While the democratic government in the post-apartheid dispensation has made significant inroads in alleviating poverty and other products of historical disenfranchisement, structural racism remains a lived reality for millions of Black people in South Africa. Every year, various institutions including Statistics South Africa and Oxfam South Africa release reports that investigate racism and inequality, and the story is the same: privilege has a White face while poverty and unemployment continue to have a Black face.
This racism finds expression in the very nature of the South African economy, where patterns of income and accumulation demonstrate that White people have a higher income per capita than Black people, and that their income levels are significantly higher than their Black counterparts even when they are doing the exact same jobs. According to the Living Conditions of Households in South Africa Survey, conducted by Statistics South Africa (2017), White South Africans command the highest average income in the country, earning nearly five times more than Black people. This betrayal of the constitutionally enshrined right to equality, a right that should be afforded every citizen of our country, is demonstrative of the ways in which Black people continue to be excluded or in this instance, barely accommodated, in the new South Africa.
Landlessness also continues to be a source of the marginalisation and dehumanization of Black people. One need not look further than townships and informal settlements to understand how dehumanisation as a result of landlessness confines Black people into a zone of exclusion and indignity. Many informal settlements in South Africa lack even the most basic of necessities such as clean drinking water, sanitation and electricity. In his book, Diepsloot, Harber details the extent to which the neglect of the people in informal settlements goes – with the state practically turning its back on them (Harber, 2014). Because of this, they find ways to navigate their existence, engaging in illegal activities for survival. When a state turns on its citizens, animalising them in the ways that people in informal settlements are animalised by being deprived of basic necessities and therefore, their basic human rights, their very claims to legitimate citizenship are challenged.
According to the Land Audit Report (2013), even though they are a demographic majority, Black people own the smallest percentage of the country’s private land. The report, commissioned by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (2013), states that White people own almost three quarters of all private land in South Africa. To be specific, the audit shows that Whites owned most of the private land at 72 per cent, followed by Coloured people at 15 per cent, Indians at 5 per cent and Africans at 4 percent. The legacy of our colonial and apartheid past is clear in these patterns of landownership.
Understanding the racialised nature of landownership in South Africa, and therefore making calls for land expropriation and redistribution, is not simply about altering economic patterns. It is also about political belonging. This is captured most aptly by du Toit (2018) who contends that:
that land, in much of this debate, is a proxy issue: a symbol for the underlying injustice of colonialism itself … Anger about the failure to redistribute commercial agricultural farming land to black South Africans is linked to a much broader sense of general economic marginalisation and political frustration … Ownership of the lion’s share of farmland by white farmers and large corporates is a political issue, not only because of what it means for rural livelihoods, but because it is a political shorthand for the perpetuation of white privilege as such … In this context, the demand for expropriation without compensation is not … in a policy debate … It is a political demand for recognition … It is a demand for the validation of the prior right of those who were here first … It is concerned, in a real sense, not with who the land should belong to but whose country this really is". Differently put, the land question "is about political belonging: about the value of our Constitution, about the nature of South Africa as a political community, and about the meaning of citizenship.(du Toit, 2018)
But the structural racism that Black people endure does not end only at an economic level or with land dispossession. Patterns of education also paint the same painful picture. Glaring traces of separate development that defined apartheid’s education policies are evident in higher education, where Black students continue to be thrust to the edge of the periphery. Speaking at the Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education and Training in 2017, former Statistician-General, Pali Lehohla made this poignant reflection: "If there are thirty-thousand or forty-thousand Whites coming into university, you would expect two-hundred thousand Blacks to enter university every year. But it’s only forty-seven thousand, and once they have entered that university, they actually head south." It was revealed in the same Commission that less than fifty thousand Black students each year successfully complete their bachelor’s degree at university.
The new dispensation, with all the many positive gains it has brought for the democratic project, is battling to resolve the pervasive structural crises that afflict South Africa – particularly racism, inter alia the exclusion of Black people that gives rise to feelings and experiences of not belonging. Maserumule (a) makes a poignant conclusion when, in his reflections on the Man dela Centenary, he argues that "poverty and inequality continue to stratify South Africa along racial lines". The profundity in this argument lies in the deliberate use of the term "stratify", which implies a systematic arrangement of different racial groups, where one exists parallel to the other. This kind of arrangement is inherently hierarchical, and the evidence shows that in this hierarchy, Black people are scrapping at the bottom of the barrel.
Stratification also implies that there is no cohesion. And indeed, racial cohesion is a myth in a South Africa where some are more equal than others. But more than just express itself in inequality, lack of racial cohesion also expresses itself in othering, in defining some as legitimate citizens of our country and others, as mere subjects, not too dissimilar to how the denaturalisation laws of apartheid rendered Black people as mere subjects even in "independent" Bantustans.