I recently read two articles
that transported me to the dark ages of apartheid, to a time when people and
organisations opposed to the vile ways of institutionalised racial discrimination
faced difficult decisions about what to do about it.
Individuals who wanted to
rid South Africa of discrimination often had a difficult time. If you were Black and active, the police were
frequently brutal. Not only could you be
beaten up and imprisoned, but, if you were effective, you could also end up dead,
as did Steve Biko and others.
If you were White and
effective, you could face a range of possible punishments—arrest without trial,
home arrest, being banned (that is your ability to meet with people was
curtailed and nothing you wrote could be published). In general, the consequences were not as
draconian as those for Blacks. The
government was also highly successful in intimidating everyone so that parents
often forbade their children to become actively involved in ‘the movement’,
frequently threatening to withdraw the financial support for university for any
child who took part in protests, and so on.
Overseas corporations were
put under increasing pressure by their stockholders and customers to pull out
of South Africa. The decision for a
corporation to stay or leave was usually not an easy one: staying, resulted in
increasing pressure back home, boycotts of goods, and protests outside buildings;
leaving, frequently meant those you wanted to help ended up in worse
circumstances. Those who left, gave up
any chance of direct influence on government police; those who decided to stay,
tried to influence change from within by openly pushing back on the racial
employment laws, by training and promoting Blacks.
Educational institutions
were subject to the same pressures. When
I was at the University of Illinois, there was a strong movement for the
university to divest itself of all stock in its portfolio of companies that did
business with South Africa. I didn’t
think this to be constructive and argued that an educational institution’s role
could be more effective if, for example, it created a scholarship fund from the
dividends of the stock and used it to further the education of South African Blacks. My suggestion was heckled and ridiculed by
the protestors.
I often wonder whether my
position of engagement would have been more or less effective than disengagement. Engagement is complicated
and fraught with moral ambiguities; disengagement is easy and the moral issues
can be ignored.
Would I take the same position
today given similar circumstances. I honestly
don’t know.
So what were these articles
that threw me back to the times of apartheid and the decisions people and
organisations had to make?
The first (which you can
read here)
reported that some Danish and Swedish
retailers are pulling South African wines off their shelves, particularly wines
from the Robertson area a couple of hundred kilometres from Cape Town. Sweden, as a county, is considering an overall
ban.
What sparked this was a
documentary by Danish filmmaker Tom Heinemann, Bitter
Grapes - Slavery in the Vineyards, highlighting the awful conditions under which
many of the workers labour. Not only are
salaries abysmal (around US$300 a month, with free accommodation), but a
centuries-old practice, known as the dop system was still in place. What this means is that the vineyard owners
supplement the salaries by giving the workers free wine. As you can imagine, this isn’t good for worker
health. (At present the workers are on strike for a monthly wage of about
US$600.)
Workers in the vineyards |
Worker accommodation |
On the surface, this looks
like a cut and dried case. Boycott South
African wines to force winemakers to improve conditions.
However, as with the apartheid
times, such simple decisions come wrapped in real moral dilemmas.
The average South African
wine sells for about US$3. Yes, that
is THREE dollars. Half of that amount is
taken up with bottle; label, cork, and tax.
Another US$0.75 for transportation, leaving the farmer US$0.75 a bottle
from which to pay the labourers, maintain the farm, and make a profit.
At the same time, the same
bottle of wine, whose export price is kept low by huge pressure by overseas
importers, is often sold for big multiples of its South African price to
European and American consumers. In
fact, the Swedish state monopoly, the Systembolaget, probably makes 25 times
the profit on selling a bottle of South African wine than does the farmer who
produced it.
It is easy for retailers and
government to advocate boycotting South African wines. It looks good, and it feels right.
But what are the
consequences?
South African farmers, no
paragons of virtue, argue rightly that they will be forced into making a
horrible choice. They say, probably
correctly, that they have continued to hire workers, albeit under awful
circumstances, because of the already horrific unemployment rate. It is easy, the farmers say, to move their
farms to being highly mechanised, as are the farms of competing nations,
Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.
Mechanisation would lower the costs of production, increase profits, and
keep the importers happy. However, the unemployment
rate would soar, and those families now earning a pittance, would earn nothing.
So, what do you think Sweden
and other countries should do? Wash their hands and disengage? Or engage and try to influence what is happening?
And what is your personal position? What do you think? Will you avoid buying South African wines in
the future because you now know the conditions under which some of the wine is made—even
though it could lead to people losing their jobs? Or will you continue to buy South African
wines, helping to keep people employed, even though you know the conditions of employment
are exploitative?
I’d love to hear your
opinions.
(The second article, Walking the Talk, from which I gleaned a
lot about this issue and the South African wine industry, was written by
Michael Fridjhon. It can be read here.)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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