MICHAEL MORRIS: Schools are a nonracialism scapegoat for failure to create better life for all - Business Day

Michael Morris

Just more than 30 years ago, historian Colin Bundy asked a pointed question that would likely have puzzled many South Africans at the time, and is likely still to do so now.

It’s a stark question that cuts to the heart of what SA hoped for in 1994, and of how far short of the hopes of those heady days it continues to fall.

Meaningfully enough, Bundy’s question appears in the cover story of a 1993 edition of the magazine Work in Progress, headlined: “The New SA Identity Crisis, Who says it don’t matter if you’re black or white?”

Addressing the “dangers” of what he called “partial transformation” and the risk of merely perpetuating “the experiential conditions that make a mockery of nonracialism”, Bundy’s question was: “We need to ask ourselves: ‘As long as Khayelitsha or Alexandra exist, how do we achieve nonracialism?’”

It ought to be remarkable, in 2024, that, broadly speaking, Khayelitsha and Alexandra remain what they were when Bundy posed that question 31 years ago — places for which the standard terminology, “black township”, has not changed in three decades. And why should it have? These places remain faithful more than just to the anachronistic semantics of a receding past but actually to the design of that loathsome history.

Why they remain faithful to the strictures of the — we thought long-dead — Group Areas Act is the real question that too few seem to be bothered to ask.

One among this category appears to be the chair of the select committee on education, sciences & the creative industries, newly arrived ANC member of the National Council of Provinces Makhi Feni.

Contorted views

Feni issued a statement on November 4 on the ongoing saga involving Pretoria High School for Girls and the determined efforts of the Gauteng education department, as one official put it earlier this year, to deal with “[issues] of discrimination and issues of racism ... whether there is tangible evidence or not”.
 
The particulars of this case are not what I wish to address. What did strike me was the evidence of Feni’s extraordinarily contorted view of his own society.

He is quoted as saying the department’s supposedly damning probe gives “all [former] white schools an opportunity to reflect on how they are integrating black SA learners into what they perceive to be their spaces”.

Later, he contrasts “[the conservatism of] outdated race politics” with ideal conditions in which “our children live, work, and play together with no regard whatsoever to race and background”. Feni appears to misperceive the truth not only that the white interests he implicitly fingers have probably been far more progressive — in the best sense — over the past 30 years than his ruling establishment has come near to being, but that, given its relative insignificance, frankly, the power of whatever collective interest Feni sees in “all [former] white schools” is minuscule when set against the capacity of the state he now represents.

The real tragedy is that the “outdated race politics” of this mighty and misdirected state have helped deliver circumstances in which, if the best schools and institutions had not made the effort, only shockingly limited change would have been achieved.

When I last wrote about Bundy’s telling question — in my column of January 26 2020 — I concluded that “in the absence of a framework really capable of spreading benefits, the experiential conditions that define the life of millions remains a mockery of nonracialism”.

Scapegoating schools is a pathetic deceit.

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

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-11-11-michael-morris-schools-are-a-nonracialism-scapegoat-for-failure-to-create-better-life-for-all/