THE big moment came about 20 minutes into the launch when the little old lady raised her hand and, begging her pardon, asked if Xolela Mangcu, associate professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town, could stop talking for a moment and allow City Press editor Ferial Haffajee to speak because, as she put it, “I came to hear what she has to say.”

Cue sudden consternation and indignant gasps. The young guy next to me could hardly believe his ears. Eyes rolling, he squirmed about with some exaggeration as if his chair was on fire and told me, “Whiteness! That’s the perfect example of whiteness, right there!” Along with several others, he started waving his own arm to be given a chance to address the floor. 

I was a little surprised at this sudden outburst – and the change in temperament. We had chatted a bit before the launch. He seemed amiable enough. He had done some work in Silicon Valley and had recently returned to South Africa from California. “Let me tell you,” he’d said, “I know all about drought regulations. . .” 

Now he was greatly outraged and insulted by this little old lady’s brazen . . . whitey-white effrontery! Offence was not so much taken as greedily snatched up with both hands. 

But there were those who had welcomed the little old lady’s intervention. This was, after all, the Cape Town launch last week of Hafajee’s provocatively titled new book, What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? (Picador Africa), and perhaps many of us were at The Book Lounge to hear what she did have to say, and Mangcu, it must be said, had been banging on a bit.

In fact, up to that point, he’d done most of the talking. He can – as local restaurant managers will tell you – sometimes be a difficult customer. Tonight was no exception. Usually book launches are polite affairs where authors engage in “a conversation” with a pundit of sorts, who would first introduce the book to the audience by saying a few generally positive remarks about its content and themes.

But Mangcu had little time for such conventions, and instructed Haffajee to instead open the conversation by saying something about the book herself before he delivered his own considered and considerable opinion of it. 

Somewhat wrong-footed, Hafajee began by recounting the disquiet some of her family members had with the title of the book. “My mother said it wasn’t very nice, and one of my aunties said, ‘Well, if that was the case, then none of us would be here as well.’” (In the book, she concedes the title is “perceived as one of the most dumb-arsed questions possible” as if it suggested “a surprising naivety” about whiteness.)  

The book, she continued, arose out of her exploration of the “race rage” that had escalated dramatically in recent years. It was as if the world she had grown accustomed to – a South Africa governed by black people, a country where the dominant culture is black, a country transformed by democracy – has been replaced by something alien; something profoundly at odds with non-racialism and constitutional vision she bought into in 1994 as a “child of Nelson Mandela’s generation”.

“Everywhere I went,” she said, “I was hearing young voices, a younger generation, obsessing about whiteness. It was if we were living in an era of white privilege and white supremacy. It sounded as if whites were still in control, that they are a majority in power. But that wasn’t my experience of our country or of my world at all. The national debate that we were now having about race was having the effect of making the white community seem much larger and more powerful than they in fact were.”

And with that in mind, Haffajee set up a series of round table discussions with a number of young South Africans – “people I regard as bellwethers of change” – to literally explain themselves. “The question I posed, basically, is whiteness such a big factor, or is the future of the country in black hands? It was an open-ended question, and I have my own views, that we give too much emphasis to the ideas of whiteness or white supremacy, but I wanted it to be discussed out there, to hear what they said.”

The book that emerged from these questing sessions was, according to Mangcu, something of a curate’s egg. While he admired parts of it, he had great problems, he said, with Haffajee’s treatment of data about the black middle class and she was wrong to speak of equality with the white middle class – there were slightly more middle-class blacks now than whites – when whites only made up about 8% of the population. Essentially, he continued, the black middle class needed to be about ten times its present size before you could talk of equality. . .

More crucially, Mangcu said, there was something “problematic” in the way in which Haffajee had “centred white people in the narrative”, with the result that she had probably presented the opposite of what she had sought to convey. “In other words, the book gives whites a false sense of comfort.”

