The recent outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa heralded the end of the concept of the rainbow nation, according to Neville Alexander.

Speaking at a public debate in Cape Town on Wednesday night, Alexander said that the rainbow metaphor, besides being an optical illusion, placed the emphasis on coexisting colour units at a time when racial classifications needed to be abandoned in the quest to establish a new, non-racial nation.

“South Africa is the one country in the world where, for historical and cultural reasons, it is possible to demonstrate that a raceless society is possible”.

Alexander, a former political prisoner now activist and educationist, was addressing the latest of a series of public debates entitled “Difficult Dialogues” which are intended to prompt discussions by Capetonians on important, if controversial, topics. The initiative is a project of the Economic Justice Initiative and is a partnership with the Cape Argus.

In a wide-ranging address, Alexander was deeply critical of the continuing racial classification of South Africans.

Reporting a minor traffic accident recently, Alexander said he was classified by the police official as a “coloured” without being asked or consulted.

“What on earth has anyone’s race got to do with his or her ability to drive a motor vehicle?”, he asked.

The “ridiculous practice” of recording the supposed race of South Africans “forces us into a racial mould, whether we like it or not”.

This was merely continuing what happened during the colonial-apartheid era and which “preposterously” carries on today.

“I don’t want to be told that I am coloured,” Alexander told about 70 people attending the Difficult Dialogue. “At the most, I am prepared to answer the question ‘what you were classified as under apartheid?’. That is a way of problematising it instead of entrenching the racial stereotype.”

Advances in the social sciences during the latter part of the 20^th Century allowed us to make a series of propositions about race which were now commonly assumed, Alexander said.

Genomic science had shown, for instance, that race is not a valid biological entity at all. Instead, races are constructed by manipulative, powerful forces, usually states.

“Because ordinary citizens are not social scientists and are not aware of the processes by which their identities have been, and are being, constructed, social, including racial, identity does have a primordial significance for them. This is the real reason for the tenacity of these identities”.

Just as racial identities could be created, so they could also be broken down.

“All these social categories are historical and, thus, dynamic. That is to say, they can be deconstructed and refashioned”.

This gave South Africans the opportunity to discard racial stereotypes and categorisation and build something new.

“We can re-imagine ourselves as a people,” he told the audience.

Alexander suggested that other questions might be asked to establish whether or not an individual had been disadvantaged. Income, language and schooling were just as efficient at doing this without falling back on racial identity.

“The still large-scale overlapping of race and class in South Africa guarantees that no disadvantaged black person will fall through the net by virtue of the use of non-racial criteria such as language and income,” he said.

“There are ways of problematising, rather than reinforcing, racial identities”.

Alexander was strongly critical of how the unthinking implementation of affirmative action in South Africa today was also perpetuating these same racial identities, the very ones constructed in the colonial-apartheid era for the purposes of subjugation and disempowerment.

While the underlying objective of affirmative action was sound, it was the unintended consequences of the policy that were so damaging.

“On balance, it is a policy that benefits mainly the rising black middle class and in effect deepens the inherited class inequality in our society.”

Among the victims of poorly applied affirmative action policy were young “whites” born after 1990.

“A major injustice is being done to white youth in South Africa who were born after 1990,” he told the audience.

This group was “not automatically advantaged merely because of their skin colour,” he argued.

“If we genuinely believe that it is possible in some vague manner ‘to level the playing fields’ by means of such measures, we are being ahistorical in the most naïve manner. For, if this were really the case, the descendents of Europe’s feudal nobility, assuming we can still identify them, should still be working at historical redress and making good the inequalities of the past.”

Affirmative action should only be applied to the one or two generations that actually suffered under apartheid, Alexander said, since this is still within the range of contemporary historical memory.

“The rest should be dealt with under the rubric of ‘transformation’, ie the remaking of the entire economy, society and polity”.

In a bid to deracialise the new South Africa, a number of steps could be taken that would assist in this process, Alexander suggested.

These included ensuring that every member of the public service should be able to speak an African language, abandoning the assumption that adding one or two black faces to corporate boards meant that capital was more South African and avoiding the creation of divisive sub-national identities based on “race”.

Alexander was critical of the Bruin Belange-Inisiatief (BBI), saying that the attempt to form a national organisation to promote the interests of a group defined by race was both unconstitutional and “highly dangerous”.

“To define yourself into a minority corner in a situation such as the transition in South Africa is to play with fire in an almost literal sense. There is nothing more dangerous,” he said.

The xenophobic attacks of recent times confirmed Alexander’s view that “we are an all too ordinary country”.

“The notion of South African exceptionalism has been attacked by many scholars and the attacks on so-called foreign Africans have underlined the need for all of us to wake up to the reality that we, too, could all too easily be faced with situations such as those that have tested other African countries such as Katanga (Shaba), Biafra, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mauretania, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Mozambique, Morocco, Uganda, Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire, and Zimbabwe”.

Rather than rely on the inappropriate rainbow metaphor to describe South Africa’s hope for a unified future, the symbol of the great Garieb river might work better, Alexander suggested.

The Garieb flows metaphorically into the ocean of humanity. “Its main tributaries (African, European, Asian and modern ‘American’) flow together to constitute the mainstream culture of South Africa (and) will from time to time and from place to place under different circumstances have more, or less, influence on the whole but they do not disappear altogether.”

“We can be both one and different in dynamic ways. We do not have to box ourselves into racial cages out of which it is impossible to escape and for the preservation of which we are willing to lay down our lives in ethnic and genocidal civil wars.

“Only such a conception of nation building, of culture without borders, will do in the new South Africa.”

The Difficult Dialogues series continues in September with an address by former Education Minister Kader Asmal.

* Dr Adrian Hadland is a director with the Democracy and Governance research programme of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). He writes here in his personal capacity.