Teaching a graduate seminar on South Africa this semester at The New School (to help prepare a small group of students who will travel to South Africa in the summer) has meant revisiting a number of older (in some cases, “old” means published a decade or so ago) and seminal texts that unpack the South African condition or what used to be called “the South African question.” This has resulted in rediscovering, and critically reassessing, both familiar and relatively obscure books, book chapters, articles, primary documents, sound files and videos, like Mahmood Mamdani’s “Citizen and Subject,” Steve Biko’s “I Write What I Like,” the film “Come Back Africa,” Nelson Mandela’s “Statement from the Dock” in 1964, the late 1980s film “Mapantsula,” about a com-tsotsi, Reverend Allan Boesak’s speech at the launch of the United Democratic Front in August 1983, the writer and academic Njabulo Ndebele’s “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” freedom fighter and lawyer Albie Sachs’ essay “Preparing ourselves for freedom,” the ANC’s early 1980s policy blueprint for governing postapartheid South Africa, the RDP (which they quickly discarded for neoliberalism), and finally, Ndebele’s talk, “Iphi ‘indlela: Finding a way through confusion,” which the professor delivered as a Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in 2000, and where he spoke at length about whiteness in South Africa. It is worth cutting and pasting liberally from that talk, as I do below:

… [The events around Steve Biko’s murder in September 1977] lets us go deep into the ethical and moral condition of Afrikanerdom, which not only shaped apartheid but was itself deeply shaped by it. It strikes us now just how terribly unreflective Afrikanerdom became once apartheid had wormed its way into the centre of its moral fibre. When apartheid culture became both a private and public condition, defining a cultural sensibility, Afrikanerdom significantly lost much of its sense of irony. In this situation, the combination of political, economic and military power, validated by religious precept, yielded a universal sense of entitlement. Afrikanerdom was entitled to land, air, water, beast, and each and every black body. At this point, the treatment of black people ceases to be a moral concern. Speaking harshly to a black person; stamping with both feet on the head or chest of a black body; roasting a black body over flames to obliterate evidence of murder (not because murder was wrong, but because it was an irritating embarrassment); dismembering the black body by tying wire round its ankles and dragging it behind a bakkie; whipping black school-children; handing to, in the words of Biko himself, ‘an illiterate [black] mother presenting her ailing infant for treatment… a death certificate in order that the [white] doctor should not be disturbed in the night’ when the infant died… These are things one who is white, in south Africa, can do from time to time to black bodies, in the total scheme of things. No wonder the death of Steve Biko left the minister (of justice) cold, and that Magistrate Prins (who presided over the Biko inquest) could admit to having witnessed another ordinary death, just as he would have had another glass of water. In all this there is a chilling suggestion of gloating that borders dangerously close to depravity. Suddenly, ‘the heart of darkness’ is no longer the exclusive preserve of ‘blackness’; it seems to have become the condition of ‘whiteness’ at the southern corner of the African continent. Its expression will take on various degrees of manifestation, from the crude to the sophisticated. That is why such instances of the desecration of the black body have yet to evoke significant expressions of outrage from the education, religious, cultural, and business leadership of this country, caught in the culture of ‘whiteness’ which they built. Certainly not to the extent of anything that signals an historic movement towards a new social and moral order. Indeed, the quest for a new white humanity will begin to emerge from a voluntary engagement by those caught in the culture of whiteness of their own making, with the ethical and moral implications of being situated at the interface between inherited, problematic privilege, on the one hand and, on the other, the blinding sterility at the centre of the ‘heart of whiteness’ …

… I am bothered by the tendency that, when a black body is dragged down the road behind a bakkie [a small pickup truck], we see first proof of racism rather that depravity and murder. When we give racism in Africa this kind of centrality of explanation, we confirm the status of the black body as a mere item of data to be deployed in a grammar of political argument, rather than affirm it as a violated humanity. The inherent worth of a black body does not need to be affirmed by the mere proof of white racism against it. The black body is much more than the cruelty to which it is subjected. If we succeed in positioning ourselves as a people above this kind of cruelty, we deny it equality of status. We can then deal with it as one among many other problems in our society that needs our attention.”

