MICHAEL MORRIS | Race policy debate tests SA’s political purpose - Business Day

Michael Morris

One useful byproduct of a brand of world politics we are urged to think of as epochal in its seemingly novel emphasis on the business arts of deal-making, finding solutions and generally getting things done, is a question that may seldom before have seemed worth asking: what, actually, is politics for?

Of course, from voters to politicians we all want things done … effective policing and justice, services delivered as required and paid for, taxes fairly collected and prudently spent, easier commerce of ideas and things, rivers kept clean.

But this is what the state is for; politics is for something else. The distinction is pressing in South Africa, where we do want so many solutions in the ordinary sense, but where we also dare not overlook the political task.

This task requires being disabused of the temptation of thinking of the world as anything other than the constantly growing bequest of our receding yesterdays, in which the real job of governments and parliaments, legislators and leaders is taking all of their society with them into a future that cannot be defined by anything other than the ethos and achievements of the time, the point we have reached (never a destination, but only an instant of the journey) in the process of being, in a sense, forever modern (from the Latin modernus, belonging to the present mode [modo, just now]).

South Africa’s continuing tormenting entanglement with race policy reveals a country failing this central question of its politics ― the requirement of being of and meaningful to the present and its always emerging tomorrows.

In a recent speech my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations (IRR) CEO John Endres, noted with surely heroic restraint: “The institute was criticised by the right for insisting on nonracialism under apartheid and criticised by the left for insisting on nonracialism after it. That position is uncomfortable. It is also necessary.” It is a necessity central to our renovation, for the same reason that it is central to what politics is for.

Looking back, we find a sense of this in the vision of a political leader I can’t imagine many today knowing much about. Burgersdorp-born Johannes “Jan” van Aswegen Steytler, a medical doctor, latterly MP for Queenstown and leader of the Progressive Party, made a speech in parliament 66 years ago that resonates still in our almost incomparable world.

A “common patriotism towards South Africa”, he said in January 1960, was only possible “when you give recognition to the individual on his merits and not on the colour of his skin... On this basis,” he concluded, “South Africa … can develop into the country that destiny wants us to develop into.”

Realising this fate ― with what Endres recognises as sometimes uncomfortable but necessary effort ― is what politics is for. Of all the things our modernity insists on ― no return to child labour, or slavery, or a franchise for propertied white men alone, no abandoning the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or pretending that in a predigital age we might regain a better, easier world ― none is more imperative than refusing skin colour as a way of understanding or organising society, or of fixing history’s errors.

This last describes the basic condition of our politics, a condition we can only pretend is not there if we delude ourselves into thinking that some alternative, a better option, once existed in a past we could plausibly breathe new life into. Accepting not only that we can’t but that we shouldn’t try is what politics is for.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-05-11-michael-morris-race-policy-debate-tests-sas-political-purpose/