in the ANC
Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
A local historian told a colleague recently that he feared the African National Congress might be going doo- lally.
“Why?” asked my colleague.
For two reasons, the historian answered: one, the government seems intent on rewriting HIV/Aids science; and, two, the ANC appears obsessed about the Mail & Guardian – what it says and why.
I don’t propose revisiting the HIV/ Aids controversy. But what about the obsession with the M&G?
The preoccupation was evident yet again on Wednesday last week in the ANC’s submission to the Human Rights Commission’s (HRC) hearings into racism and the media. As the hapless Jeff Radebe presented it in his capacity as ANC head of policy, I was struck once again by what a strange experience it is to work for the M&G.
Here we are, one of the country’s smallest papers, published only on Fridays. Yet week after week, we have significance thrust upon us.
Invariably, each week word gets back to us – sometimes directly, often not, but always conveyed under the shadow of the most meaningful of frowns – that Thabo Mbeki, the presidency or the ANC (for which read a small section of its leadership) is “enraged” or “deeply concerned” by this or that article in our columns. And, almost invariably, it is the kind of article which, if published in almost any other democracy, would be about as remarkable as an ANC member failing to return your telephone call.
Another colleague captured the two sides of this experience well last year when he thought it was getting me down.
“Cheer up, Howard!” he said. “Where else in the world could you write an editorial 500 words long for a weekly selling 36E000 copies and cause two presidential aides to spend three days writing a 2E000-word response!”
Where else, indeed? Well, it would have to be a place where the leader or the ruling party took himself or itself not just seriously, not just most awfully seriously, but really, really very seriously – if you know what I mean. And in the manner of places ruled by people who take themselves really, really very seriously – if you know what I mean – the devil is the chap with a doubt or a sense of humour. And, in dealing with a crime like humour or doubt, great foghorns of denunciation are best to drown out its echo in the popular mind.
And loud condemnation marked the ANC’s submission last Wednesday. I urge you to read it.
Fourteen per cent of the submission is devoted to the M&G. We are accused of being unashamedly racist for an article from 1998 critical of then-deputy president Mbeki. This is the piece the ANC said our editor, Phillip van Niekerk, wrote but falsely passed off as the work of a black journalist then working for the paper, Lizeka Mda, in order to disguise his own racist intent. The drafters of the submission were lying, plain and simple, with defamatory intent and result. They and, now, the public know that. But they evidently lack the simple decency or courage to apologise to Van Niekerk and Mda.
We had wondered why the president’s office contacted us a few weeks ago asking for a copy of that article. Now we know.
At the time of writing, the ANC has still not posted its HRC submission on its website (www.anc. org.za). The reason may be that it has been advised not to compound the defamation it has already committed against Van Niekerk and Mda. But I would not be surprised to hear that some ANC members have told the distinguished authors of the submission that it is, plainly, an embarrassment.
For so it is. The argument underlying the ANC’s submission is reasonable enough – although I would argue with aspects of it. It says racism takes two general forms. The first is subjective. Here, racism is the set of attitudes that causes you or me to attribute innate characteristics to all members of another race, to hold them in contempt on that basis, and to act in a discriminatory fashion against them. The second general form racism takes is objective: here, racism is the set of power relations we have inherited that positions whites as dominant and blacks as dominated. These two forms of racism reinforce each other, according to the ANC.
It’s the unreason and vitriol that gets piled on this foundation that is the major problem. Very quickly, we hear that whites – now as in the past – are all racists who attribute to blacks various innate characteristics, hold black people in contempt on that basis, and treat them accordingly.
Two pieces of evidence are adduced for this sweeping generalisation. One is a quote from JBM Hertzog, founder of the National Party in the early part of last century. The other is a passage from JM Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace.
The authors of the submission quote a statement by Hertzog which refers in insultingly patronising terms to “the native” as akin to “an eight-year-old” child in comparison to whites who are deemed adults.
On what basis the authors think that what Hertzog said more than 50 years ago shapes my own or any other white South African’s views of black people they do not say and I do not know. But the authors feel no need to provide reasonable evidence for what is a grave charge against some five million of their compatriots. Their reasoning is no more accomplished than this: we think all whites are racists, therefore all whites are racists.
The authors are, evidently, even less moved by the requirements of intellectual honesty. A friend has done some research on the Hertzog quote. He has found that, contrary to the impression created by the quote provided in the submission, Hertzog does not believe that the infantile state he attributes to blacks is innate or permanent. Rather, Hertzog believes it is temporary. This may come as little comfort to someone so insulted. But this is an important difference. For it does not make of Hertzog quite the racist ghost the authors wish him to be.
