"We are too close to apartheid". Decoding Pieter Groenewald

Asked in a Sunday Times interview if South Africa was ready for a white president, Pieter Groenewald, the leader of the Freedom Front Plus, retorted with an emphatic "No, we are too close to apartheid still". He said, "It would be difficult to convince traditional ANC voters to ditch the governing party with all its flaws, should the opposition pick a white leader as its presidential candidate". It is not the entirety of the answer that this rendition wants to decode, but that "we are too close to apartheid still", which is interesting to decode. 

In South Africa, the arc of history never bends towards delusion, it confronts reality as it presents itself to humanity. If minority rights, defence of the Afrikaner cause in Africa, and the mission to liquidate the governing ANC of its moral high ground for having led the demise of a racial oligarchy, apartheid, was a hegemon, the Freedom Front Plus is one cohort of South Africans that believe it will last forever. 

The characterisation of granting the franchise to all South Africans in terms of the 1993 Interim Constitution as a democratic breakthrough did not only make beyond 1994 South Africa transitionary but created various meanings of Freedom, whence freedom fronts with interesting endgames for the same country. The depth of socially engineered divisions of South Africans to aspire for nationhood for as long it entrenches racial contours is grossly underestimated. 

Indeed, humanity's internal experiences with its mind and thinking differ fundamentally from objective or scientific descriptions of thinking. It is also true that 'as beneficiaries of any oppressive system are transformed by the freedom that arrives with the demise of oppression, so will the notion of freedom be transformed' or even redefined by status quo defending beneficiaries. To some, and they are hard at work, freedom of association can be stretched to include separate development. 

In his answer, Pieter Groenewald underscores a truism that being in power for a long time creates intelligence on how to sustain that power irrespective of how you accumulated it. One such intelligence involves understanding the fundamentals of inter-political interaction, developing a mindful approach and building adaptive skills and a repertoire of conventions to be effective in different inter-political situations. In declaring that "we are too close to apartheid" Pieter Groenewald displays his command of such intelligence with a purpose. In the unfolding coalition conversations, this intelligence will define which parties will emerge with the most strategic arrangements to either advance or constrain transformation from whatever vantage point. 

Pieter Groenewald has given the most honest and accurate 'insider evaluation' of ANC performance since it became a governing party. He has publicly acknowledged that despite the 1996 Constitution, institutional racism is still 'close' to us as a society. Its contours are undergirded by the structural effects of what it legislated, such as the Bantu Education Act, Group Areas Act, Immorality Act, and economic dominance templating laws are 'too close'. Calls for acute profiling of South Africa along racial lines celebrate apartheid more than advancing its reversal. Interrogating transformation through the number crunching of race representation is fast dismembering the non-white non-racialism divide to levels which pulls the 'close apartheid' into the future. 

Interestingly, Pieter Groenewald further proposes as a solution to the conundrum of who should be the face of the opposition coalition, IFP leader, Hlabisa. Pieter Groenewald, who has been an 'insider' to the system, puts it to South Africa that in this 'closeness' to apartheid, the country will be in safe hands under Hlabisa or the IFP. Racial and tribal oligarchies can quickly form coalitions against an ideal as potent as creating a National Democratic Society. The non-racial, non-tribalist, unifying, democratic, and social justice character of such a society cannot co-exist with the 'closeness' of apartheid. Ultimately, it would be ideal to learn the principles that become the basic structure of the coalition Pieter Groenewald says is being formed. 

The type of institutional racism Pieter Groenewald was socialised in was not random. It was an organised and legislated system of values, attitudes, beliefs and meanings related to each other and the environmental context. Its global characterisation as a crime against humanity gave it a genocidal dimension which justifies his statement that apartheid will be 'close' for the longest time. In memory, in spatial demographics, economic access, and social hierarchies, its closeness will be a background of semi-permanence no government with a lower sophistication can fracture. 

Yes, the 1996 Constitution remains the only towering hope, besides another social revolution, to fracture the 'closeness'. Nostalgia about a possible return to apartheid related to the 'closeness' has been propelled and constrained by the extent to which the Constitution made its practice illegal. The brute truth about constitutions is that what we ultimately write inside these should not be assumed to be a description of our true world...but rather a description of us looking at the world based on how we interacted with the world at the time of writing. The timelessness of what we write and the capability of those that the past system disenfranchised and dispossessed will allow for a catching up with the true meaning of the freedoms it guarantees and the liberation promises it makes. CUT!!!