Читать книгу National Identity and State Formation in Africa - Группа авторов - Страница 14

Rhodes stands tall as an example to all amakwerekwere the world over, who are victims of the exclusionary violence of zero-sum games of belonging played by powerful states and those they co-opt in the name of bona fide nationhood and citizenship. Rhodes’s lesson to all those defined and confined as makwerekwere is clear: the only way to outgrow the status of makwerekwere within the logic of zero-sum games of ever-diminishing circles of inclusion is to rise and challenge – with violence and superior technology – the status of social, political, cultural and economic invisibility which others readily confer on their real or imagined ‘outsiders’, ‘foreigners’ or ‘Uitlanders’ and ‘strangers’.

The racialized hierarchies pioneered by Rhodes and perfected by apartheid are still very active in the purportedly new non-racist South Africa, where everyone is in principle equal in citizenship and before the law. However, few have the luxury of living their freedoms in abstraction. Ironically, black labourers remain confined to the margins, in townships or seething slums of hurriedly erected shacks, desperately seeking to get by. Many struggle on a daily basis despite the ‘enormous, untold, inconceivable wealth’ they have helped dig out of their native soils since the Kimberley days – to fill the insatiable imperial pockets of Rhodes and his band of Uitlanders or amakwerekwere from Europe.

As for middle-class whites, from the protective distance and comfort of their securitized, sanitized and secluded suburbs, they continue to delude themselves that their economic and social positions can be safeguarded irrespective of the social and economic misery of the bulk of their black compatriots.

Paradoxically, poor working-class whites, increasingly finding it difficult to live up to the illusion of a class of work beneath the dignity of whites, are perceived to bring shame on the white race and to pose a threat to white dominance. Put differently, they are fast losing the whiteness which was propped up by the deliberate, systematic and collective suppression of blacks and often taken for granted under apartheid. Whiteness beyond skin colour is increasingly being picked up or acquired by a crystallizing black economically empowered middle class.

The idea that whites are fast losing out in the competition for whiteness is an increasing preoccupation beyond South Africa, as attested by the rise and proliferation of right-wing political and cultural fundamentalism in Europe, North America and their global satellites. In this regard, Donald Trump’s campaign and persistent message as President of ‘Making America Great Again’ by making it white again, through exclusion, intolerance and vitriol, is particularly telling.