Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-11

DR NKOSI: Knows what "yebo nfundu" is.  Chairperson, I do have this onerous responsibility of summing up in some particular fashion; which fashion I think needs me to highlight the important points that came out during the course of the submissions and also to attempt to focus the attention of every body here on the issues that really need to be dealt with as we go into the future.  I would like to do a number of things, first I would like to introduce what I'm going to be saying by quoting a book that was just recently written by a colleague of ours, those of us who used to be professors, and then proceed to look at the presentation that was made by Professor Sampie Terblanche.    Look at it in terms of  what I can add to it, because I think it is a significant presentation, then thirdly look at the important issues that I think we need to deal with, then finally to focus again on the points that were made by Professor Terblanche.  And then look at the relationships of these organisations that presented today, which organisations are grouped into three categories; essentially the private sector organisations are SACCOB, Nafcoc and Fabcos and then the two parastatels, Eskom and Armscor and then of course Old Mutual and Barlow Rand, these are private companies in their own right and that will be the end of my attempt to not summarise, chairperson, but to shed more light on what has been said.  Let me start with an introduction.
 The spirit in which I accepted the invitation to be on the panel for these hearings is captured in a book written by Dr Bernard Mako Siswe Makobani, a retired professor in the anthropology department in the University of Connecticut in (unclear).  Bernard is back in this country after a lengthy period of exile in the United States where we taught together.  This book is titled quote: ' The making of a racist state, British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa.'  The period, and I think professor Sampie will be, Sampie Terblanche will be interested in this is from 1875 to 1910 close quote.  It's published by the African World Press in Trenton, New Jersey in 1996.  Now the pertinent part of what I'm trying to introduce here, appears on page 370, under a chapter called, 'historical knowledge and it's importance'; I will repeat that, 'historical knowledge and it's importance'.  Ben says the following:
"Our present reality that is in South Africa, is made up of the descendants of beneficiaries of conquest as well as victims of dispossession and the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers.  In South Africa the past is never past, it is active in the present.  Our present condition is a consequence of the action of the past.  Any attempt to forget the past, will not cure our condition."
I could not disagree with a single word in that little quotation.  I am therefore motivated by the need to cure our condition, which I presume is one of the main primary objectives of this commission.  In my comments I will confine myself to the submissions that we've had today.  
 Let me start with Professor, I'm sorry, Sampie Terblanche's presentation.  In my view, Chairperson, that presentation was extremely valuable and fundamental to the understanding of what actually took place in the economic sphere and in the political sphere, and the social consequences of the interaction of politics and economics on the society that has evolved in this country.  It does the following things:  
 First, it shows the underlying political ideologies; by that I'm talking about the kind of state or states that we've had since 1652.   Second, it shows the dominant economic policies and philosophies that prevailed during that period.  These economic philosophies tended to, to a large extent, influence the kind of business interest one saw, or sees in this country.  
 Third, you then notice the resulting social relation that occur because of the interaction of those two powerful political forces.  The state, and the economic philosophy which is really driving the business interests in the country.  
 Now, I would like to add a little bit to what Professor Sampie Terblanche presented, Chairperson; and the temptation, being a former academic is to try and see whether I can fit in another puzzle.  But I think it will be instructive.  
 We start with for instance, Jan Van Riebeeck.  This may be funny, who was he?  He was an embezzler; who happened to be located at the Cape when one of the ships or two of the ships, I don't really recall were shipwrecked.  To cut a long story short, he is taken by another ship to the Netherlands.  When he gets there, as a worker for the Dutch East Indian Company, he was asked among other things, whether he would recommend to have the Cape set up as a station for the provisioning of ships that came from the Netherlands and they were going to Batavia, which is really Indonesia.  
 Against the vociferous objections of  two of the captains whose ships were shipwrecked  at the Cape, he decided that it was a good idea to set up the station at the Cape, in order to save his skin.  So here comes this man, after he had been sent to the West Indies and set up shop in the Cape.  Who sent him?  This is where the constructive part of the exercise occurs.  Forget that he was an embezzler.  He was sent by the Dutch East India Company.  Where did the Dutch East India Company get the charter to run this business?  From the state authorities of the Netherlands.
 Here is a classic case of how the state can determine the economic consequences of the beginnings of colonialism in South Africa.  Now he struggles to get labour from 1652 to 1657.  And finally he is given the go ahead again by the company to colonise the country.  
 So a very important period in the history of this country starts with 1657, during which two things happened; slaves get imported into the country, in order to help in the production on the land and colonisation starts with the free burgers who came in.  Now here are the beginnings of two very critical things.  One, plantation labour immediately became dual in character.  Blacks did the hard work, whites did the supervision.  
