TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 29

107 At the hearing on the legal system in Johannesburg, the Natal Law Students said:

One of the more significant ways in which those who enjoyed the benefits of the past could make amends is to provide service to the community whom they allowed to be subjugated. As students, we can say that we do not want the money of these practitioners, we do not want them to go on their hands and knees and beg for forgiveness, we do not want any more platitudes and token gestures. The apology of the Pretoria Bar, amongst others, is noted. However, we need to go beyond this and ask ourselves, what are we going to do in concrete terms to redress the imbalances, to demonstrate that we really are sorry?

The law clinic suggests that these practitioners share their skills and resources. In concrete terms, all it requires is for each governing body to co-ordinate a programme where private practitioners volunteer their time to university law faculties, university law clinics and other community service organisations. If each governing body were to organise such an effort to ensure that more pro bono work and a greater degree of community service are carried out, then we would have gone beyond platitude to really transforming our society, to ensure that resources are shared, skills are shared and that human dignity is restored and protected.

108 In concluding this section, it is important to highlight, once again, the historical and moral basis for the above-mentioned demands for widespread reparations beyond the limited group of victims on which the Commission was required to focus. At the business sector hearing in Johannesburg on 11 November 1997, Professor of Economics, Sampie Terreblanche, listed the following seven reasons why “political supremacy and racial capitalism impoverished Africans and enriched whites undeservedly”:

Firstly, the Africans were deprived of a large part of land on which they conducted successful traditional farming for centuries. White farmers on the other hand had the privilege of property rights and access to very cheap and docile African labour, my father included.

Secondly, for decades, millions of Africans were paid exploitative wages, in all sectors of the economy but mainly in gold mining and agriculture. The fact that the Africans were politically powerless and economically unorganised might make them easy prey for super-exploitation [in favour of] the white workers.

Thirdly, a great variety of discriminative legislation not only deprived Africans of the opportunity to acquire skills, but also compelled and humiliated them to do really unskilled work at very low wages. While discriminatory measures were often to the disadvantage of business, they were very much to the advantage of white employees.

Fourthly, perhaps the greatest disadvantage which the prevailing power structures had for Africans is that these structures deprived them of opportunities to accumulate human capital, the most important form of capital in the twentieth century. For the first three quarters of the century, social spending, on education, pensions etcetera, on Africans, was per capita more or less ten to eight times smaller than on whites. In 1970, the per capita spending on white education was twenty times higher than the per capita spending on Africans.

Fifthly, the fact that a legal right to own property and to conduct a business was strongly restricted in the case of Africans also deprived them of the opportunity to accumulate property and to develop entrepreneurial and professional capabilities. The position of whites was again the complete opposite. They enjoyed property rights, they deprived Africans of their land, they had access to capital and the opportunity to develop business organisations, entrepreneurial capabilities, and etcetera.

Sixthly, the liberation struggle and the resistance against it had a devastating effect on the poorer 60 per cent of the African population. Their income, already very low in 1975, decreased by more or less 35 per cent from 1975 until 1991. The fact that the poorer 40 to 50 per cent of the total population, more or less eighty million people, cannot satisfy their basic human needs on a regular basis, makes it so much more urgently necessary to do at least something meaningful to improve the quality of their poverty.

Seventhly, it was not only individuals that have been impoverished and destroyed by the racist system, but also African societies, while it also prevented the South African people from becoming a society. We can put forward a strong argument, that the depravation, the repression and the injustices inherited in the racist system not only impoverished the African population but also brutalised large numbers of Africans. After decades of apartheid and the struggle against it, South African society is a very disrupted and divided society; not only along racial and ethnic lines but also because of seemingly irreconcilable values and attitudes.