“Invoking Helen Suzman is not an argument; it is simply a quote thrown in for rhetorical effect, and one that needs to be justified, quite independent of the fact that she uttered it. It is not an agrument, just a claim – if anything, it detracts from her (historic) stature – unless you, on her behalf, can tell us why the claim sticks. I’m not sure why you are replacing argument with appeal to an authority suddenly?”
Eusebius Mackaiser and I had a bit of a debate last week over his post Remembering apartheid with fondness. This post of mine was going to be a final comment on his post, but his blogging platform does not allow for comments over 4000 characters. So I’ve decided to paste it here. So if you want the context please read his comment and the full debate there first.
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Eusebius, you ask me to say why Suzman’s claim – that the Nationalists respected parliamentary democracy more than is currently the case – sticks, but then you go on to partly do this job for me by saying:
“There is indeed poor to zero debate in parliament. And, indeed, there are reasons to be concerned.”
But then you continue:
“NONE OF THESE unpleasant truths about our developing democracy entail that the apartheid system had a greater degree of parliamentary democracy. That is a shockingly callous jump in logic, given that the racially exclusive nature of the apartheid system means that it is an inherently undemocratic system, and so its parliament fails to qualify as a chamber of whom the question, ‘how democratic are thee?’ could arise.”
First I think its important to repeat what I did say:
“In some limited but significant respects (like the inner workings of parliament), apartheid SA were more democratic, than South Africa today, (particularly in the Mbeki era).”
And I also later tried to broaden the terms of the debate with reference to China by saying -
“If given a choice between a responsive undemocratic state where the lives of the majority are trending for the better in the metrics that matter (life expectancy, poverty reduction) and an unresponsive and dysfunctional democracy – I’d choose the former.”
I did not say apartheid system had greater parliamentary democracy than the new SA, I did say that the apartheid parliament was more democratic in significant respects in practise. And yes, we are playing with semantics.
Why?
It is because the stakes are high and words like callous are being thrown around. Moral outrage has to follow a cold calculated investigation and should not be invoked deus ex machina style to win arguments.
So Eusebius to get back to your question, it’s clear that lack of debate is clearly not enough for you when you say I have the onus to prove that Suzman’s claims sticks. Even if one result of this lack of debate in our parliament meant government inaction on issues such as Aids – which I did mention and you chose to ignore.
And unfortunately, in trying to find examples that will explain my ‘leap in logic’ I am going to appeal to authority, again. But I’ll be careful to back it up with more arguments this time.
Ken Owen recently wrote in relations to the Arms Deal:
“Think back to the great Information Scandal. Muldergate. A puny affair in both moral and monetary terms compared with the arms deal, but it brought down the Vorster government. John Vorster, he of the 90-day and 180-day detention laws, the creator of BOSS and the condoner of torture, the most feared man of his time, was kicked upstairs into a ceremonial presidency while his two cohorts, Connie Mulder and Eschel Rhoodie, were dismissed into obscurity. There was justice and closure in those evil times.”
Compare this to what happened during the Arms deal, Scopa was emaciated, the office of Speaker soiled to squash investigations, and when it looked like he may take up the case, the public protector Selby Baqwa, was blackmailed. He backed off.
Feinstein less we forget, was ostracised, warned off and got death threats. Has there been an inquiry into the arms deal yet?
In the way you debate it seems to me that you define democracy as a very narrow concept that merely exists by virtue of a country having a one person one vote system in its constitution, perhaps with the added addendum that it should have regular elections. This makes its parliament democratic apparently. Zimbabwe is a democracy by this definition.
I don’t have to tell you that democracy is a complex concept and there’s been reams written about what true democracy should be. As you are no doubt are aware, some would say that the term includes concepts like freedom, fraternity or ubuntu, social justice, equality, minority rights, accountability and the rule of law. Some of these, like freedom and equality, can be in conflict. No wonder democracy is contested.
But what is sure is that democracy as one person one vote is hollow without these related concepts. And one of them stands out for me. Ubuntu or fraternity, which I’d also like to call the existence of social capital. Why do I hold it higher than the others? Because with it, almost all else follows.
But I digress. To further justify my appeal to Suzman I am going to go even wider than her claim. It’s not just in parliament where democracy is lacking in SA. (Although it is surely where the lack of democracy is boiling over and seeping into the body politic.) There are undemocratic tendencies out of parliament as well.
