Can black people be racist, can whites be colonised?
The sign that says “Slegs Blankes/Whites Only” is the beginning of wisdom.
On August 3, 2023, minibus taxis in the city of Cape Town went on strike, paralysing public commuter transportation. Thousands of African workers walked tens of kilometres home from work.
Many were stranded in the CBD, with some sleeping for the night on the narrow benches at the bus stations.
But, as the African workers walked home, biting their nails in the dark, and as thousands others stampeded for the little public transport on offer, and still others slept on benches, the Netball World Cup was going on only a few kilometres away at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) and on live television, and crowds of fans in the venue bit their nails and cheered as South Africa beat Uganda by 52 points to 50. This strange side-by-sideness, for me, is yet another scene of Verwoerdian “good” neighbourliness.
What does the sight of old African women limping 30 kms to Khayelitsha from the Cape Town’s apartheid suburbs (where they do daily domestic cheap labour), while the netball goes on, teach us about the nature of apartheid as the conduct of persistent harm? What do the two forms and types of nail-biting say about the human condition? I wish to argue that this “chidimbu” (fragment) of a scene teaches us, above all else, about the Rate of Oppression, a key explanation about the persistence of harm, injustice, and oppression in the world.
There have been some inane questions about whether blacks can be racist, or whether whites can also be colonised (cf. Giliomee 2003), and so on. When you pose the wrong questions on fundamental questions, you end up with puzzling conflations and, at best, silliness and, at worst, degrading assumptions.
The key test in fundamental enquiries about the nature of harm, oppression, and injustice, is, to my mind, always that of the Rate of Oppression (cf. Mboti 2023a; 2023b; 2023c). In a word, any person regardless of race (or gender or whatever), can be oppressed. This is not even worth arguing. However, not everybody experiences “rates” of oppression. This, for me, is the key difference.
While oppression is the same everywhere (in the sense that it is harmful and all humans experience pain and loss), the rate at which we experience this same oppression is, beyond a certain threshold, adjustable upwards or downwards like an exchange rate and a currency. Beyond a certain threshold, the “value” of oppression is alterable. That is, no two people on earth experience the same oppression at the same rate. This starting point indicates that some experience oppression while others experience oppression + a surcharge. This surcharge is what we call the Rate of Oppression (cf. Mboti 2023b; 2023c).
Hence, asking if blacks can be racist, or asserting that black people cannot be racist, or if an African can call another African a kaffir (see, Columbia Media v Titi; Titi and Others v Ngwenya and Others (4737/2017; 26732/2017) [2022] ZAGPJHC 104), or if whites can also be coloniser and colonised, is posing literally the wrongest question that can be posed in the circumstances. Racism and colonialism are practices whose salience returns us where we started: about what to do about the inhumanity of humans to other humans. We cannot breach, still, the sort of threshold of knowledge that takes being human as a pivot. By this I mean that humans will always be human, such that Hitler and Winston Churchill are humans - humans possessing the property of human unbeing. The explanation that they are inhuman is plausible but still seems to me to exonerate them - as if they could stop being human in order to be evil for a period of time.
Hitler and Churchill do not need to stop being human to do genocide in Germany and India. Instead, they simply enter the zone of human unbeing where being human meets apartheid, also known as a policy of good neighbourliness.
Essentially, being human can go on side-by-side with human unbeing. Life goes on (even) if there are concentration camps elsewhere or even in the vicinity. Indeed, life goes on with concentration camps. Life goes on even as genocide goes on. With all due respect to Hannah Arendt, it is not about the banality of evil. Evil is never banal. Rather, it is about if evil can scale or not. That is, one can see how genocide is committable by humans. Indeed, genocide can only be committed by humans.
If being human is the pivot of all human actions, it becomes possible to see not just oppression but the transformation of oppression into a special purpose vehicle.
It is crucial to study racism, colonialism, oppression, injustice, harm and poverty, but such topical studies are by default limited to the description and diagnosis of the problem as a problem. As a result, such topics produce important cycles of outrage that progressively becomes degrading disappointment (and even chaos, division, anarchy, xenophobia, strife, and civil war) when little or nothing changes decades and even centuries later.
