MICHAEL MORRIS: History offers lessons in redefining political evolution - Business Day

Michael Morris

In its most obviously racist manifestation, pessimism about SA’s longed-for and patchily imagined turnaround reflects only narrow-mindedness that we are not obliged to take seriously.

But beyond the fears of the dimwit hostages of doom, there remains widespread disbelief in a better future, probably born of exhaustion more than anything else. There’s no comfort in recognising that it is an unprejudiced – nonracial – condition, as it risks robbing South Africans of the confidence of acknowledging that most of the people they live and work among every day are like them and want the same things.

Ironically, our history offers redemptive lessons.

Evidence of this emerged in a webinar last week on a quartet of draft laws the SA Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has written to illuminate the path away from the dusk of despair towards a “freer, fairer and more prosperous” future.

As colleagues Makone Maja, Gabriel Crouse and Hermann Pretorius went into the details of the No More Race Laws Bill, Right To Own Bill, Value For Money Bill, and Freedom From Poverty Bill, we were taken back to a different time when Pretorius parenthetically mentioned the findings of an opinion poll he’d stumbled on in the 1988 edition of the IRR’s famed annual SA Survey.

The poll, in March 1987, found that “the proportion of white South Africans who supported the (Group Areas Act) had declined from 35% to 27% since 1982” (and support for the law was true of only 22% of the ruling National Party).

Proof that “we can redefine our politics”, Pretorius suggested, was a history that showed “we are a country where the moderate pragmatism of the people has been the baseline of any hope we have had in our troubled history”.

This brought to mind the late John Kane-Berman’s lifelong journeying towards that elusive destination of understanding how society remakes itself and his candour in chronicling his travels. In my column of August 7 2022 (Reflections on the life and legacy of John Kane-Berman), I recalled of the former CEO of the IRR that his “blend of intellectual humility and curiosity” meant he could “see all the more clearly the primacy of the individual in society, the common person who thinks and acts, and from time to time experiences a change of heart”.

Having once argued that liberals “who were suggesting that apartheid was crumbling were clutching at straws”, he changed his mind, perceiving that all of society was steadily abandoning it

His lesson, I felt, was the importance of paying attention “to people, ordinary people — the beating heart of liberalism — and … the seeming commonplaces that are the sum of their small daily choices, for that is where history is made, and where the future becomes visible”.

Which brings us back to 1987.

It was a dreadful time. Most will have forgotten the limpet mines (nine explosions listed by Wikipedia that year), the grenade attacks (22 in 1987), the deaths and civil conflict.

In the first days of January alone, there were two bomb blasts in central Johannesburg and police raided newspapers to seize documents relating to ads calling for the ANC’s unbanning.

There were other things, of course. The milestone Dakar conference in July between Afrikaner intellectuals and the banned ANC was one. Perhaps one could mention Zithulele Sinqe’s second national title win in the men’s marathon in Stellenbosch in May, clocking 2:10:51.

But who could doubt the import, amid the turmoil and fear, of that steady abandonment of one of the cornerstones of apartheid? No less is possible today.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2025-11-17-michael-morris-history-offers-lessons-in-redefining-political-evolution/