What do the authors do with the two immediately adjacent passages in which Hertzog makes this point? Leave them out. One reads: “When [the black man] achieves his majority in development and civilisation and stands on an equal level with the white man, his adulthood will be acknowledged. Then the time will have come to take his claim to political rights into consideration, and further, to establish the relationship which he will have with the European.”
Now to the passage from the Coetzee book, in which the rape of a white woman by three black men is discussed. One would have thought that a work of fiction, such as Disgrace is, remains just that – a work of fiction. Yet, in the hands of the authors of this submission the few paragraphs of Coetzee’s novel that are quoted are proof positive that, “five years after our liberation, white South African society continues to believe in a particular stereotype of the African, which defines the latter as immoral and amoral; savage; violent; disrespectful of private property; incapable of refinement through education; and, driven by hereditary, dark, satanic impulses.”
From this point, things move rapidly downhill. The authors present whites and, in particular, the “white media”, as malign agencies consciously seeking to ridicule or undermine black achievement. Normal criticism of a government becomes, when applied to the ANC, an attempt to “show that, when the African barbarians took over from the civilised whites, the rot started and is escalating beyond control”. Normal criticism of a political figure, when applied to the likes of Mbeki, becomes in the minds of those who wrote this document an attempt to propagate a stereotype of blacks as “corrupt; anti-democratic; dictatorial; and, contemptuous of the people”. And so on.
Perhaps the most remarkable passage in the submission is the depiction of white South Africans’ praise of Nelson Mandela. It is said to indicate whites’ relief that Mandela was, in Hertzog’s terms, a “departure from the norm, a solitary ‘European’ among hordes of black savages as described by JM Coetzee”.
I thought we all knew that Man- llldela’s personal llland political llachievement lllwas a source of inspiration and amazement to people the world over, of all colours, cultures and backgrounds: his extraordinary fortitude, his llwill, his charisma, his calm, his capacity to llimbue llothers lllwith a feeling of well-being and security, his maturity, and the power that his generosity of spirit exercised over both lhis com- llrades lland those who had once been his enemies. But, no, the ANC’s submission would have us believe that praise for Mandela is, when it emanates from white South Africans, an expression of their perversity and racism.
The authors, moreover, go to some lengths to get their pronouns and possessives right when they say that, in response to one “white” article comparing Mandela’s virtues to the inconsiderable stature of his colleagues in the ANC leadership, that (my emphasis) “Mandela responded to it in person by writing his own article in response”. And they then quote a paragraph from the article in which Mandela says that South Africa’s owes its post-apartheid success to “the African masses”, not to him.
Far be it from me to allege, in the manner of the authors of the submission, that this article was in fact written by Mbeki and is now being passed off as the work of Mandela because Mbeki’s insecurities dictate that he must use Mandela’s byline to pooh-pooh Mandela’s own formidable reputation. And far be it from me, when both Mandela and Mbeki say that I am telling a defamatory lie and ask me to retract and apologise, to behave like the authors. That is, by not responding and not giving a damn.
There is a mean, insecure and fevered spirit abroad in the ANC. A party whose leadership was capable of placing before South Africans – all South Africans – a vision and a set of goals in which we could all participate and for which we could all take responsibility is now, notwithstanding its perfunctory nods in the direction of non-racialism, snarling in search of blood conspiracies and scapegoats. White South Africans, according to the ANC’s submission to the HRC, are incapable of a non-racist and, so, a constructive contribution to the future.
Whose pygmy purposes can this kind of nonsense serve? Perhaps it best serves a group of men and women at the top of the ANC who fear that their huge gamble on economic policy will fail; people who sense that now is the moment to begin to stress a blood bond in order to hold together a party which might otherwise blow apart; people who sense that now is also the moment to line up a blood enemy.
Or perhaps the interests served by the submission are apparent in its talk of “objective” racism. For, in the eyes of its authors, getting rid of “objective” racism means equalising power relations. And this, for them, means achieving racial representivity in positions of power and influence.
For them, deracialising positions of power and influence means reracialising in proportions they approve of. It means jobs for coms and pals – and, frankly, bugger the poor if they don’t get their welfare because a bunch of incompetent coms or pals are running that part of the show.
We may be at a turning point, I sense. This week we commemorated the assassination seven years ago of Chris Hani. That was a moment when we had reason to fear for the future of our country. April 5, the day the ANC presented its submission to the HRC, may have been another such day. For the authors of that submission set out, among other things, to kill off five million South Africans’ right to hope.
Unless someone can turn the ANC around, we may well be hurtling, fast forward, back to the past.