The main problem, in my reading, is that such topical studies of harm seem to neglect a different category of exploration and knowledge: the direction of a fundamental grasp of how evil and harm are not only committable and repeatable by humans but also how evil and harm are compatible with life going on. That is, it is a question of entropy (oppression on holiday), of quantum superposition (the lab leak theory: when the dompas escapes the laboratory into social relations), and of scale.
In this model, if there is no scale, then it is oppression. If there is scale, then there is a Rate of Oppression at work. The Rate of Oppression, as far as my emerging work has shown, is a substantially falsifiable way to understand the commutative persistence of harm at scale.
How else do we explain the permanence of Palestinian refugee camps or informal settlements in Cape Town and Johannesburg and slums in Nairobi, Lagos, and Lima?
Hence, my work in Apartheid Studies begins with the 17th of August 2012 (the day after Lonmin Massacre) rather than the 16th of August 2012, or with 9/12 rather than 9/11, and with the day after the Grenfell Tower fire in London, and so on. As I show in Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, the day after is all the proof we need that the sky does not fall. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
For me, inductive study begins the day after the supposed point of “impact”. My forensic work begins by assessing signs-of-life-going-on. I’m interested in signs-of-life in the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico (where no life is expected to exist because of extreme pollution and absence of oxygen - yet some organisms thrive there) or in the dead zone of Gaza in Palestine or the townships of South Africa or the Stolipinovo ghetto in Bulgaria and the favelas of Brazil and barrios of South America, and so on. It makes beautiful sense to start with the day after.
I did mention, in the first volume of Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, that Apartheid Studies addresses questions about knowledge, specifically questions about the knowledge of harm, oppression, and injustice. How do we speak as if, and in such a way that, what we know is in fact what others know? Particularly, and principally, there is always the to-be-repeated question about how we know, when we hear the word apartheid, if we are talking about the same thing? How, indeed, can we be sure that we speak of the same thing or the same experience?
When HF Verwoerd defines apartheid as a policy of good neighbourliness, what does he mean by “good”? Or by neighbourliness? Who are Verwoerd’s neighbours? What is a neighbour to Verwoerd? How does Verwoerd learn about neighbours at all? How does he see neighbours? Who does he see? What does he see? So, is Verwoerd’s “good” good for Africans? What does it take for a policy to be “good” for Verwoerd? That is, what is good for Verwoerd? How is Verwoerd’s “good” good at all? For whom is Verwoerd’s “good” good? For whom is it neighbourly? How is it neighbourly?
Hence, when we say apartheid, and when we hear “apartheid”, there is a constantly irresolvable problem about how we know. This is not a cognitive or mentalist problem, but one that is forced on us by our experiences of harm, injustice, and oppression. Specifically, this is a problem that has everything to do with the Rate of Oppression, that surcharge that all oppressed people are subject to at different rates. Verwoerd cannot know about apartheid because he can never experience a Rate of Oppression. Whites can indeed oppress each other, as the British showed when massacring the Irish and inventing concentration camps for Boers, and as Hitler showed when expanding this original British practice to the Jews – but so far as I can tell whites cannot subject whites to a Rate of Oppression. That is, the oppression does not scale.
To my mind, this is the major difference between how oppression and harm have been normatively understood and how my work in Apartheid Studies shifts, or at least seeks to shift, the paradigm.
In one real sense, at least, the sign that say “Slegs Blankes/Whites Only” is the beginning of wisdom. When we study evil and harm, we must always control for scale and commutativity.
It is not enough to study oppression. Rather, one must also study the rate at which oppression is experienced by the oppressed. It is not by about the charge of colonialism and racism but, rather, about their surcharge. There is oppression, and then there is the Rate of Oppression.
To glean more about my invitation to the emerging approach of Apartheid Studies and how I frame the notion of the Rate of Oppression, see here and here… and here… and also here.
References.
Mboti, N. (2019). Circuits of Apartheid: A Plea for Apartheid Studies. Glimpse 20,15-70.
Mboti, N. (2023a). Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, Vol. 1. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Mboti, N. (2023b). Introducing Apartheid Studies: A new forensic-inductive philosophy for abolishing harm. Filosofie & Praktijk, 44(1), 58-73.
Mboti, N. (2023c). The Rate of Oppression (ROp): The Apartheid Studies Approach to the Study of Harm, in: Chitando, E. and Mlambo, O. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Africa. London: Palgrave.