The cover of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon is a perfect visual metaphor for the South African transition from apartheid. The image, a single beam of white light being refracted through a prism, becoming a rainbow, perfectly captures the way the transition to democracy in 1994 became a prism refracting whiteness into a multiplicity of coexisting colours. This trick of refraction temporarily enabled white South Africa to erase its complicity in the persistence of racialised poverty and deepening inequality in favour of an imagined unity that left the fundamental structural problems of South African society unchallenged.
In a context of persistent racialised poverty, the rainbowfication of whiteness serves several critical functions: it revitalises settler myths of belonging, it erases whiteness as an identity of dominance and oppression, and it unifies an elite against the class interests of the majority, functioning as a co-option and pacification of black power through a project of assimilation.
As descendants of settlers in settler colonial societies we have not come to terms with our settler identities, our complicity in colonialism, and our ongoing participation in reinforcing colonial structural violence. But we still have an insatiable need to belong to our colonised lands. This need drives the denial of our complicity and guilt in perpetuating an unjust system that continues to marginalise vast swathes of the population. We justify our presence and privilege through ‘claims to belonging’ through which we attempt to demonstrate the naturalness of our presence.
Historically, these claims take the form of myths about ‘manifest destiny’, discoveries of terra nullius, or racist ideas of superiority to indigenous populations. However, with the passing of time these myths have become too awkward to maintain (at least in public), and settlers shift to declaring our deep love of these stolen lands. But without reparations and restorative justice, the love of settlers for their colonies is akin to the way an abusive spouse loves their partner. This is a love contingent on subjugation through violent domination. It is entirely conditional. The deep violence of this ‘love’ is revealed in the scars borne by colonised people and colonised lands. Apartheid spatial planning scars the cities. Mines and monocultures scar the countryside. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment persist as colonisation’s gangrenous untreated wounds, threatening septic death to society. And people bear the psychic scars of generations of trauma received and inflicted in ongoing cycles of violence and dispossession.
Is this truly what we love?
This ‘love’ that depends on the ability to destroy landscapes under monocultures, mines, and concrete grotesqueries; that demands the exploitation of indigenous bodies in pursuit of profit; that encloses nature into exclusive, expensive, reserves which are valued only because they offer relief from the oppressive lives that settlers have created through the imposition of systems of exploitation.
The seductive power of the rainbow nation for whiteness lies in its offer of a new myth of belonging, unencumbered by the baggage of oppression and exploitation. A myth that easily refracts whiteness into a shining beacon of hope without the burdensome need to address or even acknowledge the hundreds of years of oppression prior to the prismatic moment of rainbowfication.
That moment, in which whiteness was refracted, becoming multicoloured, facilitated the perpetuation of oppression, by expanding whiteness to a broader, darker, elite, and reified a rainbowness built on the terms of existing power structures. This elite transition facilitated the broadening of whiteness to include a rising black elite while simultaneously enabling the invisibility of whiteness as an identity of dominance, exploitation, and oppression. By making whiteness ‘invisible’ the perpetuation of oppression and exploitation were ensured.
Disappearing whiteness mirrors the invisibilisation process through which colonialism turns into neo-colonialism. The relative invisibility of extraction and exploitation in neo-colonial relationships is key to maintaining these processes. The rainbowfication of whiteness, and its subsequent invisibility, similarly ensures that the processes of exploitation and oppression established through colonialism and apartheid remain substantively unchanged in the new South Africa.
Because the maintenance of exploitation and the extraction of profit by historically privileged white elites, transnational capital and the new black bourgeoisie, is reliant on the invisibility of whiteness, any process or development that begins to highlight the racial basis of this exploitation needs to be undermined. The de-emphasising of whiteness as a key structural element in the maintenance of exploitation is undertaken at multiple levels, from the individual to the public and political.
The compromise of 1994 thus avoided the need to challenge the fundamentally white supremacist nature of South African society. South Africa remains white supremacist as long as its social and cultural norms and values reflect those of the cultural hegemony of western imperialism. Maintaining this compromise means that the perceived legitimacy of all mainstream political parties depends on their working to sustain the invisibility of whiteness by ensuring the continuity of colonial structures of exploitation and oppression.
Politically, therefore, the project of whiteness is foundational to all the major post-94 parties. In practice this means that the conflation of whiteness as a structure of exploitation, whiteness as eliteness, and whiteness as an aspirational cultural identity defines the political terrain of post-apartheid society. This conflation has co-opted and pacified black power and the existence of any effective principled oppositional politics in South Africa.
Rainbowism means that belonging is assured for settlers, but is contingent on wealth and an elite status for the colonised. In this context, the rainbow nation ultimately becomes a class-based project of assimilation.