Time to reinstate ideal of non-racism

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THIS week, 156 years ago, Indians were brought to South Africa to work in the sugar cane fields. They were soon joined by “passenger Indians” who came to trade.

The indentured Indians were not the first brought to South Africa. A significant number had been brought to the Cape colony as slaves. Their descendants became part of the groups classified as white and coloured under apartheid.

The indentured Indians and the merchants who followed were kept a separate “race group” by apartheid social engineering and so developed a particular Indian identity.

It is their experiences and achievements which have been celebrated in various events and publications marking the anniversary of their arrival.

As photographer and historian Omar Badsha observed, these attempts at memorialisation are taking very different trajectories.

It has been suggested that in common with other minorities, many Indians responded to the perceived or potential ethnic chauvinism in South Africa by turning away from the nation towards a narrower conception of ethnic and religious identity.

There is truth in this, but we should remember the rainbow nation ideal of the (Nelson) Mandela presidency was of a multiracial rather than a non-racial society.

The problem was that we embraced a culture of multiracialism rather than non-racism. Experiments in popular non-racism happened in the Black Consciousness and trade union movements, but not much attention was paid to this.

The tradition of non-racism has been largely abandoned in postapartheid South Africa. It has even, to a degree, been written out of history.

Young Indian students know more about the ethnic politics of the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses than about the non-racism of the Black Consciousness and trade union movements. It is essential that we recover this memory and celebrate those who committed their lives to it.

Abandoning the tradition of non-racism has led to a situation where it is assumed Indians are a homogeneous group whose support can be delivered by self-proclaimed elite leaders. This is nonsense.

The Indian community is deeply divided by class, with rich and poor living in different worlds. Poor Indians who live in shacks have almost nothing in common with rich Indians in mansions.

Attempts to portray Indians as uniformly committed to the antiapartheid struggle are deliberately dishonest. As in all communities, there was heroic resistance, outright collaboration and much apathy.

There has long been a taboo on openly admitting the prevalence of anti-African racism within the Indian community. When African people raise this issue, Indian intellectuals and self-appointed community leaders rush in to shut the debate down. But it is a debate that needs to be had. If we don’t discuss Indian racism, we can’t deal with it.

There are many Indians who courageously fought apartheid racism, but there are also many who seem to think racism is a white disease and, unthinkingly, engage in shockingly racist behaviour towards African people daily.

Even within the community there is, in some quarters, prejudice against darker-skinned Indians by some of the lighter-skinned. Indian racism is not always a question of nationalism.

The non-racism cultivated in the Black Consciousness and trade union movements still exists, of course, in the commitment, lives and work of many individuals, and in some social movement politics. But the only thing that really seems to bind South Africans these days is consumerism and the worship of bling.

For the majority, who are not rich, the culture of bling only compounds their sense of marginality and even desperation.

The fact that so many young people are desperate is a threat to nationbuilding. There is a grave risk this desperation can be exploited.

The turn to politics of racial and ethnic chauvinism leaves no space for the children of the Indian working class and the poor. No doubt the same is true for coloured and white youths. For those of us who remain committed to non-racism, it is time to return to the trenches of struggle.

• Buccus is a senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the UKZN School of Social Sciences and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.