property owners in Cape Town were whites “and in particular, Jews”.

Anyone who perpetuated an ethnic or racial stereotype could not only inflame anti-Semitism but lacked real understanding of South Africa’s political reality, Turok said in interviews.

“I also fear that if anyone in the movement begins to talk in terms of ethnicity (such as) Zulu, Xhosa, Venda or Greek, or Italian or any other category, because we are such a multicultural society and diverse. . . this will become a distraction from our main objectives of creating a nonracial society in which all can live.”

Turok is not alone in this concern. A growing number of prominent figures are warning of the dangers of ethnic rivalry.

Former president Thabo Mbeki earlier this month lamented the tendency of people to put up car stickers proclaiming they were “100% Venda” or “110% Tswana”.

“I am sure all of us need to be very concerned about a regression to tribalism. . . One hundred years (after the ANC was formed), this demon is raising its head,” he is reported as saying.

This week United Democratic Front leader Bantu Holomisa expressed a similar sentiment – and laid the blame at the door of the Zuma government.

Speaking at a Dispatch Dialogue in East London he said that by “attempting to turn a national government into a regional one” and by populating key clusters like security and economics with “people from a certain region” the Zuma administration was provoking ethnic prejudice.

“This can escalate into ethnic war or even ethnic cleansing,” he said.

Political scientists say that South Africa is some way off from such a scenario which requires a collapse of democratic institutions and a high level of strategic organisation and machinery.

However, the problem escalates incrementally when ethnic discrimination is exercised with impunity.

This happened in Rwanda. Like South Africa, Rwanda had a transition to democracy in 1962 but in 1994 it was the scene of ethnic genocide in which one million people were systematically butchered in 100 days.

But apart from inflammatory rhetoric in South Africa, there are other signs of a drift towards ethnic conflict: no-go areas are being established on ethnic lines in parts of KwaZulu-Natal.

Writing in the Dispatch recently Rhodes University politics lecturer, Richard Pithouse, drew attention to an escalating conflict in shack settlements around Durban.

He said local ANC leaders, including key councillors, were using the language of ethnicity to eradicate opposition.

Members of the ethnically diverse organisation, Abahlali baseMjondolo, were all being branded as Mpondo (from the Eastern Cape).

“Senior ANC figures, including the mayor, have repeatedly made clear that this makes them illegitimate in the area,” Pithouse said.

Not only is this being used as grounds to validate violence against Abahlali, but it had also given rise to several murders.

Pithouse quoted S’bu Zikode of Abahlali saying: “To the smug politicians in their suits in the City Hall, and their thugs hunting us in the shacks, you are not a proper human being if you are not Zulu and if you are a Zulu living and organising with Mpondo people then you are not a proper Zulu.”

Said Pithouse: “This drama is not simply about the state using violence to try and sustain the duopoly that it shares with the market with regard to the allocation of land. It’s also about protecting the interests of the ruling party. Party supporters have built shacks in the same area without consequence. These are political evictions.

“Politics is being openly mediated through ethnicity.”

Despite appeals to President Jacob Zuma from various representatives of civil society, including church leaders and international notables like Noam Chomsky, the top echelons of government have been silent.

But this is in line with the current trajectory of the ANC in KwaZuluNatal and nationally. According to Wits Graduate School of Public and Development Management associate professor, William Gumede, Zuma has elevated narrow conservativism along ethnic lines to the degree that he has taken the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal back decades to a time when ethnic nationalists sought to control it. This approach is mirrored in national government. He said Zuma had done this by:

·        Using ethnicity in an attempt to cover his own flawed behaviour,

·        Causing the “Zulufication” or “Zulunisation” of strategic state clusters;

·        Explicitly mobilising support on an ethnic basis – as happened at Polokwane and Mangaung; and furthermore

·        Corralling conservative traditional leaders behind him through patronage and active support of anti-democratic legislation like the Traditional Courts Bill.

Zuma had in fact, become an incarnation of Inkatha Freedom Party leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, “who ironically, has now tried to warn Zuma against narrow Zulu nationalism because he (Buthelezi) says he tried it and it does not work,” said Gumede.

Political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi has expressed a similar view. Writing in Business Day he said: “Support for the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal is, in part, informed by the fact that, after Polokwane, the Zulu nationalist impulse was transferred from the IFP to the ANC.”

This had taken on worrying dimensions – some of Zuma’s supporters had actively been “seeking support for a succession plan according to which the ANC and the country would be led by someone from KwaZulu-Natal until 2039”.

This led Matshiqi to conclude that African Union head Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma would succeed Jacob Zuma as president of the ANC and the country, not Cyril Ramaphosa.

Matshiqi’s response was an impassioned plea: “At the risk of being accused of tribalism, I believe very strongly that progressive members of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal must form a line of resistance against demons that speak in the forked tongue of tribalism. . . . If the fight against tribal chauvinists is not defeated, the reaction will lead to a split, and those who want to eternally keep the leadership of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal will be left holding only the Zulu piece of the ANC.”

According to Gumede, leaders who solidify support along ethnic lines, or even allow the perception of this, govern “in the very worst way”.

“Nobody, nobody trusts you and people go into laagers. Which, in fact, causes your organisation to unravel.”

Mandela had governed in entirely the opposite way. “He used inclusivity to persuade a critical mass of people who did not trust him initially, to support him.”

Highlighting the need for a change in course, Mbeki urged South Africans to learn from Sierra Leone where two dominant parties had mobilised along ethnic and regional lines, eliminating any sense of common national identity, and descending into civil war.

“Because I see that worrying trend even here at home. . . of the resurgence of tribalism, of people talking about this or other tribe,” he said.

But it is not just tribalism that South Africans need to address, it is whether, as Turok says, people elevate any ethnicity “Zulu, Xhosa, Venda or Greek, or Italian or Jewish” above an overarching common South African identity.

This does not exclude the preservation of ethnic identity, but this preservation should not be the defining feature of a multi-layered South Africanness, said Gumede.

In fact, Mandela signalled this as far back as 1962 when, from the dock of his political trial, he highlighted the importance of a common South African identity, something he said should not be defined by one dominant community or in relation to a majority community.

“The best way forward is not Afrikaner or African nationalism, but civic nationalism,” said Gumede. In civic nationalism the glue that holds different communities together is equal rights and shared democratic cultures, values and institutions, rather than ethnic nationalism, whether Zulu, Afrikaner or coloured or Jew.

So Turok should not be addressing the problem of Fransman in Cape Town in isolation, but the victimisation of Abahlali in the shack settlements of KwaZulu-Natal and also the tactics used by the president.