How apartheid’s harsh barriers were crossed
Andrew Innes’s essay in “The Big Read” told how, in the late 1960s, Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu formed a bond that led to their 50 years of fruitful collaboration and laid a new track in South African music (“Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s cross-cultural brotherhood”, March 31).
However, there is a dissonance that needs clarification. His analysis of South African society at that time recounts how the white government of the 1960s, and those before it, worked to entrench power through promoting a “superior” culture, whose language, lifestyle and moral standards were to be authoritative. The Nationalist government developed this hegemony further through the system of apartheid, which forced a segregation of society, illustrated by the laws to which Innes referred.
After this analysis, which laid bare the calculated moves towards white domination and black subordination, came the sentence, “It was in the course of that year (1969) that he (Sipho) met Johnny through mutual acquaintances and began teaching him the Zulu guitar style,” and we read that Johnny visited migrant labour hostels and learnt more.
Herein lies the dissonance: having laid out so clearly the legal, cultural and spatial segregation of white and black society, the apparently casual and natural way the two men met and collaborated seems contradictory. How did it happen?
As it stands there’s a note missing from this story.
Roger Graham
Meadowridge
Indian court ruling on slavery reparations set global precedent
Readers of Andrew Kenny’s letter will be interested to learn that the first case of slave descendants being awarded compensation for slavery involved victims of the Indian Ocean slave trade, not the trans-Atlantic slave trade (“Sahara slave trade worse than Atlantic one”, April 1).
In a landmark case the Indian high court in Karnataka ruled that Siddhis (Indians descended from African slaves kidnapped before the British Empire epoch) are entitled to be registered as a statutory “other backward class”. This entitles them to affirmative action in applying for civil service jobs and in applying for university admission.
This precedent will be of great interest to those campaigning for the case of trans-Atlantic slave trade reparations, and the form the compensation takes. As is widely taught, in the Cape Colony it was not the slaves, but the slave owners, who were paid handsome compensation when the slaves were freed.
Keith Gottschalk
Claremont
Rules and bureaucracy hinder government evaluation and reform
Ronette Engela’s article was spot on (“Rigid compliance trumps meaningful evaluation in auditing government departments”, April 1).
The issue of morality is not addressed, and so there are tonnes of rules to deal with issues that need to be addressed through the HR system. The rules snare lower-level officials.
As she indicates, when we first established the evaluation system, we could procure evaluations in two months. By 2018, when I left government service, it took six months.
So, the ability to use the system as a responsive tool to assist policymakers was severely affected. But the rules don’t stop high-level corruption.
Ian Goldman
Via Business Day online
Procurement policy shift raises concerns for black shareholders
Stuart Theobald hit the nail on the head concerning the Transformation Fund (“Transformation Fund a threat to transformation”, April 1).
The shift in procurement points to rewarding 100% black-owned businesses at the expense of 51%+ black-owned means there is enormous destruction of value for black shareholders in the 51% entities because the points remove a source of competitive advantage for those businesses, and there is no longer space for white or foreign shareholders to work with black shareholders.
I doubt this is constitutionally right, and it destroys more value for black shareholders than it creates. The department of trade, industry & competition has managed to be anti-white, anti-foreign and anti-black all at the same time. That takes some doing!
Gareth Ochse
Via Business Day online
Government’s BEE and economic growth at odds
John Dludlu’s most recent column refers (“After the bluster about BBBEE”, April 1).
BEE does not live in a vacuum; it is one part of a plethora of discriminatory legislation (the Mining Charter, employment equity, affirmative action and so on). This has essentially come about mainly from the lack of constitutional protection for minorities and, sad to say, was almost inevitable in South Africa, especially with the low quality of black political leadership.
However satisfying racial retribution may be for black nationalists and their apologists, it’s a disaster from an investment and economic policy point of view. This is what all the economic measurements tell us — especially from 2015, when the legislative effects of discrimination really started to yield the natural economic results of such policies.
Replacing white faces with black faces in the workplace by force is not a logical economic policy, especially as minority citizens still provide a disproportionate added value to the tax base, small business growth and capital investment.
Ultimately, we can have BEE or economic growth — we cannot have both.
Ian Ferguson
Via Business Day online
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