While not exhaustive, the following points are relevant.
France has considerable difficulty tolerating the wearing of head scarves and crucifixes in schools. The reasons go back to the French Revolution and the Code Napoleon, with their vision of a single French citizenship, undivided by religious affiliation. We have much less of a problem. ‘Ag,’ South Africans say, ‘they are like that’ and accommodate differences. And, while there remains considerable homophobia in South Africa, gay people have achieved a new recognition, and have emerged publicly as a new tribe, as it were, with its own customs, lifestyles and rituals.
This has been noted in comparative international studies of nationalism. In making the transition between roles, people find their sense of self under pressure and have to negotiate changes in it. A century ago, South Africans were generally very poorly educated. Growth in the middle class has necessitated extension of education and each successive generation has gone further than its predecessor. Unlike societies with a more stable class structure, most South African university students have parents who had not been to university. When these changes intersect with group identities, the issues become even more pressing. Black consciousness, for instance, emerged at a time when black university enrolments started growing strongly. Likewise, old middle classes may suffer disorientation when dealing with the new. Of course, many people negotiate new identities quite easily and are relatively uninterested in identity politics.
Part of the process of mobilizing Afrikaner nationalism was the withdrawal of Afrikaners from common civil society associations into specifically Afrikaans organizations, resulting in encapsulation into a managed social base. And the civil society mobilization around the political transition was also managed politically, with effects lasting into the present. The ability to crosscut ethnic cleavages by associational membership organised around interests is reduced, and with it a sense of common citizenship.
From time to time, new entrepreneurs may peel off from existing movements and seek to mobilize constituencies of their own. This happened to Afrikaner nationalism from the late 1960s and it has been a feature of recent years as well. Two outcomes are possible: extremists are marginalized by peeling off, leaving a more moderate rump. Or the radicals may displace the rump or exert a radicalizing influence on it.
Mobilization develops narratives of what ‘they’ did to ‘us’. In the political space, these narratives oversimplify processes and outcomes, exaggerate agency and neglect the relevant counterfactual. What would South Africa have looked like today if there had never been colonialism? The greater the populism, the greater the distortions.
The substantial diminution of the inequality of income between ‘races’ between 1970 and the present moderates identity politics, as have changes in patterns of employment, reduction of residential segregation and a more continuous spectrum of business activity.
As it became clearer that apartheid was doomed, old elites detached themselves from it in order to influence the shape of the new. By the time that serious political negotiation had started, elite polarization had diminished to the point that the negotiation could succeed. Quite where we are at the moment is more difficult to read. Should fault lines open up over the most carefully negotiated parts of the constitution, elite polarization is a serious risk.
These include:
Just because identity politics did not tear the country apart in the last great political crisis, we cannot be sure that it will not do so in the next one.
[1] See for instance, Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Charles Simkins
Senior Researcher
charles@hsf.org.za