With that the floodgates opened and there seemed to be no holding Mangcu back. There came a great deal of holding forth on the usual culprits – unemployment, white complacency, white privilege, racism, lack of transformation in academia, the looming racial apocalypse, the colonisation of this, that and the other, and he probably would have moved on to the intricacies of dining out in the Mother City were it not for the aforementioned little old lady’s intervention, which prompted a suggestion from Haffajee that it was perhaps an opportune time to take questions from the floor.

There were a number of students in the audience, so inevitably there came responses – presumably from history and politics majors – aimed at reinforcing the perception that Nelson Mandela had sold out the revolutionary principles of the Freedom Charter – and thus the country – in some sort of capitulation in the negotiations with FW De Klerk and the Nationalists prior to the 1994 elections. Both Haffajee and Mangcu were having none of this – and said as much. But perhaps too politely. 

One of the last contributions from the floor came came from a young man, one of those who, Haffajee had suggested, offered “a different way of how we will complete our walk to freedom”. He rose to offer a confident but qualified defence of Madiba, one that echoed the views that Julius Malema later shared at Oxford that evening: Mandela, regardless of whatever, had been too old and too tired to carry the good fight forward.

Having captured our attention with this choice nugget, he then burbled on at length about having only one white friend, but then that white friend just happened to be Angus Gibson, a filmmaker who co-directed the 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary, Mandela, and whose output was nothing like that of the films made by Leon Schuster, another white man, which were very profitable and very popular, even with black South Africans, despite the fact that very often Schuster appeared in the films disguised as a black person, which was not a good thing. 

There was applause when he eventually finished. It was unclear whether this was because he’d said something profound or merely stopped talking but to me it seemed a new generation of would-be leaders had learned a very old political trick, one that the Rev Allan Boesak and others knew all too well: hold forth in the stentorian and mellifluent oratorial style of a country pastor and the mugs will be all ears no matter what you say.

• • •

THE next morning Haffajee and I met for our interview. We laughed a bit about the little old lady, and she said that she had enjoyed Mangcu’s contribution at the launch, “the tension” he brought to their discussion. “But,” she smiled, “I also felt that I had some interesting things to say.”

That was, in the book’s context, a bit of an understatement – but the voices Haffajee wanted her readers to take note of were those of her “discussants”, the new black opinion-makers, she said, who had “radicalised race discourse” and fundamentally questioned “the terms of the transition and the idea of non-racialism”.

They included, among others, journalist and broadcaster Gugulethu Mhlungu, former Economic Freedom Fighters MP and activist Andile Mngxitama, ANC spokesman Khusela Sangoni, Department of Home Affairs spokesman Mayihlome Tshwete and Wits Centre for Diversity Studies director Melissa Styen. 

They are, importantly, also firmly part of the emerging black middle class.

“It has interested me that, on the face of it,” Haffajee wrote, “this new establishment had voice, agency, could pick its roles in society and was the power. So, what was eating at this new power that its discourse was so enraged with whites and so disempowered despite the end of white minority rule over two decades ago?”

What, indeed? Consider the problems Tiyani Rikhotso, a spokesman with the Department of Transport, has had with his white neighbours. Or better still, consider the problems some of his neighbours have had with Rikhotso’s “roaring” Golf GTI. “It’s the sexiest car and if you touch the accelerator,” Haffajee revealed, “the engine growls. Instant respect. Except if you’re black and live in a townhouse complex in northern Johannesburg, apparently.”

Rikhotso told her: “There used to be this couple opposite who used to complain about the noise of my car. They put in speed bumps although I never sped. There was a whole long petition.”

There was a whole long petition? 

Nothing further is said of this petition, but it does suggest the beef about the GTI was not without foundation. But, equally so, the same could be said of Rikhotso’s attitude towards white people, which had soured considerably since a disastrous and humiliating meeting with the father of a white girlfriend.

Another of Haffajee’s contributors was Milisuthando Bongela, a Rhodes alumnus who runs a feminist stokvel and who one day eavesdropped on a meeting in a Linden cafe of “Jewish business people” discussing the production of teacups.

