In the last part of this opus, we have to look at some of the hidden economic dynamics of the system of Apartheid!
The parts that aren’t “sexy,” isn’t easily visible but has a deleterious effect in the long term on the oppressed (read black people) in South Africa.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism have taught the patrimonially “monied class” one important thing it is immeasurably profitable to get the labour for free, steal it, or systemically construct it as, “not that important” to the means of production. and therefore automatically undervalued by a type of “social agreement.”
In South Africa, this became apparent when the Carnegie Commission, under the leadership of one, Frederick Keppel, was tasked with studying the “poor white” (mainly Afrikaner) problem in 1932, scarcely 30-years after having received substantial war reparations from Kitchener and Milner post the Anglo-Boer II in 1902/03. This laid the blueprint for Apartheid, which we may refer to as Colonialism 2.0, but on steroids. One of the “findings of the report” and recommendations to the South African government was that, and I paraphrase; “given similar or the same set of opportunities, the black man shows a greater willingness to work and will outshine the white man.” Thus, one of the pioneering cornerstones of Apartheid was inadvertently created, “Job Reservation.” An almost innocuous term that sounds as if the job market, skills and opportunities will be fairly or equally segmented.
In reality, this, and the Natives Land Act of 1913, singularly contributed towards the economic disenfranchisement and generational impoverishment of black and brown peoples on an incomprehensible scale!
It legally denied black people access to skills, and the skilled ones were relegated to bit players in the “machinery of industry” despite the known economic fact that “cheap black labour” (read legally enforced) provided massive gold mining interest on the Witwatersrand with an unassailable advantage over other mines worldwide, turning a few white families into today’s billionaire oligarchs and providing their children with generational power and resources that are still seen today.
This praxis extended to every industry and every nook of commerce and business in South Africa, making this country an overnight haven for the indolent and useless white youth of Europe. A country, where you could literally visit as a white person and be guaranteed a managerial position because racial triangulation dictates that a white European is worth more (read, more white privilege) than your “home-grown” white South African male. This eventually led to the South African local bourse, the JSE, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, becoming the most valuable in the world, compared to the size of the economy.
By the late eighties, the “blue-chip” or ALSI, all share index (similar to the FTSE in London), was so bundled, top-heavy and cash-flush, they literally couldn’t buy up any more of South Africa because they had run out of options.
This state of the exchange also led to “big business” or the white capital class pushing for the re-opening of the South African economy through what’s euphemistically known as the “negotiated settlement.”
Which more accurately should be referred to as the “negotiated appeasement” because very little has changed for the ordinary black person, and that will be addressed in Part IV of this conversation…