For example – I am sure you are aware of recent things done to Zimbabweans, by police, against the law, and in spite of court orders to the contrary?
“A number of documented persons were arrested, along with persons who had either received an appointment to lodge their asylum claims at the Department of Home Affairs, or were in the process of lodging these claims,” he said. “Home Affairs failed to issue any documentation to these persons indicating their immigration status in the country.”
The Johannesburg Refugee Reception Office remains closed, despite several High Court orders mandating its reopening, forcing all asylum seekers to queue for weeks at the nearest office, which is about 40km away in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria.”
We can add these to reports of prostitutes and citizens being raped by police, and general police corruption.
And what about the Courts?
When the Bloemfontein court of appeal found for a claimant and against the government, Judge John Hlophe found otherwise in the Cape High Court. Not only was it absurd, the appeal court is the ranking legal body, it was outrageously disrespectful of the legal system. To add insult to injury, the government refused to present their case before the appeal court.
Said the Constitutional Court in its final judgment handed down later:
“…courts are entitled to expect assistance and not obstruction from litigants in the discharge of their difficult duties. What happened in the present case not only failed to meet this requirement, but also evinced a deplorable lack of respect for the SCA, which is the highest court in this country in respect of all matters other than constitutional matters.”
You might hold up the Constitutional Court’s intervention as proof of the systemic strength of our democracy. I do. But shortly after this judgment the Mbeki ANC released this statement, a thinly veiled threat:
“The reality can no longer be avoided that many within our judiciary do not see themselves as being part of these masses, accountable to them, and inspired by their hopes, dreams and value systems. If this persists for too long, it will inevitably result in popular antagonism towards the judiciary and our courts, with serious and negative consequences for our democratic system as a whole.”
It remains to be seen whether our legal system has successfully withstood recent similar assaults to its integrity by way of the Zuma Mbebi succession battle, or by John Hlophe.
The apartheid state was a different beast.
It took it’s own laws very seriously. It tended to inact draconian laws like detention without trial, the current government just ignores the law when it suits them, even when it means detention without trial.
At the Helen Suzman memorial lecture Dr. Mamphela Ramphela stated:
“What would we say about our silences in the face of “group morals” trumping ethics in public policy and practice? HIV/AIDS denialism; Education under-performance; and corruption in high places? What about our inaction in the face of outrageous statements by young political leaders? Shoot to kill University of Free State Prof. Jonathan Jansen! Professor Kader Asmal must just die!
We are at a crossroads as a society. We need to make a second transition to strengthen the institutions of our democracy to enlarge the political space for more citizens to make ethical choices. We need to identify constraints that may limit this space. We should not shy away from what may look like holy cows, including our constitution.
…
Ours is a great country but we owe it to the memory of Helen Suzman to create a vibrant polity driven not by group think, but by ethics. The integrity that marked Helen Suzman’s political career is in serious need of revival and strengthening. That is the least she would expect of us.”
I disagree with Dr Rhampela. I think what is lacking in South Africa is a civic mindedness, not laws, not systems. Do we think of ourselves as citizens of a society?
The state seems to have very little social capital. The kind of stuff that makes us stop at red lights because its the right thing to do for society and not because it is the law. The kind of thing that makes ministers not buy expensive cars. You can’t legislate ubuntu. It is a state of mind.
If society depended only on rules and policing for it to function in a democratic fashion we would need a police state and to encodify very many things we now consider moral and ethical behaviour as laws.
WITHIN THE NARROW PAROCHIAL AND PERVERTED world the Nats inhabited their was loads of the stuff called social capital. Which had all kinds of unexpected consequences – See what Gavin Evans says in this regard, how the rule of law in apartheid SA opened democratic space for the ECC to operate within to undermine the state.
See Vorster loosing power. See the Nats not engage the Cubans in the fourth phase of Cuito because they thought white voters won’t accept more body bags. See Swapo send 500 of their men to certain deaths, AFTER the first democratic elections in Namibia which Swapo had won. In one word this can be explained as social capital of the Afrikaner Nationalists at work.
The very concept of apartheid was part a moral apology to a lack of having a one person one vote system in South Africa. Blacks were not black South Africans, they were not citizens. Accepting that they were citizens would have only one consequence to the Nationalist mind. One person one vote. Within their moral universe apartheid was an inoculation against accusations of being undemocratic.
