Robert Kirby ONE MIRACLE IS NOT ENOUGH by Rex van Schalkwyk (Bellwether)
About a quarter of the way through Rex van Schalkwyk’s very disquieting book I had moments of a curious temporal shift. So much of what I had been reading could well be the Kafkaesque testimony presented to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of, say, 50 years hence.
The syllabus of this future body – exposing the trespasses of post- transitional South Africa – would be more or less that of the present TRC: to discover what went so terribly wrong. What led, for instance, to a Greater Johannesburg Council spending more on its own entertainment – R15 000 a week – than it does on ambulances? What has led to the Heath commission presently investigating no less than R440-million worth of fraud in the Eastern Province? What underwrites an apparent complacency in the face of deliberate violent crime? A reporter is maliciously assaulted by nine policemen and it takes six weeks of angry media complaint before anything is done about it?
Whether, like the present TRC, a similar future body will often deliberately pander to whatever faction of strutting apparatchiks replaces the present government is a strong possibility. In the first place there is no such thing as an honest committee and in Africa, as a rule, governments tend to get worse the more often they change.
Van Schalkwyk’s book is going to annoy a great many people. Reading his candid, penetrating analysis of the often deranged style of politics that has developed in South Africa is not for the touchy. For reactionaries it will be a satisfying exercise in Schadenfreude.
The title of the book states Van Schalkwyk’s argument in full. The first “miracle”, in which South Africa underwent mostly peaceful political transformation, has run out of steam. What was a forcible need for democratic change has been supplanted by a now critically urgent need for a godsend of far greater dimensions. Something to winch South Africa from the well of corruption, in competence, brutal violence, economic frailty into which the government, its parastatals, a terrified private sector, criminals and all the rest of them slide deeper by the week. Something that will obstruct the runaway flow of money used for underwriting profligate and grandiose schemes of politicians. Something to stop the runaway flow of professionals and scientists. Something that will, in short, save South Africa from the distressing social and political situation into which its dream is disintegrating.
The time for self-congratulation is clearly over and Van Schalkwyk sidesteps no icons in his adamant deconstruction of the past few years. He is unsparing of the great Nelson Mandela. This frontal tilting comes as a surprise. An often grovelling populist media has ingrained the new government, especially its leader, with the expectation of nothing but gentle condemnation of mistakes.
On the occasion when Mandela described a United States aid package as “peanuts”, Van Schalkwyk refers to the response as “insulting”, continuing, “… he did no more than betray gross insensitivity and ingratitude. He articulated the expectation of entitlement which now permeates the black community”.
It was a line Mandela continued to follow. Van Schalkwyk expands, referring to a Mandela speech last year when he told the Southern African Economic Summit: “The West was `obliged’ to invest in Southern Africa because of `brutal exploitation’ of the region by colonial powers which had `robbed it’ of its resources.”
In this and on other occasions in the book another prevalent ritual comes in for a vigorous scrub-down. This is the practice, very popular among South African political janitors: blaming others for distresses which are often endogenous in origin. In discounting this essentially self-destructive process, Van Schalkwyk is particularly admiring of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, whom he describes as a “singular figure on the bleak political landscape of Africa … because he has recognised that economic and social renaissance can be achieved only on the basis of personal responsibility.”
An axiom, as we all know, more honoured in the breech of the African political gun than in its barrel. The now almost obligatory victimology, the hustle to identify past malfeasance as the only possible aetiology for present ills , is well known – and quite threadbare. Still promoted dutifully by organs such as the SABC news department, the “blame others” method does little more than dutifully strip all dignity from the people it claims to comfort.
And so, if Mandela gets the share of strident criticism the likes of an obsequious SABC have denied him for so long, others in his administration are certainly praised for what they have achieved. Success in political and social transformation is as well noted as futile maundering is condemned. Often Van Schalkwyk uses overseas parallels to demonstrate the global purview of liberal and academic authoritarianism, blundering administration.
If there is any basic tenet to the book it might be that expressed in the chapter on the death sentence. Here Van Schalkwyk revisits the notorious case of the “screwdriver” murderer, Willem van der Merwe. In 1972 Van der Merwe was sentenced to death on five counts of aggravated rape. On appeal his sentence was commuted, mainly on the grounds that he could be rehabilitated in prison. Of the substituted prison sentence he served 15 years and, on release, almost immediately started to abuse his sister’s children. Two years after his release from his lengthy and expensive rehabilitative procedure, Van der Merwe viciously terrorised and raped two young women hitchhikers, brutally murdering one of them. He was shot with his own gun by the survivor – 19 years old.
Van Schalkwyk argues against the commuting of the original death penalty, observing that, effectively, it was left to a young and terrified girl to do what the criminal justice system – on behalf of the society it is meant to protect – should have done 17 years before: rid everyone of a hideously dangerous psychopath. Van Schalkwyk sums up: “The primary duty of the criminal law and of its judges is not to disport intellectual conceit and moral arrogance … judges must learn to distinguish between moral posturing and moral responsibility.” In broader application this is what the book underwrites: perspective seen in favour of profile; resonance heard instead of clamour.
There is little doubt Van Schalkwyk’s work will be greeted by the politically ensconced and their feather-bearers with scorn and the all-too-predictable cries of “racism”. Particularly since the book’s publication coincides with the already discernible hypocrisies of politicians snuffling for votes in the 1999 general election. In fact the book is the explicit reverse of racism simply because it never implies that colour may be seen as pardon. It sites itself far above the subversively derisive commentary of smug apologists who refuse to assess black people by the same calibrations they reserve for whites.
Detractors will be hard put to find grains of much other than unembroidered, if uncomfortable, truth in what Van Schalkwyk observes. His collocation of meticulously researched fact offers a truth and reconciliation diary all of its own.
Van Schalkwyk’s background and experience as a high court judge, preceded earlier in life by a degree in political science, qualify each other in a counterpoint of incisive evaluation of this record. In his elegant, often formidable use of the language, Van Schalkwyk shines. And in these days of pusillanimous political correctness, his direct and unswerving opinions, their fluent articulation, find the inner circle time after time.
You have to be quite brave to read One Miracle Is Not Enough. He does not embellish fact with sentimentality. As a social and political overview this is of the first order. We should hope that Van Schalkwyk’s intrinsically sanguine criticisms of the reigning and past adminstrations are not drowned in yet another display of bruised pride.
The still-transforming South African aspiration is generously served by this book. It is an important study.