“Pure green jealousy settled inside me at the thought that these grown white men had the luxury of convening a business action about crockery,” Bongela said. “And that they were probably going to make a lot of money from it. I tried to check the jealousy in me to to understand why it was so buoyant, so relentless.

“If I was going to interpret my surroundings, I had to understand their foundations. The difference between them and me is that they inherited the peace of mind to craft and contemplate teacups on a Wednesday afternoon. I inherited the responsibility of discovering, addressing and solving a race, gender and class disparity I did not create.”

Haffajee said that she was initially dismissive of “whiteness studies” when she first became aware of the term. This inchoate rage, she suggested, prompted an indignant reaction of, oh, just move on; get a life – you have political power, the world is yours.

“I was impatient,” she said. “I was mocking. But, when I started listening to these youngsters, to what they had to say, I realised there was something there. 

“Look, I’m very interested in non-racialism. That’s my background. When I grew up that was what we staked our identity on, a non-racial future, which meant that you had to deal with the race issues, that you had to have a strong anti-racism drive, you had to change the ownership structure of your economy, but the eventual outcome of where I see you goes beyond the amount of melanin that you have in you. I see you for what you are as a human being.”

This however did not imply a blindness to race. “It’s never meant that,” she said. “But I think [non-racialism] has been hijacked by the likes of Solidarity and Afriforum who argue that black empowerment and employment equity practices are against non-racialism.”

In her book, she revealed she could be quite grumpy about this, “like a crotchety old aunty” who dismisses the “dreamscape of beer-guzzling, braaing mates . . . that is narrative of so much feel-good advertising”.

Her frustration here has resulted in a few sweeping, if clumsy generalisations in the book, like this unfortunate example: “I have white friends who call themselves ‘post-racial’, but who don’t have any black friends, except me and maybe two others. Their definition, I think, means listening to Karen Zoid, reading Max du Preez and liking Laugh It Off T-shirts.”

The elephant lurking between the covers of What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? is of course the economy. Haffajee suggested that Mangcu had perhaps missed the point she was making about the growing black middle class, that it had grown to its present size from an almost zero base in just 11 years.

“But that was at a growth rate of 6%,” she said. “What’s the growth rate now? I think if we want to be comfortable, then we need the black middle class to be three, maybe four times its size. So, if it’s about three million now, it needs to go up about 12 million to be in a position where you can feel its impact on the entire country. But it’s not going to happen with the way things are right now.”

Employment, she continued, was the number one priority with most South Africans. “I don’t think Cosatu’s at the forefront of the working classes,” she said. “It’s the unemployed that we should be listening to. Their needs and desires. It is they who should decide what a labour market should be.” Change here did not mean, she added, a slump into “unregulated” Asian sweatshops and so on – merely that it was more possible to bring more people into a workplace.

And change must come. In her final chapter she noted: “There is a substantial narrative, and it is largely but not only white, that is waiting for South Africa to fail. The next five years will separate out those with a pessimistic take and those of us who want our country to succeed.”

It started, she told me as we wound up our interview, with the listening. 

Some critics have suggested that Haffajee’s book has not served such movements as #FeesMustFall and #OpenStellenbosch particularly well. The Cape Town-based writer TO Molefe is particularly scathing, and has argued that not only was the book dashed out in haste, but her “weak and flawed interpretation” has given “those cynical of [such] movements  . . . a means to dismiss a new generation of important thinkers and activists”. Molefe, incidentally, had taken part in one of Haffajee’s round-table discussions, but then withdrew his participation.

It’s not an opinion that I share. If the book has the urgency of journalism about it, then that’s what it is – journalism. But it will, I believe, encourage debate more than hinder it. And that’s not just a whiteness thing.

Correction: an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the audience member who spoke at Haffajee’s launch as Chumani Maxwele, the UCT student whose protest actions with human waste started the #RhodesMustFall movement. The error is regretted.