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Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published
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Africa: Racism Conference, 2
Africa: Racism Conference, 2
Date distributed (ymd): 010731
Document reposted by APIC
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information service
provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa Policy
Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American Committee on
Africa). Find more information for action for Africa at
http://www.africapolicy.org
#############################################################
NOTE TO READERS:
The Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List will take a vacation
break during the month of August. Postings will resume the first
week of September.
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +economy/development+ +political/rights+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
This posting contains an article, written by Dennis Brutus and Ben
Cashdan for Znet (http://zmag.org), and originally reposted in BRCNEWS
(see contact info at end of article) on next month's World
Conference against Racism. The article relates issues of inequality
inside South Africa and globally. A related posting today contains
several other documents related to the conference. For additional
background and links see
http://www.africafocus.org/docs01/wcar0101.php,
http://www.africafocus.org/docs00/wcar0010.php, and
http://www.africapolicy.org/action/other.htm#racism
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ZNet Commentary
http://zmag.org/zsustainers/zdaily/2001-07/11brutus.htm
July 11, 2001
World Conference Against Racism:
South Africa Between a Rock and a Hard Place
By Dennis Brutus <[email protected]> and Ben Cashdan
<[email protected]>
If you were planning a holiday in South Africa's east-coast resort
of Durban before the warm winter season is over, you'd be well
advised to steer clear of the city during the last few days of
August and the first week in September.
Unless that is, you are a government official, a UN bureaucrat, an
academic or a journalist with a burning desire to discuss racism,
xenophobia and related forms of intolerance. If you are one of the
latter, you probably already have your hotel room booked.
If you are one of thousands of delegates coming for the official
inter-governmental World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) you may
well be booked into the Royal Hotel, with its splendid
colonial-style accommodation. If you are a lowly NGO worker, you
will most likely have to make do with the spartan Holiday Inn
Garden Court.
Either way your programme will be very full, as you ponder the
fight against racism in Durban's world class International
Convention Centre (ICC), conveniently located opposite the Hilton
Hotel and a stone's throw away from the beachfront, rubbing
shoulders with Presidents, Prime Ministers and luminaries such as
Kofi Annan, Thabo Mbeki, Mary Robinson, Manning Marable and Harry
Belafonte.
During your stay in Durban you may take a stroll along Marine
Parade, the beachfront promenade, to be confronted by a stream of
Zulu-speaking hawkers (South African slang for informal street
vendors) eking out an existence or Durban's incongruous rickshaw
drivers desperately competing to pull you along in decorated
two-wheeled chariots. As long as you stick to the official
conference transport you won't be bothered too much by the beggars,
pickpockets and prostitutes.
It's highly unlikely that you'll follow any of these unfortunate
folk back to their homes in the townships of Chatsworth, Cato Manor
or Umlazi where unemployment is up above 50% since the collapse
over the past few years of the textile industry and other globally
'uncompetitive' sectors. As South Africa has implemented WTO tariff
reductions, these jobs have moved to East Asian sweatshops where
wages are even lower than in Africa.
You will almost certainly not see the desperate living conditions
of South Africa's poorest Indian community in the council flats in
Chatsworth's Unit 3, known owing to its poverty as 'Bangladesh'.
Last year Bangladesh hit the headlines when ANC-led Durban Metro
Council evicted several families from their council flats for
failing to keep up with their rents. The council is determined to
ensure that rents are up to date in preparation for privatisation
of housing. The community resisted the evictions, with Indian
grandmothers in saris defending the homes of their Zulu neighbours
from the municipal police, who resorted to tear gas and rubber
bullets.
Thirty years ago these families were evicted by the apartheid
government for being too dark in complexion. The ANC is now
evicting the same families for being poor. Mandela's friend and
biographer Professor Fatima Meer labelled the council's actions
"fascist brutality".
You also won't have time to visit the tiny and leaky matchbox
housing, constructed by the ANC government under its reconstruction
and development programme (RDP) into which some of the destitute
are being relocated along the Higginson Highway, far from jobs and
services. You'll also miss the misery of the shackland that is Cato
Manor. With your busy conference schedule you definitely won't have
time to take an hour's drive north along the N3 highway to
Hammarsdale, a former KwaZulu homeland 'growth point', its
factories subsidised by the apartheid government to keep black
people in the banthustans. Now the jobs are gone and the residents
of Mpumalanga township just outside Hammarsdale are literally
starving. No-one is quite sure whether the twenty bodies in the
morgue each weekend are victims of poverty, AIDS, cholera or some
combination. In Mpumalanga, former ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party
(IFP) activists, once avowed enemies, are now united against a new
enemy: Durban Metro Council. Their objection, Durban Metro's new
cost-recovery policies. In Mpumalanga, many residents received
subsidised water even under apartheid. Now the ANC government is
installing water meters and cutting off services to those too poor
to pay.
Cholera broke out in Durban and its surrounds last year, making
80,000 people sick and killing 180 across the country. At its
centre a community who used to get subsidised water but was
recently disconnected.
Just before you touch down at Durban airport, you may catch a
glimpse of the township of Wentworth, where black workers recently
struck against oil refineries owned by Shell, British Petroleum and
a Malaysian oil company after in the same week one worker was
killed by exposure to hydrochloric acid and another was injured in
a machine. In Wentworth, where workers live on the hillsides all
around the plants, inhaling noxious fumes day and night, residents
are 8 times more likely to get asthma, bronchitis and leukaemia
than the South African population as a whole. Protective labour
legislation, won during the anti-apartheid struggle, is currently
being rolled back in the interest of international competitiveness.