 The origins of the dual labour structure go back 1657, with the introduction of slavery.  If you do not believe me, read a book called, 'White Supremacy' by Frederickson.  It will give you the parallels of Dutch formation in the United States as well as in South Africa.  Very well documented, he's a professor at Stanford University in California.
 So you begin to see the evolution of the dual labour structure in which whites supervise blacks labour.  And that should be something that all of us are familiar with because you still see it to this day.  That's where it comes from.  So it is very important to recognise the origins of some of these formations in order to be able to deal with them as we progress into the next century.  
 The next thing that happens is that in the process of colonisation, introducing slaves, really developed a racist attitude towards the colour of black people.  And that attitude was carried through all the major industries of this country.  The agricultural and pastoral economy of the Cape was underpinned by black labour, working for whites.  
 When the next industry, which is the first mining industry starts in Namaqualand, that was copper mining, the same dual labour structure is moved into the copper mining industry.  Except that it is modified slightly by the intrusion of the experience of Cornwall miners, who mined tin.  There was no beneficiation for copper in Namaqualand, it all had to be shipped out to (unclear).  
 The development of the copper mining industry was then followed by the diamond mining industry and when that takes place there is not a European country that is not represented on the Kimberley mines.  What do they bring?  They bring their own work experiences from their own countries and followed by the capital that comes in from those countries.  What kind of labour is put at the disposal of capital?  It is again this dual labour structure that we see, being racist that started in the agricultural and pastoral economy, moved over with modifications from Cornwall into copper mining.  Now it comes in with important innovations from every part of the world into the diamond mining sector.  Now the actual development of the mining system that took place in Kimberley, was developed by and American mining engineer who had enormous experience in mining, because the United States was ahead in terms of mining in comparison to South Africa.  
 But the point I'm trying to make chairperson is I'm tracing the evolution of these phenomena, the labour structure that we've been talking about in terms of its extensions, migratory labour.  The founding of  the compounds.  The compounds were first put in place in the diamond mining industry in the country.  And also the running of that diamond industry pleased the members.  Cecil Rhodes even went to the extent of getting into politics in the Cape in order to be able to influence the economic imperatives that were needed to run the diamond mining industries.  Here's a classic case again of the duality of the state and business interests.  
 Now one thing I nearly left out, is in this evolution of the agricultural and pastoral economy of the copper mining industry, of the diamond mining industry, you also have an important powerful force, the economic philosophies that prevailed.  And I think Professor Sampie Terblanche mentioned that.  Free trade was very important during the period of British Imperialism as well as the operations of the Dutch East India Company and the state in the Cape.
 Later the development of free trade, comes in place, and I think Professor Sampie Terblanche is right when he says there was a mixture of both free trade and mercantilism during the period of the 1870's and thereabouts.  Now these forces are powerful.  They're not just home-grown, they stem from outside.  When Britain comes into South Africa and begins to see the potential of the diamond mining industry and begins to see what will happen with respect to gold, it takes a very important interest.  Britain comes here, motivated, not just by the dispossession of black off land but by making sure that they have the supplies of gold, which was a commodity that underpinned all international transactions at that time.  Now, I have now reached the point where I think Professor Sampie Terblanche started.  My addition is simply this, 1657, critical, slavery the jewel labour market.  Shortly thereafter you see the development of the agricultural and pastoral economy which really exploits that labour structure.  Then you see the development of copper mines of the copper mining industry and you see the modification of the system and it carries on through the diamond mining industry into the gold mining industry.  Where, suddenly, you see this massive amounts of labour streaming from various parts of Africa and they are housed in compounds.  The design of which was borrowed from the Panama Canal and you see the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, going as far as Northern China to fetch what they call 'coolie labour' to bring them into these compounds that were designed with the technologies that were evident in the Panama Canal.  Remember now, the Panama Canal was an incredible feat of engineering and you had to have hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of people working to cut through that (unclear).  The consequences of that, was that you have to house them in a very hostile environment and that's what happened.  
 Now I want to add by saying, is that what's gone or left.   Thank you very much.
