Brendan Benfield: From racial-apartheid to elitist-apartheid

I witnessed the historic 1994 election in South Africa, a day filled with hope and peace. However, the promise of a new era was shattered as a new form of Apartheid emerged. This modern Apartheid, led by the ANC, separates the political elite from the rest, fostering economic decay and social division. As another crucial election looms, all South Africans must unite to fight for true freedom and equality.

Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.

By Brendan Benfield*

I was there, that fateful day in 1994 when South Africa had its first truly democratic election. As I was 16 years old, I could not vote in that election, but I remember to this day how palpably you could feel the peace in the air no matter where you were in South Africa on that day. My wife, who was the same age, remembers the same sensation. There had been so much fear mongering up to that day about how the country would turn to violence and yet the exact opposite occurred. We were filled with hope and expectation as a result. How could it be that that peace, on that wonderful day, could be so false?

That election would not bring in a new era free from the legacy of Apartheid; it would instead usher in a new era of Apartheid, an Apartheid that would encompass so many more South Africans than the first ever had.

Just last week I was in Cape Town with my family showing an American exchange student the beauty that South Africa has to offer. As residents of Johannesburg, we try and visit Cape Town every few years as its beauty has historically been such a relief from the squalor and decay of Johannesburg. However, on this occasion we were all struck by the decay that has now, and perhaps inevitably, reached the streets of Cape Town too. This is not political or municipal decay as we see in all other eight provinces, but rather economic decay. It felt as if the pervasive corruption and poverty of the rest of South Africa had now pressed through the veneer that had so effectively covered the Western Cape for so long.

As we drove from the airport to Camps Bay, we witnessed the aging buildings, the spread of homeless people and the almost complete lack of new construction in the city’s streets. In contrast however, we would have presented to us the spectacle of the African Nation Congress’ (ANC) new Apartheid put on display, in all its glory for us, on Camps Bay’s boulevard that evening. As we stood on Camps Bay beach we watched as some of the world’s most expensive motor cars emerged from some of the country’s most expensive houses and paraded for us down the boulevard.

Almost without exception, displaying black South Africans dressed in the finest clothes money can buy, adorned in large and seemingly very expensive jewelry and hair dos, passing their destitute fellow countrymen on each side of the road, using them as valets to care for their cars as they entered some of the most expensive restaurants available in Cape Town. It was nauseating to witness, and not only for us white South Africans, but for their fellow countrymen, who too in witnessing this display, understood that they now lived in a new Apartheid.

This new Apartheid isn’t in fact new, it is just a far more extensive and all-inclusive version of the original. The original National Party (NP) version of Apartheid (Translated into English loosely as “Separation”) aimed to separate blacks from whites, politically, economically, and legally. The ANC’s new Apartheid aims to separate black and white South Africans from them, from the political elite their families and their friends and their connections (henceforth referred to as “Comrades” – their favoured term). This new Apartheid, a working example of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others”.

As we head towards this year’s national elections, we have naturally been surrounded by the realities of our countries current conditions. We are, as the Democratic Alliance (DA) phrased it in their latest advert, burning. But what struck me on that beach that evening was that we have not actually been told the truth about why we are burning. We are not burning because the ANC has plundered our country, destroyed its infrastructure, and overwhelmed our economy with expensive, constricting and destructive regulation. We are burning because they have created a new and far more extensive Apartheid.

Under this new Apartheid black South Africans have been separated from the black political elite and their comrades by bribing them with grants, removing proper education from them, destroying their healthcare, removing from the constitution their ability to own land, and implementing labour laws that make it impossible for them to be employed. But now they have expanded this separation they inherited from the NP, to include white South Africans in the above as well.

Further though, whites are now used as the scape goat for all the evils incurred by the ANC. My children have been taught in school that they are racist simply for being white. They have been told they have no place in the South African tertiary education system and are therefore often forced to look for this education outside of South Africa.

As early teens they know already that because they are white, it is very unlikely they will be able to find employment in South Africa and if they do, they will be extremely limited in their career progression simply because of their skin colour. But perhaps more importantly, they already, as mere children, know that if they are to believe what the ANC and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) pour down their throats every day, that all that they have, build or innovate in South Africa will ultimately be taken from them in this new Apartheid under the auspices of Black Economic Employment. They know for certain though, that what they saw on Camps Bay boulevard that evening would never be something they could have or do under this new Apartheid.

And so it is, that all South Africans of all races find themselves under this new Apartheid; an ANC and potentially EFF-led Apartheid. We are a broken, destitute, hopeless and an ununified people. We are told that we must blame white people for all our countries problems, and we are taught that we should hate blacks because they have taken and will take everything from us while vilifying us in the process. It’s a simultaneously wicked and brilliant plan to ensure we as black and white South Africans never turn our eyes on our new slave masters but fight each other in the pits over the scraps for their benefit, entertainment, and enrichment.

I realised that evening on Camps Bay beach just how extensively we as South Africans have been lied to over the last 3 decades by the ANC and perhaps more vocally by the EFF:

We are not “still” under some kind of economic apartheid separating black South Africans and requiring further “revolution” against white South Africans to rectify.

All South Africans outside the political elite and their comrades are, in fact, under Apartheid, both economically and politically. Any “revolution” required is a unified black and white “revolution” against this new system and those that control it.

White South African’s do not all “control” the wealth in South Africa, they do not “all” own the land and they do not have some sinister racist plot to “continue” to oppress black South Africans simply because of their skin colour.

As was so physically evident that evening on Camps Bay’s boulevard, the vast if not all the real wealth in South Africa, land and power has long since shifted into the hands of the black political elite and their comrades.

As black and white South African’s we do not live in a free democracy and we are not held equal under the law of this land.

We live under a single party (Or perhaps parties unified in their philosophy – think ANC and EFF) totalitarian state that cares only about keeping all the power and wealth in its own hands and keeping the rest of us fighting with each other in the name of race.

This year’s election will arguably be remembered as about as important as that first election in 1994. This is so because it will either permanently sign off on this new Apartheid, or it will usher in a new and third era into South Africa’s modern history. Will that new era be any better than the previous two? Will we even ever be given the chance to know? If we are to know, it’s time all South Africans of all races unify, despite their colour and the beliefs they may have as a result of the lies they have been told, to end Apartheid in South Africa finally and usher in true freedom at last.