Afrikaner culture in particular has a history of being democratic. If you look at the heated debates in the Transvaal parlaiment between those that advocated war with Britain and the likes of General de la Rey. If you look at the Saamwerk and Saambou organisations created to lift Afrikaners out of poverty. If you look at Afrikaner schools, who were (in the past) never private, mostly mixed male and female and egalitarian in the sense that they contained young Afrikaners from all sides of the tracks.
Now you may immediately counter that this existence of social capital among Afrikaners is morally meaningless because at the same time most of them embraced apartheid, that their development was based on the exploitation of black South Africans. I agree that much of white and Afrikaner advancement was based on exploitation. And on top of that the system did uncalculated psychological damage. What is not so clear cut is the question if it was solely at the expense of black South Africans.
It is besides the point I want to make but to shortly digress, I would argue that considering the history and context of particularly Afrikaner South Africa at the time facile moral condemnation is not possible. Accepting one person one vote probably means the death of Afrikaans and carries with it the possible death of democracy not only in the narrow confines of white society but for the whole country.
But Afrikaners are guilty of humiliating and debasing black South Africans, and I wish we had a credible leader, if only to apologise publicly with real sincerity as German Chancellor Willie Brant did to the Poles.
But that Afrikaners have guilt or not was not the point I was trying to make.
The essence of democracy
For me the existence of social capital is the essence of a sound democracy. I am going to do a dangerous thing and quote from Wikipedia:
In “Social Capital and Development: The Coming Agenda”, Francis Fukuyama points out that there isn’t an agreed definition of social capital, so he explains it as “shared norms or values that promote social cooperation, instantiated in actual social relationships” (Fukuyama, 27), and uses this definition throughout this paper. He argues that social capital is a necessary precondition for successful development, but a strong rule of law and basic political institutions are necessary to build social capital. He believes that a strong social capital is necessary for a strong democracy and strong economic growth.
Update – I found a link to the original Fukuyama paper.
The Chinese state has social capital even without one person one vote system.
We have zero ubuntu and South Africa lives in a Uber-Thatherite world where there seems to be no such thing as society. Everybody for themself.
What does give me hope is the protests in the townships. They give meaning to our democracy. Organisations like Abahlali baseMjondolo give me hope. Polokwane gives me hope.
But there are many countries that are nominal democracies that does not inspire this kind of hope. You are in danger of fetishizing our democratic system while it’s democratic legacy is highly suspect, and it’s democratic future uncertain.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 daniel.waweru
// Dec 12, 2009 at 3:53 am
Dude, redefining democracy as social capital –the social capital thingy — is a red herring. Even were it true that the new SA has less social capital than the last, some further argument would be needed to show that the difference in social capital justifies apartheid. And, basically, Charles Manning was much better at defending apartheid by appeal to white solidarity. And since you’re defending apartheid, it makes sense to take on board what its most accomplished defenders have to say.
Incidentally, there’s a bunch of similar justifications of the slave-holding South; I thought you might enjoy this.
2 Kameraad Mhambi
// Dec 12, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Firstly Daniel welcome back, it’s been a while. Secondly, your comment is just plain silly, you can do better than that.
1. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your logic, if I criticised Stalinist Russia, it means I want the return of the Tsars and all that came with them?
2. Neither you or Eusebius takes me on, on the facts or even how to interpret them – you revert to broad brush strokes of moral condemnation to crowd out debate, because I suspect you know deeper scrutiny would be deeply embarrassing.
3. It’s precisely the bogeyman ‘apartheid’ which is held up to deflect criticism of the current regime. It is therefore a legitimate endeavor to examine the rhetoric of the new SA against ‘apartheid’, to break through the smoke and mirrors.
4. Which apartheid do I want back? Colonial apartheid, grand apartheid and the bantustans, petty apartheid like separate toilets? A qualified vote? Bantu education? Human rights abuses and forced removals? A volkstaat? Please be more specific? If you can’t bother it shows your not making a serious point but just seeking to obfuscate.
5. I argued against grand and petty apartheid and for one person one vote at school, at university too, I was called a traitor of my people, I received death threats, got assaulted once, and received death threats again when I worked for the TRC. I did so even though I knew it would be the end of the dream of an Afrikaner homeland, and probably the beginning end of Afrikaans. I did it because I thought apartheid was unjust. I still do.
