What+is+the+value+of+the+black+bourgeoisie



=What is the value of SA’s black middle class?=

Jacob Dlamini, Business Day, 16 March 2005
WHAT good is the black bourgeoisie? What good is SA’s black capitalist class? I put these questions to all those who have made the black bourgeoisie, quite simply, the most fashionable sociological thing around. With the South African black bourgeoisie showing more interest in holidays in the south of France, expensive cigars and even more expensive cars than they show in starting productive businesses, it is time we asked these questions.

Writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called the African bourgeoisie in the 1960s a “little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster”. They were, he said, “good for nothing”. Would this apply to SA’s black bourgeoisie?

I could ask President Thabo Mbeki, who told the Black Management Forum in 1999 that we must “abandon our embarrassment” over the emergence of black capitalists in SA.

I could ask the US multinational corporations that drew up the Sullivan code in the late 1970s. The code was intended to stave off disinvestment from and political revolt in SA. It sought to do that by asking US corporations in SA to identify blacks for managerial training.

The idea was that the black managers would help strengthen the black middle class and serve as a buffer between business and the restless trade unions.

I could ask PW Botha, who made the creation of a black middle class a crucial component of his “total strategy” when he came into power in the late 1970s.

Again, the idea was that only a black bourgeoisie could protect the apartheid state from a mass uprising that was fast gaining momentum at the time.

I could put my questions to the Tomlinson Commission, set up by the apartheid state in the early 1950s to make the bantustan system viable.

The commission said a black middle class would be essential to the success of the tribal enclaves, the “homelands”.

Or, I could take my query all the way back to the first European colonialists and the missionaries, who saw the creation of a black, Christian and educated middle class as a way to undermine chiefs. They also thought this new class would serve as intermediaries between Africans and the colonial state.

Trouble is, the answers I would get are likely to run along these lines: the black bourgeoisie is “naturally” a force for good in SA, or a “thing” that is good in and of itself in any democracy.

I do not believe that Mbeki can and should be lumped together with apartheid leaders and apologists. He is approaching the issue from a different angle.

But I would like to question the assumptions that underpin the conventional wisdom that the rise of the black bourgeoisie is inevitably a good thing.

Where is the evidence for that? Sure, the black bourgeoisie might worry about schools for their kids, bond and car repayments and also be responsible for conspicuous consumption.

They might also be politically and economically conservative, preferring moderation to revolt. But what is fundamentally middle class or bourgeois about these concerns and anxieties?

Do peasants not worry about schools, housing, and political and economic stability?

Does the working class not worry about debt and issues of social stability?

Why should the anxieties of the bourgeoisie take precedence over those of the poor?

Is that why the African National Congress talks of a “patriotic bourgeoisie” but no “patriotic peasants”? It seems to think the black bourgeoisie needs the state more than it actually might.

Mbeki said that “we must strive to create and strengthen the black capitalist class” as part of the struggle against racism.

But what makes anyone think that black capitalists will be any different to nonblack capitalists? Are they the kind of people we want to use to measure how far we have come as a democracy?

Referring to the penchant among the black bourgeoisie to buy property in Europe, a South African-born academic says: “The south coast (of KwaZulu-Natal) is one thing; but the south of France is another.” Touché!


 * - Dlamini is political editor**