South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) highlights key contestations about the nature of the relationship between race and class which may constitute the most powerful fault-line of South Africa’s post-apartheid socio-political terrain. Survey findings from the 2011 South African Reconciliation Barometer indicate that inter-racial social interactions have gradually increased at both national and Gauteng provincial level. However, GCRO’s focus group research project on non-racialism suggests the opposite in terms of close social contact between different race groups.

For example, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation/GCRO focus groups raise class as a key source of social division which prohibits close inter-racial social contact. Some respondents stated that ‘rich people find it easier to accept each other’, and that ‘all poor people of all races have a lot in common’. Such remarks suggest that apartheid conditioned modes of race and racist thinking remain normalised in the modalities of thought and everyday life practices of South Africans.