6. I never once even remotely said that “the difference in social capital justifies apartheid”.
3 daniel.waweru
// Dec 18, 2009 at 10:09 am
No. Have you some evidence for this claim?
In any case, if you criticized the Stalinist USSR on the ground that it wasn’t an absolute monarchy, then one might reasonably suspect that you were, in fact, looking forward to the restoration of the Tsar.
Eusebius pointed out that your choosing to class the apartheid regime as a democracy – a ‘democracy’ in which the vast majority of the population was deliberately prohibited from participation; indeed, in which it was argued that black folks were incapable of basic self-rule – is a straightforward absurdity.
There’s no reasonable interpretation of the word democracy on which apartheid South Africa was more democratic than its successor; the facts foreclose that option. This was pointed out to you. You can’t complain that you haven’t been engaged with.
Some connection between the first and the second sentences – some reason other than your say-so – wouldn’t be superfluous. Regardless, even were you able to make the connection, the relevance of this piece of argument would remain unobvious: since you were defending apartheid; and since defending apartheid and examining the rhetoric of the new SA are distinct, it’s unclear what difference defending your right to critically examine the rhetoric of the new SA makes to the viability of the defence of apartheid.
Who knows? You took good care not to specify which form of apartheid had greater social capital than SA’s present; you were happy to express a preference for the genus apartheid. Since you left your specific preference indeterminate, all that can be said with confidence is that you prefer some sort of apartheid or the other.
This isn’t consistent with your claim – here and at Eusebius’ – that the apartheid regime had greater social capital than the post-apartheid. Given your further argument that social capital is necessary for sound democracy, and that post-apartheid SA lacks social capital – at least to the extent that apartheid SA possessed it – it follows that apartheid-era SA was a democracy, while its post-apartheid successor isn’t.
There’s a slightly weaker line you seem to push sometimes: that post-apartheid SA has less social capital than apartheid SA, in which case the argument comes to the claim that apartheid-era SA was more democratic. There’s some support for this from your additional claim that the apartheid era government followed its own laws, so – we’re invited to accept – apartheid SA was more democratic.
The obvious consequence of these thoughts is that apartheid SA was a morally superior regime. Democracy is pretty clearly a value of some importance. The point of apartheid was arbitrarily to deny non-white folks the right to rule themselves; that right appears to be central to democracy. The heart of the case against apartheid was that its denial of the non-white capacity for self-rule was both false and unjust; post-apartheid democracy was supposed to be the vindication of that claim. Necessarily, therefore, it was both democratic and more democratic than apartheid. Your view is that it isn’t – that, actually, the defenders of what was called democracy under apartheid had the better case. It’s not hard to see why you’re going to be taken to be a defender of apartheid.
This followed more or less directly from the context at Eusebius’. There was some tricky business over whether nostalgia about apartheid was justified. Your view is that it is: that, on reflection, those who prefer apartheid to its successor are reasonable. The hard part is backing up this claim. As far as I can tell, you chose to make the argument on the ground that apartheid was more democratic because it possessed greater social capital (and you made the beginnings of an argument that the apartheid state was more likely to obey its own laws). The obvious consequence is that the nostalgia over apartheid was justified because apartheid was more democratic; it was more democratic because it had greater social capital.
(You might have chosen to argue that some aspects of life under apartheid were better than they are now. For some reason, you chose to argue that apartheid was better than things are now.)
4 Kameraad Mhambi
// Dec 19, 2009 at 11:53 pm
“Eusebius pointed out that your choosing to class the apartheid regime as a democracy – a ‘democracy’ ”
Please do point out where I said the apartheid regime was a democracy?
I will repeat what I did say.
“In some limited but significant respects (like the inner workings of parliament), apartheid SA were more democratic, than South Africa today, (particularly in the Mbeki era).”
Here is an interesting philosophical point for you to ponder in respect to your statement (which – by the way – is an incorrect summary of what I did say).
“You might have chosen to argue that some aspects of life under apartheid were better than they are now. For some reason, you chose to argue that apartheid was better than things are now.”
If – heaven forbid – it turns out that ‘democracies” legacy in South Africa is negative.
And by that I mean, measurable things – whether inequality has risen, life expectancy has fallen, infant mortality is up and even subjective opinion, that people say it’s negative.
Then my question to you is, should we mention it? Should we talk about it? And if we say it, does it mean we want apartheid back?
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