This article was first published by BizNews on 31 January 2025
One of the Apartheid government’s biggest crimes was its denial of freedom of association (among other freedoms) to all South Africans through its grand project of using the state to segregate on a racial basis.
By enforcing segregation through legislation and imposing its narrow vision or an idealized South Africa, the government infringed upon people’s freedom to interact and build voluntary relationships across racial and ethnic divides.
The democratic breakthrough of 1994 symbolised the end of this social engineering and the birth of a free society, where all people could determine their own identities and freely associate with others. It may not be fashionable to admit it today, but that moment inspired hope in all South Africans for a better future.
Unfortunately, as I reflect on the state of our democracy three decades later, it has become evident that our collective hope was misplaced. As Flip Buys, the chairperson of the Solidarity Movement, so eloquently notes, “The ANC’s strategy was to try and build a nation for a state, rather than a state for a nation”.
What this means is that the ANC did not reject social engineering in principle. It simply remodelled it and attempted to use the democratic state to impose its statist vision of a “united” nation on all South Africans.
What, then, has the ANC’s form of social engineering been?
The ANC did and does not envision a society where SA’s diverse communities can retain their identities and co-exist peacefully and respectfully. Rather, it has envisioned both a homogenous and thoroughly “integrated” society where all people subscribe to a single national identity that isn’t rooted in any culture.
Therefore, its focus has been on moulding South Africans to conform to this twisted vision of a “united” society that marches to a single ideological tune. One of the many ways in which it has attempted to engineer people is through education. Through its shaping of the educational curriculum, the ANC has promoted this “unity” vision in subjects like history and life orientation, and stigmatised anyone who deviates from it.
The ANC has relied heavily on this stigma to marginalise South Africans who don’t conform to its particular vision because they deeply value their own cultural identities. Those who have argued that their cultural identities can co-exist with a broader South African identity have either been dismissed as “racists” who harbour a nostalgia for Apartheid or “tribalists” whose “laager mentality” poses a threat to national “unity”.
There are two cases that illustrate the latter point effectively. The first is of a group of culturally conscious Afrikaners in Orania who are merely exercising their freedom to associate with whom they share a background. These Afrikaners have not denied that they are also South African. Furthermore, they have not rejected the idea of unity in principle. They simply envision a society where diverse communities in their respective cultural spaces can co-exist on a basis of mutual recognition and respect. Does this not sound like the “unity in diversity” emblazoned on the national coat of arms?
In the twisted minds of the ANC’s social engineers, such an attachment to Afrikaner identity, which they regard as inherently racist, constitutes a rejection of one South Africa.
The second case involves a group of Zulus who want to restore the independence of their kingdom. Their sentiment mirrors that of the Afrikaners in Orania and they too want to be the masters of their own destiny. But the ANC despises this, so it has made it its business to project these Zulus as backward tribalists who pose a threat to not just national unity, but also this mirage called “black unity”. Black unity obviously presupposes that blacks are a homogenous group, but it falls outside the scope of this piece.
The central argument that readers must take away is that the Apartheid government’s tyrannical social engineering did not vanish as the regime collapsed. The ANC just reworked it and employed it in service of another statist agenda. While the Apartheid government imposed a vision of racial segregation, the ANC has imposed a vision of homogenisation and integration that attacks people’s freedom to determine their own identities and associate with whomever they wish.
The point Is not that integration is problematic. The point is that the state has no business with telling people what to identify as and who to associate with.
In this regard, the Apartheid government chose the path of tyranny. The ANC has also chosen to attack individual freedom through its project of social engineering, dressed in a thin veil of appeals to democracy. The people of SA deserve a party or a civil organisation that truly believes in a free society that accommodates diversity.
