Ninety years old and still going strong
Thursday 9th May, two and half weeks from now, is the 90th birthday of the South African Institute of Race Relations, now officially known as the IRR. It is a unique organisation.
Firstly, the IRR is one of the few organisations in South Africa to have been without a colour bar in its membership or leadership from Day One. Secondly, its critical scrutiny of apartheid was second to none. Thirdly, it has remained true to classically liberal principles under both National Party (NP) and African National Congress (ANC) rule – and applied the same yardstick to the policies of both parties.
Even today, some whites claim that censorship by the NP government kept them in the dark about what they were voting for. "We never knew," goes the excuse. But censorship was limited. There were few aspects of apartheid that were not exposed to the light of day by the IRR, year in and year out, with its thousands of lectures, conferences, press statements, and publications. It's all there in meticulous detail, chapter and verse.
The IRR was also one of the very few organisations to predict the demise of apartheid long before it happened. Early liberals had always pointed to the ultimate impossibility of trying to manage an irreversibly integrating economy within a straitjacket of political segregation. They said so long before either the Liberal Party or the Progressive Party (forerunner of today's Democratic Alliance) was founded.
However, as the NP began to make the necessary, albeit clumsy and half-hearted, reforms of the 1980s, the IRR recognised a new threat: the ANC and its allies feared that successful reform would undermine their objective of bringing about revolutionary change.