My family’s ritual Sunday lunch at home has not been the same since the birth of the ANC’s half sister Congress of the People (Cope). At the best of times, we are a loud, rambunctious bunch eager to engage in heated debates on the latest political upheavals and trade saucy barbs on the most frivolous and salacious gossip.
The balcony or the ”head office” as its known is not a place for the faint hearted or those unwilling to participate in these robust discussions. We usually gather at midday straight after church. It is a euphemism really to refer to it as lunch because these lazy, wine-soaked affairs usually go on till late in the evening depending on how scrumptious that Sunday’s lunch offering happens to be and the quality of various news nuggets being chewed on.
Sometimes I suspect we are rivalled in our boisterous and bizarre behaviour only, by Spud’s family in Johan van der Ruit’s hilarious account of life at a Midlands boys’ boarding school. Yet in the middle of all the chaos and joshing, just like Spud’s family, we all love one another dearly. This love, however, is going through its most exacting test in ages, as I’m sure is the case in many other families and relationships as we face the most dramatic political sea change in the country since the end of apartheid.
With the election drawing ever nearer, talk at Sunday lunch is dominated by politics. The split in the ANC has drawn firm and unwavering battle lines in my family. The differences in political allegiance cut across spousal and filial lines. Siblings are practically at one another’s throats.
Although our debates have always been rigorous and lively, they now border on screaming matches. We’ve now resorted to having a time keeper at the table who gives each speaker two minutes to make his or her point, to avoid turning the discussion into a downright farce.
Thankfully, once the restive subject of ANC vs Cope is dropped, we happily move on to far less personal and rancorous yet just as fascinating topics such as: ”Is Rihanna really getting back together with Chris Brown?—”
It seems as if in my family though, we have so far remained relatively unscathed by the political fracas in the country compared with what is happening in certain other quarters.
Recently I’ve heard of two long-term relationships that have broken up acrimoniously and bitterly as a result of differences brought about by this political split. In both instances it is the men who have initiated the parting of ways. In both cases the men are steadfast ANC supporters who are infuriated that their partners of many years have chosen to abandon the party to bow at the ”altar” of former clergy man Mvume Dandala.
What intrigues and alarms me is that both men’s anger and decision to call it quits seems to have been triggered in part by their concerns about what impact their partners’ political affiliations may have on their business interests!
Their main bone of contention is that the contracts or tenders they have received by virtue of their political allegiance to the ANC will be compromised by their spouses’ vocal campaigning for Cope.
How ludicrous.
So what is informing our political discourse then? Is it simply now a crude case of quid pro quo? In my naivety, I’ve always dared to believe that people’s political convictions, — often passionate and unwieldy — are guided by loftier values that we should hold dear such as principle and ideology and are not simply driven by patronage and access to resources.
I’m appalled and bewildered to think that someone would want to end a long-term relationship or risk alienating a parent or their offspring based purely on the threat to their material status. This would mean we’ve become a nation of rent seekers with no soul.
Political disagreements should by all accounts be robust and we should all be allowed our standpoint, but as a nation I think we need to examine carefully what we hold dear as human beings and what character we aspire to behold before we throw everything away on the altar of expediency.
Let’s have the debates and be free to disagree, but most importantly let’s also recall the price to be paid by looking at lessons from our own history when intolerance goes unchecked. In numerous discussions taking place around the country in the run-up to the elections, I don’t think anyone of us would’ve imagined that when Mosiuoa Lekota served divorce papers on the ANC, this seismic shift in the political landscape would also manifest itself in a very real and personal way in our own lives.
What will happen then, to misquote Gabriel Garçia Marquez, to ‘Love in the time of Cope’? Whatever happens — let’s not allow the beast of intolerance, seemingly coupled with naked greed, to engulf and destroy us.