Reconciliation and red herrings

Sometimes The New York Times‘s reporting on South Africa can be really, really poor.

Take this article on the Day of the Vow celebrations at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.  The fact that a number of die-hard Afrikaners are still staring at a ray of sunlight falling on an empty tomb in the monument, confusing architectural trickery for a Divine sign that the land belongs to them, is conflated by the NYT correspondent Barry Bearak with a much more important finding from a poll conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation that 31 percent of South Africans believe that race relations have not improved since the end of apartheid, and 16 percent think relations are worse now. (One could also look at the glass as half full to point out that about 50 percent said relations had improved.)

The IJR report is rather worrying, but to suggest that the widespread racist attitudes are only to be found among Afrikaners is cliched and flawed. Linking the IJR study with the Day of the Vow story (taken out of proportion in any case) is lazy, and provides a too easy fit with old stereotypes instead of the complex new realities. The most important one, is the persisting economic inequality – the worst in the world – the NYT report refers to only in passing. The impact of  these persisting inequalities – linked to the racial privilege of the past but also to post-apartheid macro-economic policies that have been enriching a few but failed the poor majority – on social identities seemed too challenging and complex an issue for the NYT to engage with. Last year’s outbreak of xenophobic violence across the country, surfacing again recently amid global financial insecurity, suggest that links between economic hardship and racist attitudes should also be considered in a wider context than just domestic identity politics. Yes, of course old-style Afrikaner racism exists, but focusing on the exotic devotees at the Voortrekker monument presents a red herring which will not bring anybody, especially the international readership of the NYT, closer to understanding the real issues.
But if domestic politics and attitudes are under consideration, perhaps a more valid question would be how many people actually thought about things like reconciliation on Wednesday and for how many this was just another day for South Africans to emigrate internally, withdrawing behind their security fences (as the satirical website Hayibo.com observed in jest), with outreach and reconciliation the last thing on their minds.

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