White South Africans Still Earn 4 Times More Than Black Peers, Decades After Apartheid

RACISM AND INEQUALITY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: WHY THE ANC’S COMMITMENT TO NON-RACIALISM HAS FAILED TO DISMANTLE WHITE PRIVILEGE

White South Africans earn, on average, four times more than Africans over a lifetime of work. That single figure, drawn from Jacob R Boersema’s book “Can We Unlearn Racism?”, captures the scale of an economic divide that has outlasted apartheid by three decades. The gap is not accidental. It is the direct result of centuries of racist exploitation that built white wealth at the expense of black communities.

The consequences of this unresolved legacy are visible across South African society. Millions of black people face the compounding effects of racialised poverty, rampant crime, gender-based violence, and failing political institutions. Former president Thabo Mbeki recently offered a scathing critique of the African National Congress for its inability to address these interconnected crises. His criticism extended to a specific moment: the ANC’s failure to organise a racially diverse audience for the memorial service of deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte. For Mbeki, that failure symbolised the party’s inability to embody its foundational commitment to non-racialism.

His analysis points to real problems. But it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.

Mbeki assumes that diversity itself produces harmony, and that an ideological commitment to non-racialism should naturally translate into racial unity. The reality is more complex. Since its formation in 1912, the ANC has been ideologically trapped inside a 19th-century framework of Victorian liberalism and Christian humanism, a framework that equipped the party poorly to understand how white racism actually functions.

The party’s early history reveals this limitation clearly. In 1912, Reverend John Dube, addressing the South African Native Congress (now the ANC), encouraged black people to show “deep and dutiful respect for the rulers whom God has placed over us,” believing that “the sense of common justice and love of freedom so innate in the British character” would ultimately triumph over racial prejudice. This strategy of moral appeal to white benevolence, rather than political demands grounded in power, defined the ANC’s approach for decades. From its formation through the 1950s, the party failed to win a single political victory against white racism.

The ANC shifted course from the 1950s onward, incorporating Pan-Africanism and Marxist analysis. The Marxists within the party argued that capitalism, not race, was the fundamental problem. This ideological move carried a significant consequence: black people directed their hostility toward the apartheid government rather than toward white people as a group. Those who insisted on using race as an analytical category were eventually purged from the party.

By the turn of the 21st century, the ANC had abandoned British liberalism and Christian politics but retained its commitment to non-racialism. At the same time, it embraced capitalism, specifically the capitalism that white people had entrenched in South Africa. This combination has produced three outcomes: an intellectually impoverished organisation that rewards incompetence and greed; corruption and disregard for law at ambient levels; and a dysfunctional society with broken social cohesion.

The failure of non-racialism as a unifying principle is now evident in the data. Statistics South Africa shows that black African unemployment rates remain between four and five times higher than those for whites, reflecting, in the agency’s own words, “strongly persistent legacies of apartheid policies.” The black middle class, often cited as evidence of progress, consists of merely 4.2 million people in a black population of 48 million. Research demonstrates no decrease in racialised wealth inequality since apartheid ended.

Meanwhile, the white narrative that attributes persistent inequality to the failures of the black elite conveniently erases white racism from post-apartheid South Africa. This erasure allows the structures of white privilege to remain unexamined and intact. The vast majority of black people remain trapped in poverty with few prospects of escape.

Mbeki’s public acknowledgment that non-racialism has failed to unite South Africans marks a rare moment of honesty from an ANC politician. Yet the party itself has not developed a compelling analysis of the relationship between white wealth and black poverty. Until black South Africans break free from the ideological capture of non-racialism, the legacy of white racism will persist, continuing to structure opportunity and deprivation along racial lines. Whether the ANC, after more than a century of existence, has the capacity to develop that analysis remains the question its critics are waiting for it to answer.