South Africa is a 'less equal place' now than under apartheid, author says
January 14, 2015 · 3:15 PM EST | Jeb Sharp | PRI's The World
JS: Is South Africa a more equal place (now)?
KN: No it isn’t. It’s a less equal place. You’ve seen huge eruptions of inequality develop where education is playing a huge role in determining where people end up in the occupational sphere. Of course, South Africa is not unusual in that. What has happened is South Africa has now joined the rest of the developed world in seeing this galloping inequality. But once upon a time, because of apartheid, race would have been the defining line. Now class is an incredibly important dividing line. It’s not that race doesn’t matter. It has everything to do with whether you’re likely to be in a good school and learn English and have opportunities for the kind of cultural capital that will give you a leg up in the labor market. But those divisions are now erupting within racial groups. So you’ll have two people side by side who in the past would be condemned to the same terrible life, and now their pathways are diverging, and that in turn has huge implications for their confidence in democracy. Because when poor blacks see what has happened among the affluent, who are turning their backs on what needs to happen for the poorest of poor, they feel the promise of democracy has been vastly diluted, if not a failure.
 |
| Trader Nono Dawane greets customers at her shop selling cigarettes and cold drinks, in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township. Credit: Mike Hutchings/Reuters |
“I wanted to tell the story of South Africa in its post-apartheid years through the eyes of the rising generation, for whom the struggle years are childhood memories,” says Katherine Newman. “It’s not a story we know very well. We get caught up in the story of Nelson Mandela and the story of the struggle itself, but South Africa’s been a democracy for 20 years and we wanted to do a deep inquiry about where the country had come to 20 years after the birth of democracy and the first free election.”
Here is an edited version of a Q&A in December I did with Newman, who also spoke Wednesday on air with Marco Werman of PRI's The World.
JS: Is South Africa a more equal place (now)?
KN: No it isn’t. It’s a less equal place. You’ve seen huge eruptions of inequality develop where education is playing a huge role in determining where people end up in the occupational sphere. Of course, South Africa is not unusual in that. What has happened is South Africa has now joined the rest of the developed world in seeing this galloping inequality. But once upon a time, because of apartheid, race would have been the defining line. Now class is an incredibly important dividing line. It’s not that race doesn’t matter. It has everything to do with whether you’re likely to be in a good school and learn English and have opportunities for the kind of cultural capital that will give you a leg up in the labor market. But those divisions are now erupting within racial groups. So you’ll have two people side by side who in the past would be condemned to the same terrible life, and now their pathways are diverging, and that in turn has huge implications for their confidence in democracy. Because when poor blacks see what has happened among the affluent, who are turning their backs on what needs to happen for the poorest of poor, they feel the promise of democracy has been vastly diluted, if not a failure.
JS: How did you approach the book?
KN: I looked for people who are now in their early 30s, so they were children when apartheid ended, who would illustrate the important finding that race is no longer the only dividing line in South Africa. In many ways, class — meaning educational background, family background — plays a tremendous role in dictating the future life chances of people in South Africa. There has been, for example, a rising group of black Africans in South Africa who’ve done quite well and are no longer the oppressed poor. They are middle class and even upper middle class in South Africa and they represent a new story. But the other side of that equation is a massive, massive, enormous population of poor black Africans, so the division within race, by class, is now an extremely prominent feature of growing inequality by income in South Africa. I wanted to be able to tell the story of democracy through lenses that would reflect that underlying dichotomy.
[..]
JS: And the white man you profile, “Brandon,” is struggling to compete?
He is, because he didn’t do well in school. Education was not his strength. And in fact, when you were white in the apartheid years, you didn’t have to do well in education. Brandon’s father had been a bank manager. He barely had a high school education. But because whites had a lock on the only really valuable occupations, you didn’t need to apply yourself to school. You go down one generation to Brandon’s generation and there is no way he could have replicated his father’s success. His father lost his job also. Both of them have ended up in blue collar occupations that are kind of iffy.
One thing many Americans may not realize — I didn’t realize it, either — is that the race laws in South Africa, especially the so-called color bar in the world of employment, were built primarily to protect poor whites from competition. There were a lot of poor whites in South Africa. The Afrikaans population was not well-educated. The apartheid state ensured they wouldn’t be losers. But once apartheid was lifted, all that human capital produced through education started to make a difference. So Brandon, who was an indifferent student and thought he’d have a pathway paved before him because his father had a pathway, lost that pathway when whites lost the lock on those occupations. Now, it’s really what can you do in the white collar world and without an education. The answer is you can’t do much.
» » » » [Excerpts: PRI's The World | We Miss Apartheid]
No comments:
Post a Comment