Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL
I was not alone in thinking it must be April 1. As I stared at the early morning sun – or was it my egg yoke? – my radio was telling me that Louis Luyt had formed a political party and expected us to support him in next year’s election.
Called the Federal Alliance, the party would unite all existing parties to the right of the African National Congress.
It would also, said Luyt, try to win over the one in seven voters who do not yet know how to cast their ballots next year. And, Luyt added, the party would be the natural home for all the gatvol (fed-up) voters.
When it dawned that this was October 1, I looked elsewhere for an explanation for Luyt’s behaviour. The issue became: what causes someone to become a politician or, more to the point, to want to become a politician?
What causes Luyt to want to venture out of his bunker at Ellis Park to play a different game – one that is rougher and has far fewer rules than rugby?
His announcement that he had formed an opposition alliance was all the more astonishing because, within a few hours of it, all the main opposition parties – from the National Party to the Democratic Party, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Freedom Front – had said they had no intention of joining it.
This leaves Louis to scrum down alone, scrumcapped and, it would seem, blinkered, rather like a hooker without his props, against the ANC’s entire pack. In this contest, no doubt Luyt believes he actually will push the ANC eight off their feet.
Whiffs of omnipotence here? Afraid so. Luyt told the Afrikaans press last weekend that he was ready to answer the call and become president of South Africa.
The other enthusiast for his party, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, who headed various South African special forces in adventures in Angola and elsewhere during the apartheid years, said Luyt’s arrival on the political scene resembled Winston Churchill’s assumption of the prime ministership in Britain during World War II. Like Churchill, Luyt was now poised to lead South Africa though its darkest hour.
This is, indeed, a black, black time for Luyt and others like him. Such dark times turn Breytenbach’s mind to metaphors of war. Luyt sees a fight as the way out.
Luyt may have lost the presidency of the South African Rugby Football Union. But he won in court against the government recently and managed to persuade the presiding judge in the case to summons Nelson Mandela, the head of state, to court to explain his decision to appoint a commission of inquiry into the union.
Now Luyt evidently needs a new battle, preferably a bigger one. For fighting seems to provide one of the few ways he can satisfy his need for outrageously improbable fantasies of power. And how, other than through those fantasies, can he cope with his own and his kind’s disempowerment? His guiding maxim appears to be: I fight, therefore I am.
This seems to be a fairly common attitude among those who turn to politics. For others, such as United States Presi-dent Bill Clinton, the corresponding maxim may be: I seduce (audiences or women), therefore I am.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s affirmation seems to be: I smile idiotically, therefore I am.
For his part, Allan Boesak once disclosed proudly that, as a child, he used to make speeches to his own or his sister’s dolls – I forget whose he said they were.
Convinced that leadership was his destiny, he found the dolls’ deaf ears, unseeing eyes and vacant faces ideal dummies on which to test his rhetorical technique. This may be a case of: I am heard, therefore I am. Or I am not answered back, therefore I am.
What Boesak described may be a common childhood experience among those who eventually become politicians or sermonisers of one kind or another.
It may also be an innocuous expression of fairly ordinary primordial needs: to feel listened to; to feel admired; to feel in control – although I can hear my psychoanalytic friends suggesting it was all Boesak’s dear mother’s fault.
Who knows? Perhaps the special branch’s lead interrogator in the 1960s, “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel, also played with his sister’s dolls – secretly. Perhaps he beat the soles of their feet, burned them with his father’s cigarettes and half-drowned them in basins of water only to ask them again after each such session whether they liked him.
The point is, I suppose, this: the case of Luyt suggests to us that it may help to ask what drives politicians. Why do they need to do what they do? Why, for example, do they need to believe that the rest of us need them in order to give form to our interests? Ask the next politician you see.
A few years ago, a Scandinavian research institute conducted an intriguing experiment. It pitted a monkey against several professional stockbrokers. The challenge was this: each had to buy and sell stocks over the next year and maximise the value of their portfolios. The monkey outperformed the professionals.
That is not apocryphal or an April Fool story. It happened.
Perhaps the time has come for us to conduct a similar experiment in our politics. The opposition parties may not be willing to unite around Luyt, but who knows what could be achieved if Max the Gorilla could be persuaded to launch a party. It would almost certainly lead to a more effective campaign against crime than either the opposition parties or the government seem capable of suggesting.
Whatever the case, I say: better never than Luyt.