If you don't see most of this, you may not be struck by the
poignancy and potential for irony of our ANC government hosting a
world conference against racism in a city where the majority are
black and poor, and a minority, mostly still white, continue to
enjoy the spoils of the economy.
A question on many peoples' minds in the run up to the World
Conference Against Racism is whether the economic forces and
policies, both local and global, which continue to keep so many
black people poor, will be up for debate in the conference at all.
Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this uncertainty is the
behind-the-scenes tussle over one particular agenda item in the
conference: whether the Global South, and people of colour in the
north (led by African-Americans), deserve reparations for the
crimes visited upon them by the largely-white north: viz. slavery,
colonialism, and apartheid. African delegates meeting in Dakar in
January to prepare for the WCAR highlighted reparations as the key
issue for discussion in Durban. As recently as this week, the US
and some European governments are reported to have threatened to
withdraw their funding or to boycott the conference altogether if
the issue of reparations is to be included. US Secretary of State
Colin Powell warned supporters of reparations to withdraw this
issue or risk "derailing" the conference. In South Africa, opinion
appears divided. Jubilee South Africa has been outspoken in its
support for reparations. Jubilee leaders such as Anglican
Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town have repeatedly called
on Swiss banks to pay back the profits they made from trading in
apartheid gold and to compensate the victims of apartheid violence
for the support the banks provided to Pretoria during the 1980s. In
1986, when PW Botha declared a debt standstill, Swiss bankers
provided a major bailout.
Yasmine Sooka, a Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) has argued that families of freedom fighters
killed or injured during the struggle should receive compensation
from the banks for prolonging apartheid.
Interviewed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in
January, Thabo Mbeki distanced himself from this call. Whilst
commending Jubilee 2000 for its success in promoting debt relief,
Mbeki said of the reparations campaign, "It's an NGO call. As
government we've never made such a call."
Granted Mbeki was in Davos to promote South Africa to investors as
a safe and lucrative place to do business through his Millenium
Africa Plan (MAP). A demand from the president that foreign banks
pay back profits made over a decade ago would hardly have helped
his cause. In line with Mbeki's reticence, top South African
officials appear reluctant to take sides publicly in the debate
over the conference agenda.
The differing views on reparations are associated with quite
different assessments of how racism should be approached at the
WCAR. Northern governments would generally like to see the
discussion focus on racial ideologies and psychologies and the need
for education and tolerance. This personalised approach to
discussing racism avoids an acknowledgement that Europe and the USA
built their economies through systematic racially-based
exploitation and dispossession. "Civil society" groups in South
Africa such as organised labour and NGOs (whose contribution in
Durban is confined to a separate venue at a separate time) believe
that the WCAR must consider the systemic causes of racial
inequality. Amongst these are the historical legacy of slavery and
colonialism, the impact of the current phase of corporate-led
globalisation on jobs and living standards in the global south,
and, last but not least, the effect of domestic economic policies
on the living standards of the black majority. With the help of the
World Bank, South Africa introduced its own home-grown structural
adjustment programme in 1996, under the rubrik Growth Employment
and Redistribution or Gear. Gear focused on macro-economic
indicators such as budget-deficit reduction, replacing the
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which had emphasised
meeting the basic needs of the population.
The South African government is caught between a rock and a hard
place. If it limits itself to the "personalised" approach, it risks
being co-opted into an agenda set by the north. Debt cancellation
would be off the agenda, as would most of the concerns being raised
by grassroots groups in South Africa.
On the other hand, if the South African government takes a
courageous line against the racial disparities exacerbated by
globalisation it risks throwing the spotlight on its own
neo-liberal policies. Since the introduction of Gear, life has
undoubtedly become harder for the vast majority of the poorest
black South Africans. In 1990 South Africa was the second most
unequal society in the world. After seven years of an ANC
government SA has won first place.
One option, of course, is to keep quiet and try to bask in the
glory of the political 'miracle' of the South African transition
and the racial reconciliation it was built on. As conference hosts
there will be plenty of opportunity for pomp and ceremony, and to
promote Durban as a tourist destination. For those off the tourist
track in Durban's black and Indian townships, however, it
increasingly seems as if the struggle against racism is a struggle
against our own post-apartheid government.
While the government bureaucrats meet in the ICC, and NGOs parley
in Kingsmead stadium, community groups across the city are planning
their own action. They will call for an end to cost-recovery in
poor townships, an end to evictions, a halt to commercialisation
and privatisation of services and a renewed focus on meeting basic
needs.
Their 'Concerned Citizens Forum' or CCF, formed two weeks ago by
poor people of every race and religion, is likely to make one of
the most powerful statements against racism at the WCAR, although
they may not be in a lavish venue, and the TV cameras of the world
may miss them.
However we urge all those international groups and activists on the
way to Durban to make contact with grassroots groups like the CCF.
We'll certainly be with them, and we promise to bring you the story
from the grassroots outside the WCAR in future postings.
Ben Cashdan is a lecturer and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. His
five documentaries on globalisation and struggles for social
justice will be on tour during the fall.
Dennis Brutus is a patron of Jubilee South Africa and a long-time
fighter against South African and now global apartheid.
Copyright (c) 2001 Dennis Brutus and Ben Cashdan.
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Action's information services provide accessible information and
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