 Now the point I'm also trying to make is that the same evolutionary process of this labour structure, was translated into the manufacturing sector.  Consequently what we now have, where there is a depravation of black managers, where there is a depravation of skilled people, where today, when you see these Africans in bakkies on a cold morning, you have free labour.  In the past it wasn't free labour.  If you got arrested and you were taken down to Marshall square, the probabilities that you would end up working in the farms of a white farmer, who was contracted by the government to take you for nothing, were very high.  I have gone through that experience, I stopped short from digging potatoes with my hands, because I had to be very street smart to get out of that trap as a young man.  But you see, those bakkies you see today, in the past they were huge lorries, with many people sitting in the back there and then two white farmers sitting with guns at the end, at the corners of the truck, ready to shoot you if you jumped off.  Now this is what we have seen in the evolution of how labour in this country has been used.  The point of this exercise is to simply say, I would like to add that little part eventhough, it is not very elegant because I've gone into the manufacturing sector.
 Let me try and be a little more elegant now.  The larger issues that we need to look at.  It really doesn't matter whether it was in 1657 or 1997, the nature of the state is very very important.  And the states change over time.  We now have a democratic state, but that state must understand, that when it comes to economic imperatives, whatever the economic philosophy is, we will always see the relationships between what the state does and what the dominant economic paradigm is.  And that's what we're looking at now with globalisation.  With the determinance of the (unclear) system etcetera.  I will not get into the question of whether should we follow the (unclear) system, and the advice they give or not, that's a separate issue.  But for us it is important to understand the relationship of the state and those economic philosophies.  It is also very important to think in terms of  how civil society is organised.  In 1657, civil society was limited, if it existed at all.  If you look at the journals of Jan Van Riebeeck, he has a whole compliment of the people he came in with from the Netherlands, including one thief.  And he was the head man who determined who did what kind of labour in that compliment.  There was no civil society, but civil society began to evolve after the burgers came into colonise the country.  
 And as you go further on, you begin to see the formation of political parties with the intent of really (unclear) the state and organising the rudiments of civil society which had laws and systems which were operative during that time.  We are no different now.  We have a state, we have a economic philosophy, it's a global economic philosophy, because we no longer have socialism around, but we also have civil society fortunately it's a little more democratic than what it was in the past, and then we have a legal framework that makes sure that the laws of this country are obeyed and executed properly and justice is done.  Now, I think if I go back again to Professor Sampie Terblanche's presentation, that's the attempt we are, his trying to make, to show you how these tend to interact.  It's within that forest that you start splitting hairs and you look at how individual interests behave.  Not necessarily the individual in this case, but we're looking at business organisations.  I switch immediately to SACCOB, Fabcos and Nafcoc.  
 I can take Nafcoc and Fabcos, chairperson and look at them in the context of really political organisations for their business organisations, because of their environment in which they were operating.  And still are operating.  They're disadvantaged in very many ways.  Now when you start looking at the sort of depravation that you see in Nafcoc and Fabcos and you look at the formation of ASACOM way back in 1892 and FCI in 1917 and you look at Nafcoc coming into being in the 1960's and you look at Fabco's in 1988. It becomes very clear that these cannot really be put alongside one another.  And when you look at SACCOB, in fact ASACOM and FCI, and you see how they tried to operate in the past.  The term, engagement, I think the deputy chairperson was right, is borrowed from Chester Crocker's concept of constructive engagement, which was a failure.  Let's assume that it is true, that engagement underlined the way in which ASACOM and FCI dealt with the states  of that time.  They have ample evidence to indicate the extent to which they engaged the state.  They even have a methodology they use to represent their feelings to the state.  These were the resolutions.  When you look at those resolutions and you see the end results of those resolutions over all those years, you scratch your head and you wonder, how could they have survived so long, but made very little difference.  And you look at the other group, Fabcos and Nafcoc, and you begin to realise invariably they had to become part and parcel of the liberation struggle in order to break the shackles that surrounded them.  I only have two minutes left.  I want to make one point clear.  It really doesn't make any sense for me to sit here, in particular me, and listen to the absolving of individuals and individual organisations, the same organisations become collective in character in ASACOM and FCI and SACCOB.  And you ask yourself, how much more power does one organisation have if it acts alone compared to if it acts in tandem with others.  Therefore we have to sooner or later, understand that we will have to bear collective responsibility for the some of the ills that this country has and it is not good enough to suggest that, ' I was not involved, I did not know about it'.  Those kind of things really are reminiscent of what happened at the (unclear) trials.  
 There is no comparison, this particular hearing is quite different from that.  But I must be honest with you, I cannot help but recall those trials.  The last thing I would like to say chairperson is simply add what Professor Sampie Terblanche has said,  I won't go over the seven points of depravation that he talked about.  But my view is that this is just the beginning of a very important process.  If you look at how I introduced my little comments, you'll realise we've just barely scratched the surface.  The question is how do we move from here to where, and the concept of a justice reconciliation statement in my view, is absolutely appropriate.  Thank you.