Sitting in the waiting room of my aroma-chiropodist the other day, I picked up a recent copy of what used to be that excellent British magazine The Spectator. It had an interesting front page. In enormous letters it announced THE END OF SOUTH AFRICA — Rian Malan Mourns the Collapse of His Homeland. That’s going to be worth a read, I thought, but I turned first to a favourite part of the ‘Speccie”, the weekly literary competition under the byline Jaspistos. This section is one of the long-time survivors in the Speccie and which, so far anyway, seems to have escaped the ferocious pruning shears of the magazine’s new editor, Matthew d’Ancona, and who, it seems, is determined to strip this fine old right-wing war horse of its spirit and identity.
Each week, The Spectator readers are invited to take part in short ingenious competitions. They are invited to write short poems with specified rhyme schemes, to compose imaginary letters to the papers as they might have been written in Tudor times, those sorts of things. In the edition I was reading, the competition was headed ‘Pseudospeak”. Readers had been invited to provide typical examples of ministerial waffle.
The entries took one back to that hilarious Peter Sellers spoof, Party Political Speech, in which he parodied the meaningless drivel that politicians so often deliver from the hustings. Here’s a little test for Mail & Guardian readers. What follows are selected sentences from the six winning entries for the Jaspistos ‘Pseudospeak” competition. Intertwined with these are quotes from an actual political statement published in a Cape Town newspaper in October. In the following, the passages are numbered. What you have to do is decide which bits are from The Spectator parody, which are the extracts from a real statement.
(1) At the end of the day, education policy must encourage self-actualisation while tackling social exclusion. In ignoring voters we ignore democracy. (2) There are hundreds and thousands of things that the government does and should continue to do; but it should define a new trajectory of growth and development, identify the key things required to attain it and make the strategic choices in expending effort and allocating resources in order to blaze along this new trail. (3) We look forward to — perhaps in the future — no hasty solution — no hasty solution, but a tough vision of renewal, building on a truly sustainable course of action. (4) In the context of resource scarcity, growing inequality and increasing environmental degradation, making strategic choices on where and how to invest scarce resources in order to maximise social and a economic returns is an imperative.
(5) This government has successfully continued to strive year on year, not merely to level the playing fields, but to build on them, moving rapidly towards deliverability and literally touching the people at every point, (6) therefore fulfilling the mandate from stakeholders to access a wider and wider range of initiatives and opportunities, to define shared growth and integrated development through proposing strategic principles, concrete outcomes and realisable targets.
(7) We must empower communities to drive the criminal element from our streets and embrace them in the educational fold. (8) It is widely acknowledged that higher rates of gross domestic product are a prerequisite for boosting job creation. (9) Our own policy is one of transparency. (10) In assuming its developmental role, the government recognises its position as a key facilitating, partnering and collaborative economic agent through its own fixed investment and developmental spend. (11) My objective is nothing less than a dynamic, top-performing, cutting-edge service. (12) Public investment and the use of publicly owned property are therefore key mechanisms to achieve higher GDP growth, guiding private investment decisions and facilitating social and economic spin-offs.
(13) If there are lessons to be learned, we will not shirk from taking the tough decisions necessary. (14) These include colour-coded poverty, an inequitable distribution of wealth and assets, environmental degradation, urban sprawl and social dysfunction.
It’s quite hard to tell which is the satire and which is the real thing. Hollow insincerity is shared by both. Those passages not from the Jaspistos parodies are verbatim extracts from an article written by the Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool and published in the Cape Times on October 13. As to which is which is which, see below.
Having enjoyed Jaspistos, I moved on to read Rian Malan’s prophecies of South African doom. A week or three ago, my learned friend, Maureen Isaacson, over at the Sunday Independent, had some strong things to say about Malan’s piece in The Spectator. I would disagree, Maureen. The wrong thing to do with Rian Malan is to take him seriously. Rian is to be pitied. How sadly he misses his vanished limelight: the squib that longs to be a Roman candle. In his Spectator article, he desperately tries to be controversial, but all he really does is cobble together the prejudices and fears of the wittering classes. A little name-dropping adds weight to his essentially superficial analysis of the current South African political and social disorder — as disturbingly chaotic as it is in many places. Rian Malan’s is the sort of doom-dialogue of those countless who derive their predictions from a sort of spiteful Schadenfreude and little else. The end of South Africa indeed!