Kader Asmal
A Second Look
In 1995, an article I co-wrote on liberalism noted that it “has sadly become South Africa’s last credible instrument of privilege”, offering an oxygen tent for apartheid. We wondered whether “discerning liberals” might reverse this.
Today, the answer is clear. The Democratic Party is unabashedly the new voice of white privilege and power. Its petulant appeal (which the inelegant gatvol slogan exemplified) belongs to a party of spoiled brats, not visionary leaders.
In her 1957 travelogue, Going Home, Doris Lessing predicted the apartheid privileged would become “increasingly soft with self-pity”. This, she wrote, “is the most remarkable symptom of `white civilisation’ on the defensive”.
Thus, in her remarks at a Book Journalism Awards banquet on April 22 1998, the DP’s Dene Smuts attacked what she views as “a few false notes in the free speech symphony”.
She expressed the hope that these allegedly false notes were merely the “start-up squawks and squeaks of instruments being tuned before everyone plays off the same score”.
Smuts thus ironically envisages a type of free speech in which “everyone plays off the same score”. While purporting to champion diversity and free expression, Smuts expects that everyone will sing from the particular hymn sheet she happens to fancy. She both celebrates diversity while undermining it.
She confirms Edward Said’s observation that cultural liberalism is a “forceful and tyrannical” – not pluralistic and accommodating – value system.
And what are these false notes? Despite her own shrewdly disguised pretensions towards cultural overlordship, despite her own desire that “everyone plays off the same score”, Smuts accuses me, personally, of advocating censorship by means of political correctness.
Ironically, Smuts bases this accusation on a book review of March 29 (not in the Mail&Guardian, incidentally) in which I distinguished artistic from political ambitions and emphasised that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction eschews narrow political ambitions.
Smuts objects to what she calls my “shock denunciation of critics, booksellers and distributors” who were complicit in apartheid.
Many booksellers, for instance, voluntarily submitted advance proofs of forthcoming books to censorship authorities, facilitating prior restraints on distribution – a feat of co-operation that was not mandated by law. One reputable history of South Africa played it so safe that it blanked out a whole chapter on black nationalism for fear of prosecution – making this a collector’s item today.
Nowhere does Smuts deny the complicity. She just does not want me to mention it; she wants us to forget past misdeeds, even though at the same time she is gatvol with political morality.
Smuts even defends a daily books editor who, last year, referred to black writers like Zakes Mda as “pigmentally correct”. This same books editor launched a wholly unreasoned summary attack on our only Nobel laureate for literature, Nadine Gordimer, even while his elementary errors (misnaming her debut novel The Lying Days as A Lying Gaze) suggested an incompetent grasp of Gordimer’s work.
In the unexacting tone of the colonial amateur, Smuts affably dismisses this books editor’s incompetence, calling it a mere Freudian slip. Yet would a black journalist in a similar position, committing such elementary error alongside such outrageous racial innuendo, be treated so indulgently?
In another instance, Smuts again conceded the merits of my criticism, but nevertheless doggedly defended a second incompetent reviewer as a “poor soul”. Here is exactly that self- pitying defence of colonial mediocrity that Lessing predicted.
The DP presents itself as the party of competence, not white power. In resisting affirmative action, it is supposedly defending merit. But – as illustrated by Smuts’s affinity for incompetent book reviewers – the DP exempts its own constituency from meritocracy’s hurdles. They see whiteness and competence as synonyms, regardless of contrary evidence in particular cases.
The DP is unable to distinguish between the real censorship of yesteryear, imposed by a Parliament in which it sat (at the feet, of course, of naked, racist power) and the uninhibited debate that new democracy brings. It is only now that, secure in the constitutionally protected free speech that is democracy’s irrevocable gift, her prissy talk of censorship – set off apparently by my mere act of writing an article! – suddenly arises to tax our patience.
Integral to free speech is the right to criticise the critic. Smuts would deny us that right. She poses as a defender of free speech in order, ironically, to curtail debate. If the books editor of a major newspaper abuses his position to disparage black artists as “pigmentally correct”, the rest of us are as free to criticise him as he is free to voice his race- baiting and right-wing views.
This echoes American cultural debates in which rightwingers reject critical comment as if it were simply an accusation of political incorrectness, and then use this to deflect justified complaints. It is a lazy type of argument which simply equates criticism with “shutting up at source” arguments about literature, art, science or politics, as Smuts does.
I will confess to holding particular political and moral views, but it is absurd to deduce from this that others will therefore be afraid to voice contrary opinions.
In the past, the apartheid regime viciously censored anti-apartheid views. Today, open debate is the prerogative of all, and I reject the notion that the tenor of my book reviews can be dismissed as a “false note” in the free speech symphony. Free speech is not the domain of the DP alone, or even mainly. Free speech was brought about when the liberation movement defeated apartheid, and of this we can be justly proud.
Labels like “political correctness” are deployed, as the United States literary scholar and legal theorist Stanley Fish points out, “to delegitimise the complaints of victimised groups”. Under these right- wing pressures, Fish suggests the US First Amendment, which Smuts ineptly quotes in her attack on me, has become “The First Refuge of Scoundrels”. Smuts mimics these scoundrels. We should be gatvol with that.
Kader Asmal is the minister of water affairs and forestry