On Saturday, Nando’s announced that it would be terminating its sponsorship of The Burning Platform, a show that is hosted by Gareth Cliff on Cliff Central. This decision came after Cliff, in an interview with the impolitic DA leader John Steenhuisen and One South Africa Movement member, Mudzuli Rakhivhane, dismissed Rakhivane’s experiences of racism as “completely anecdotal” and “unimportant”.
They were discussing the furore over DA posters in Phoenix in which the party referred to those who had massacred black people during the July riots as “heroes”. The party claims heroes were people of all races who “stood up against criminality” – a pathetic lie when one considers that most of the 36 people killed in that massacre were unarmed, innocent black people.
Cliff’s comments triggered outrage. Here was Cliff, a privileged white male, speaking over a young black woman and completely invalidating her experiences as someone who, like millions of people who look just like her, must negotiate existence in a racist and heteropatriarchal society that deems black lives unworthy. Rakhivhane is all of us.
Here was Steenhuisen, a white male with ambitions of governing a country with wounds still bleeding from the horrors of our colonial and apartheid past, as well as a democracy that has been bruising, legitimising Cliff’s racism and white privilege that enabled him to claim that “race is at the bottom of the list” for many South Africans. And in true racist form, he used a 2020 report by the Institute of Race Relations – a right-wing organisation that conducts “research” with flawed methodology that is aimed at producing racist work. But what would anyone expect from an organisation that appointed Helen Zille, the poster-child of racism, as a Senior Policy Fellow?
But let’s look at Cliff’s argument that racism is at the bottom of the list for most South Africans. I don’t think he is entirely wrong. The reality of the situation is that many South Africans (including the ANC) do not have a coherent race theory and as such, do not understand how racism functions systematically.
When you listen closely to people’s arguments around corruption, maladministration, poverty, unemployment and other challenges, you’ll realise that many can’t make a definitive link between these and our colonial and apartheid past.
More importantly, few realise how the very neo-liberal ideological posture of our democratic government is embedded in racism. This is why people cannot understand that coloniality, a by-product of colonialism, can still function under a black government. They make a distinct separation, demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of racism.
But perhaps where you’ll realise that South Africans don’t understand racism is on the question of foreign nationals. In 2008, when we killed foreigners, we killed only Africans (including South Africans, most of them Tsonga-speaking). We continue to attribute our socio-economic challenges to foreigners – but are specific about the kind of foreigner. It is the African from Zimbabwe, the DRC, Malawi, Mozambique and Sudan, never the European or white American.
We don’t understand how this “migration crisis”, from political and economic instabilities in these countries, right down to ecological disasters resulting from climate change, is a function of structural racism. And so, we target the small fish in the ocean, vulnerable migrants, and allow the real architects and architecture of racism to remain intact.
We see a Somalian street vendor as the source of our troubles and decide his punishment must be death while allowing three white men to own wealth equal to that owned by almost 70 percent of the economy. Cliff is not entirely wrong.
But it’s not that we don’t care about racism – we just don’t understand it well enough.
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