It is perhaps not politically correct to draw sustenance from the “poet of Imperialism”. But as one surveys the international and domestic scene at the moment, the famous words from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, spring inevitably to mind: “If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs …”
We are living with the suspicion that some sort of sexual juggernaut is loose in the White House – bombing foreign countries to cover up his young lover’s antics with a cigar. Daily we watch the death-defying high-wire act being performed by the financial markets without apparent benefit of a safety net. The world is now waiting for the last shoe – Wall Street – to crash down. On our borders we are witnessing the implosion of Central Africa into all-out war, the like of which we have not seen in our lifetimes.
A hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad, in his dark critique of colonialism, called the Congo river the heart of darkness. Today, a multiplicity of forces from 11 nations are ranged against each other along that river, threatening to rip Africa apart. Our mercenaries and arms, the dregs of the apartheid military machine, are contributing to both sides in this orgy of killing.
The lives of civilians are randomly claimed in Northern Ireland and Nairobi, rendering the global village into a global war zone where no one is safe. And now we feel the dragon’s breath ourselves, in the shock waves from Planet Hollywood.
Taken together it is almost enough to persuade one that millennium fever is already loosed upon the world. In the words of the Irish poet WB Yeats, things are falling apart, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. What rough beast, its hour come at last – the superstitious and ultra-religious are already asking – is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?
It is a time, perhaps, to spare a thought for our own government and, in the Kipling tradition, try and offer a few words of encouragement. The Cape Town bomb obviously has the first demand on our government’s attention and there – even though the pain is at its most intense – the course of action is the easiest.
There may be something distasteful about the politics of condemnation, the cries of horror usually attendant on acts of terrorism frequently being a substitute for understanding. But the unprecedented wave of protest from across the political spectrum over the Waterfront atrocity points to the absence of even the shreds of moral justification.
Individual responsibility still has to be established, but few can have any doubt as to the direction from which the bombers come. Theirs is a malevolence born of twisted principle, nurtured by religious fanaticism and unleashed by feeble imitation (despite the greater numbers of lives claimed by the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam embassy bombs, there is something more sickening about the choice of target in Cape Town: a restaurant dedicated to the fantasy land of populist and primarily adolescent imagination).
We have previously seen these forces at work, in the bombing of the home of the University of Cape Town academic, Ebrahim Moosa, and they have been tolerated too long in the shenanigans of People against Gangsterism and Drugs. But, disgusted though we may be by their activities, we have no doubt they have triggered their own destruction.
Provided the authorities avoid any extremes of action which might create a justifiable grievance, those with responsibility will quickly be expelled by the very community in whose name they claim to act, leaving it only to the judicial process to mop up the effluent.
“Keep your head” also stands as good advice where the Democratic Republic of Congo is concerned, particularly at a time when such as Zimbawean President Robert Mugabe are busily losing theirs. Our influence in the affairs of our neighbours may have been exposed as minimal by the failure of our elusive ceasefire proposal, but at least we’ve managed to keep out of the shooting war. Even if our strategic priorities are limited to that one goal, let us stay out of this imbroglio. Perhaps we can best contribute to stability in Central Africa by cracking down on those South Africans who are lending support to the warring parties.
The patient diplomacy being pursued by Thabo Mbeki in Lesotho gives grounds for hope that we may be in good hands in that respect. Even so, we are tempted by the deputy president’s taste for poesy and his passion for an “African renaissance” to offer him Kipling’s injunction: “If you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim …”
Where the financial markets are concerned we can only urge the nation to collectively cross fingers and reflect that the most persuasive explanation for the performance of the world economies lies in the confusion of chaos theory.
And Bill Clinton? Ah … there (with apologies to Kipling’s Victorian sensibilities), we would merely join in the prayers which we have no doubt are already being offered up by our president to the gods of comedy that it should prove to have been a cigar of Cuban manufacture.