… [W]hite racism in South Africa no longer exists as a formalized structure. We conjure in our minds the continued existence of such a structure to our perceptual peril. There is no evidence of a Ku Klux Klan that is regrouping somewhere in the far-flung corners of the country. On the contrary, with the disintegration of apartheid as a formal structure, white racism has reacted in a number of ways. In some cases it has simply died. In other cases, particularly where strong pockets of white power remain, such as in commerce, industry, and in higher education, it has either mutated and assumed the colour of change while retaining a core of self-interest, or has genuinely struggled with the agonies of embracing necessary change. In other cases, racism also continues to exist as individualised pathology, frequently exploding into acts of suicide or desperate acts of brutality against any black bodies in sight. In almost every case, we witness a crisis of identity with various degrees of intensity. But what these various forms of reaction do show is the danger inherent in a singular approach. That is why the black majority carries the historic responsibility to provide, in this situation, decisive and visionary leadership. Either it embraces this responsibility with conviction or it gives up its leadership through a throwback psychological dependence on racism which has the potential to severely compromise the authority conferred on it by history …

What is the connection between the project development so essential to our finding the future and this critique of ‘whiteness’ and what our response to it has been? Of course this question has to be considered alongside the hegemonic growth of a black consciousness (not in the sense of a philosophy or movement associated with Steve Biko, although it may not exclude it, but rather, in the more fundamental sense of the inevitability of a particular kind of social process). It will be obvious that the flow of social influence is not going in one direction from the black to the white community. There is a two-way process setting itself up as a critical stabilising factor as we negotiate change. Because the process will not always be smooth, it will require a number of negotiated positions. On the balance, though, white South Africa will be called upon to make greater adjustments to black needs than the other way round. This is an essential condition for a shift in white identity in which ‘whiteness’ can undergo an experiential transformation by absorbing new cultural rootedness. That is why every white South Africa should be proud to speak, read and write at least one African language, and be ashamed if they are not able to.

This matter of rootedness is important. For example, from a black perspective, whatever the economic merits of the case, it is difficult not to see the transfer of capital to big Western stock exchanges as ‘whiteness’ de-linking itself from the mire of its South African history to explore opportunities of disengagement, where the home base is transformed into a satellite market revolving around powerful Western economies, to become a market to be exploited rather than a home to be served. This kind of ‘flight of white capital’ may represent white abandonment of responsibility towards the only history that can promise salvation to ‘whiteness’. ‘Whiteness’ has a responsibility to demonstrate its bona fides in this regard. Where is the primary locus of responsibility for white capital, built over centuries with black labour and unjust laws? A failure to come to terms with the morality of this question ensures the continuation of the culture of insensitivity and debilitating guilt. In the past, ‘whiteness’ proclaimed its civilising mission in Africa. In reality, any advantages for black people, where they occurred, were an unintended result rather than an intended objective. An historic opportunity has arisen now for white South Africa to participate in a humanistic revival of our country through a readiness to participate in the process of redress and reconciliation. This is on the understanding that the ‘heart of whiteness’ will be hard put to reclaim its humanity without the restoration of dignity to the black body. We are all familiar with the global sanctity of the white body. Wherever the white body is violated in the world, severe retribution follows somehow for the perpetrators if they are non-white, regardless of the social status of the white body. The white body is inviolable, and that inviolability is in direct proportion to the global vulnerability of the black body. This leads me to think that if South African whiteness is a beneficiary of the protectiveness assured by international whiteness, it has an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history. It will have to come out from under the umbrella and repudiate it. Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies. South African whiteness will declare that its dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies.

The collapse of ‘white leadership’ that would spearhead this process has been lamented. On second thoughts, perhaps this situation represents a singular opportunity. The collapse of ‘white leadership’ ought to lead to the collapse of the notion of ‘black leadership’. Where there is no ‘white leadership’ to contest ‘black leadership’, where these descriptions of leadership were a function of the outmoded politics of a racist state, we are left only with leaders to govern this country. There can be no more compelling argument than this to urge for care and caution in addressing the issue of racism at the southern tip of the African continent. The historic disintegration of ‘white leadership’ imposes immense responsibilities on how we frame notions of leadership in the resultant political space we are now inheriting.