agricultural employees, even in skilled and foremen’s jobs, came to be nearly all black, despite high Afrikaner rural unemployment.16
Moreover, as demand for skilled labour grew in the 1960s, business repeatedly urged the government to ease restrictions on African employment. In 1973 the prime minister, John Vorster, finally yielded to this pressure, saying his government would no longer stand in the way of blacks moving into higher jobs. This resulted in considerable advances for Africans and a subsequent narrowing of racial inequality. Hence, whereas in 1970 some 71% of personal income had been in the hands of whites and 20% in the hands of Africans, by 1990 the white share had dropped to 54% and the African share had grown to 33%. This signalled a decrease of 24% for whites and an increase of 67% for Africans.17
After the transition to majority rule in 1994, the private sector had still more reason to embrace black advancement in the workplace. By September 1997, shortly before the Employment Equity Bill was published, 90% of the 150 large employers surveyed by a human resources consultancy, FSA-Contact, had affirmative action programmes in place, even though this was not required by law. The proportion of black people in senior management posts at these firms thus increased from 5% in 1995 to 12% in 1998 – and was projected to rise further to 21% in 2001, an overall increase of some 325%. In addition, the proportion of black people in middle management increased from 10% to 21% between 1994 and 1998, and was projected to increase to 29% by 2001.18
Given the shortage of skilled black South Africans of an appropriate age for management posts, this increase in black representation was a notable achievement. It was made all the more remarkable by a simultaneous increase in the proportion of black managers in the public service. Between 1994 and 1997, this grew from 6% to 38% at national level and, from the same baseline, to 66% in provincial administrations.19 This rapid rise in black management in the public sector significantly reduced the pool of black candidates available for private sector posts.
Not surprisingly in these circumstances, data gathered by FSA-Contact showed that 63% of employers had experienced the ‘poaching’ of their black managers by firms willing to pay significant premiums to attract them to their staff.20 This level of poaching – coupled with a willingness to pay black people premiums ranging from 10% to 20% above normal salaries – testified to an enormous unmet demand for black managers in the private sector, rather than a racist refusal to employ them.
The black underclass will benefit
The Employment Equity Act is further premised on the assumption that it will bring substantial and lasting benefits to a poor black underclass. The initial explanatory memorandum accompanying the EE Bill thus emphasised the plight of the poor and held out the implicit promise that the statute would play an important part in their upliftment.
However, experience in other countries has repeatedly shown that the poor gain little from affirmative action. In India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the United States, affirmative action has benefited a relative elite within the disadvantaged group – what India calls ‘the creamy layer’ – while the truly marginalised have derived little or no help from it.21 The same is true in South Africa, where millions of unemployed and unskilled people have little prospect of ever attaining management jobs or benefiting in other ways from empowerment laws.
Race must be used to get beyond race
The Employment Equity Act is also based on the assumption that ‘in order to get beyond racism, we must first take race into account’.22 The statute assumes that classifying people by race, counting them by race, and giving preferences to those identified as ‘black’ provides the best means of ending racial discrimination and overcoming the persistent effects of previous racial prejudice. However, such policies risk entrenching racial consciousness. The declared intent might be to end racial prejudice, but the actual effect of any race-based law may be to promote it instead.
The ANC government has often sought to justify its racial rules on the basis that colour-blind requirements would ignore black poverty and protect white privilege.23 However, this is a red herring. Policies to liberate the poor and reduce inequality could easily be directed at those who fall below a certain income level, most of whom would in any event be black.
The real rationale for racial laws
The reasons put forward by the ANC for employment equity and other racial laws are not the true rationale for these measures. A large part of the explanation lies rather in the ruling party’s long-standing commitment to the national democratic revolution (NDR) it has been pursuing since the early 1960s. This national democratic revolution is aimed at giving the ANC a hegemonic control over all ‘levers of power’ – including the judiciary, the press and civil society – while ushering in a form of ‘economic emancipation’ inconsistent with free markets and private sector-led growth.
Though the concept of the national democratic revolution was developed and refined by Soviet strategists in the late 1950s, the idea can be traced back to the theory of imperialism developed by Lenin in 1917. According to Lenin, the living standards of the working classes in industrialised Europe were then improving rather than deteriorating (contrary to what Karl Marx had predicted) solely because the imperial powers were able ruthlessly to exploit the brown and black masses in their colonies.24
This theory won wide acceptance among nationalist movements in many parts of the African continent, but was difficult to apply to South Africa because the country had gained independence from Britain as early as 1910 and so ceased to be a colony. However, in 1950 the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) found a way around this obstacle by stating that South Africa had ‘the characteristics of both an imperialist state and a colony within a single, indivisible, geographical, political and economic entity’. In this ‘colonialism of a special type’, white South Africa was effectively an ‘imperialist state’ and black South Africa was its ‘colony’. This implied that the wealth of white South Africans had nothing to do with enterprise, skill, or technological advantage but derived solely from the exploitation and impoverishment of black South Africans.25
In the 1950s, as the process of decolonisation in Asia and Africa began to accelerate, the Soviet Union started to examine how the concept of ‘national democratic revolution’ could be used to draw newly liberated states into Moscow’s orbit. Later that decade, the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formed a special group of advisers to work on this issue. According to this special group, the defining features of national democratic revolutions are that ‘they lead to the elimination of colonial … oppression and are also latent with anti-capitalist tendency … paving the way for transition to socialist reconstruction’.26
According to these Soviet theorists, South Africa had particular potential to ‘shorten the stage of the national democratic revolution’ and move swiftly to socialism. This was largely because of its developed economy, which meant it had an industrialised labour force that could be drawn towards the South African Communist Party (SACP), the underground successor to the CPSA. Even in South Africa, however, a transitional period, in which a national democratic revolution would be necessary, was not ruled out.27
In 1962 the thinking of these Soviet theorists was clearly evident in the SACP’s new programme, entitled The Road to South African Freedom. This document began by identifying South Africa as a ‘colony of a special type’ in which the white minority had gained its wealth solely through the ruthless dispossession and exploitation of the black majority over centuries of colonial rule. This meant that the ‘colonial state of white supremacy’ would have to be overthrown and ‘an independent state of national democracy’ established in its place. Towards this end, the existing state machinery would have to be destroyed. Hence, all public institutions, including the civil service, the judiciary, the police, and the army would have to be re-staffed with black people and made ‘fully representative of the population of South Africa’. Once the state had been ‘democratised’ in this way, its main task would be
