/ 25 May 2001

Forward to a plural marital model

Letters to the best man

Chez Uhuru

228 Musgrave Road

iThekwini

To:Dr Essop Pahad

The Presidency

Union Buildings

Tshwane

Dear Dr Pahad,

In recent months I have been plagued by guilt, without being able to identify the source. Every time I have seen our leader on television, heard his inimitable voice on radio, or read in the press of his extension of the boundaries of knowledge, my feelings of adulation have been subverted by a sense that I cannot sincerely count myself among those our leader can trust.

This week, the essence of my discomfort suddenly dawned on me. Here I am; on the inside; one who understands that loyalty to our leader is the basis of patriotism; a confidant of our leader’s Best Man; yet, despite all that, pursuing a political agenda in terms of which my access to the Cabinet is premised upon acting as Best Man to somebody else.

I have realised that my strategy is the unwitting product of a lack of lateral thinking. The more I think about it, the more I realise that my myopic vision is a vestige of Eurocentric conditioning and uncritical acceptance of an institution suited to a redundant stage of history. Why, I now ask myself, have I been charting my path to power on the assumption that a leader need have merely one wife, and thus merely one Best Man?

Whenever I find myself confused, I try to imagine what you would do. What advice you would give me.

I am not sure whether you would regard anything that was not written in the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953 as having scientific integrity and I hope I am not straying too far in drawing on something Friedrich Engels wrote in the 19th century.

You will probably accept as trite the Marxist proposition that capitalist relations of production determine the form of all other social institutions and activities. It is not merely the public institutions of capitalism, such as Parliament and the law, which are determined by the economic relations.

According to Engels, the institution of marriage in terms of which two people generally live in an individual isolated unit, bringing up children in a nuclear family, was an institution peculiar to capitalist society. He anticipated a historical stage at which sexual relations would not always take the form of bourgeois marriage “that state of leaden misery known as domestic bliss” but would, inevitably, take a more collective or communal form.

It occurs to me that the limitations I have imposed on myself in assuming that my appointment as a Cabinet minister is to be based on association with somebody other than our leader and the questions that are unfairly being posed regarding our leader himself, are founded upon a conception of marriage that is static and outmoded. We are not living in 19th century Britain with its myriad of small individual producers, but in an age where the market is characterised by conglomerates and a concentration of capital. In this stage of late capitalism, as social forms anticipate socialism, mergers and acquisitions are the norm. Does it not follow that our marital regimes should reflect the monopolistic conditions of our economic relations, opening the way to polygamous configurations in alignment with corporate reality?

If we opt for a more inclusive marital model, I will be able to banish all thoughts of a political career for myself that does not involve service of our leader. The possibilities are exciting indeed. Should our leader take more wives, I will, like you, and without replacing you, also be able to serve as his Best Man, thus securing ministerial status. We could even mobilise popular support for pluralist maritallllll arrangements under the banner of our national motto “Unity in Diversity”.

The model recommends itself, moreover, as a means of political control. If our leader were to marry his entire Cabinet, he would be able to secure pledges of life-long commitment from all who serve him. Perhaps, out of respect for our leader’s sound relationships with his Zimbabwean and Namibian counterparts, this initiative should be limited to his female colleagues. A useful feature of the marriage vows is that the parties commit to each other, so they say, “until death do us part” a salutary source of discipline, if ever there was one.

There remains, of course, the technical difficulty that capital punishment is currently outlawed, but as anyone with knowledge of our leader’s policies knows, there is, in truth, no right to life in South Africa. It must, however, be said that there is a limit to what omission can facilitate in disposing of the unwanted whether in a domestic or national context. Surely the time has come to enhance the status of our leader by taking the incremental step of giving him explicit powers of the kind exercised by real leaders such as Henry the Eighth.

An injection of several Best Men into the Cabinet would also serve to consolidate our leader’s reign. If he were to take, for example, 10 new spouses, the attendant swelling of the ranks of the Cabinet with ministers without portfolio in your fashion would ensure a ministerial corps of dedicated loyalists, unencumbered by the distractions of having to account for the performance of government departments. Imagine it, not one, but 10 Cabinet ministers, focusing all of their energies on prolonging the tenure of our leader.

You should not feel that your unique status will then be diluted. You will remain the original, the benchmark, the blueprint. We must obviously devise a grading system. In my initial draft I have you designated as the Senior Best Man. We could refer to those following in your footsteps as the Second Best Man, Third Best Man and so on.

Alternatively, we could employ terminology such as Deputy Best Man, Assistant Best Man and distinctions of that kind. A more visual means of projecting the varied status of the respective Best Men would be relatively simple if you were to adopt military dress as suggested by me in my last letter.

As the Senior Best Man you might want to opt for the uniform of an admiral, with each additional Best Man assuming a diminished rank further down the hierarchy. Another differentiation might be in the number of medals or in the quality of the sunglasses.

Yours for multi-dimensional conjugal possibilities and the deepening of democracy,

Craig Tanner