Breaking the Ignorance Contract: White South Africans' Recollections of Complicity and Collusion with Apartheid

It has become a commonplace joke in South Africa that one cannot find any white South African who admits to have voted for the Apartheid government. White South Africans tend to produce accounts of their past that present innocence, or at the least, ignorance of how their privilege was premised upon the disadvantaging and oppression of black South Africans.  Focus groups were conducted with white South Africans who lived in South Africa during the apartheid years, and who stated their willingness to engage in conversation about their racialisation into whiteness. They were invited to reflect on a) what they in fact did know, b) what they chose/preferred not to know, and c)  what they now feel they legitimately can claim they did not know about the system and how it impacted the lives of black South Africans while holding their racial privilege in place. Drawing on the emergent field of epistemologies of ignorance, the paper investigates the costs and rewards of breaking faith with "the ignorance contract" that holds white collusion with racial privilege in place. I explore some of the complexities of dealing with the shame and continued self-interest that inhibits the admission of complicity.