Howard Barrell : OVER A BARREL
Nigeria and South Africa, radically different in so many ways, are similar in at least one respect: the way language, at least the English language, is used by many of their political intellectuals.
This became apparent last year when I spent two months in Nigeria co-teaching a few courses for practising journalists. Those attending the courses were unusually intelligent (for hacks). Their uptake of new knowledge was very quick. And the debates between participants were keen and fiercely contested, prompting the person teaching with me to remark: “If you have one Nigerian, you have an orator; if you have two, you’ve got yourself a debate.”
One reason for their acuity seemed to be that Nigerian society has provided few outlets for intellectuals for at least two decades. Successive dictatorships and corrupt civilian regimes have run the universities, schools and other centres of learning into the ground. Academic life is a poverty trap. Aside from notables like writer Wole Soyinka and a few thousand highly educated Nigerians who have managed to find academic or artistic livelihoods abroad, Nigerian intellectuals have very few chances of prospering by intellectual means.
One result is that many Nigerian intellectuals have moved into journalism. There they have faced many difficulties not of their making. Among them is the commonly corrupt newspaper owner willing to change his paper’s political posture depending on whether or not one of his other businesses is awarded a particular government contract.
But Nigerian journalists are not a blameless breed. A problem substantially of their own making is the way in which they seem to feel they have to write in pretentious, obscure language when analysing an issue.
The issue may be, say, how millions of subsistence farmers have, over the past 20 years, arguably saved Nigeria from collapse and terrible social unrest. For, regardless of the regular idiocies of the kleptocrats in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, these farmers have managed to eke out survival for themselves and their families from a few yams and cattle. So far, anyway.
Asked to analyse such a suggestion, these journalists would burden themselves with the weightiest jargon they could find and conduct a theoretical expedition back to the origins of society itself before returning to the issue at hand with a lot of impenetrable mumbo jumbo. They were using language to achieve one or both of the following: to confuse issues rather than to clarify them; to intimidate readers rather than invite them into a debate with the analysis on offer.
Not only journalists behaved this way. It seemed, to judge from the press, that almost any Nigerian who wanted to make a serious point believed he had to use complicated language to do so.
The only country in which I have encountered a similar talent for obfuscation is South Africa – although, at a distance, it seems French philosophers can beat all comers. Few in South Africa can have shown greater aptitude for causing confusion than the young Marxist intellectuals who held forth on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the African National Congress in exile there were similar people, of all races, vying for the title “massive intellectual”. Somewhat ill-advisedly, a person’s ability to sprout theoretical hogwash was often seen as evidence of his or her commitment to the cause.
I was reminded of them and their Nigerian equivalents when, earlier this week, I did the virtuous thing and read the tripartite alliance’s new document on economic policy entitled The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation. It is, we are told, a paper intended to stimulate discussion. But I came away – after three readings, just to be sure – concluding it was no such thing. Rather, the way its authors use language suggests it is primarily intended to confuse and/or intimidate.
Take this little passage, for example: “However, to the extent that there will always be sectoral interests; to the extent that these interests – among the motive forces of change – may not always coincide; to the extent that immediate sectoral interests may not always serve the general interest; to the extent that the choice of the path to the common objective may not always be consensual; to this extent and more, will there be ‘contradictions among the people’.”
Are the learned authors saying much more than, “People’s various interests may sometimes conflict”?
Or this passage: “These tasks are not sequential but mutually reinforce one another in the same time and space”.
Oh dear. What about: “We can achieve these things at the same time”?
And so on and so on, in almost every paragraph of the paper’s 15-odd pages.
This is, at one level, pretentious. At another, it is damaging for our political process. For democracy depends on transparency – in language perhaps more than in anything else.
What on earth can the intentions be of the so-called people’s organisations – the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)and the South African Communist Party (SACP) – when they all allow language to be used in their name in this way? Is their intention to communicate to the people; to invite the working class and peasantry into the debate over economic policy?
The individual authors of the document – reputedly Joel Netshitenzhe for the ANC, Mbazima Shilowa for Cosatu and Philip Dexter for the SACP – all have more than enough grey matter to talk about the issues the paper covers in simple, clear language. Why then do they not do so? Is it because they sense how ridiculous all ordinary people sound in plain English? Perhaps.
I think the more important answer is that their intention is not a democratic one. The aim is to close off debate on economic policy in the alliance. Opaque words and phrases are used to skirt over and around fundamental differences. Why? Because life in the tripartite alliance these days consists of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Because with an election coming up, the three organisations have a tacit pact of convenience, characterised by very little sincerity, to hang together lest they hang alone.
What I ultimately extracted from the paper, from under its many layers of opaque jargon, was a hidden admission that most Marxist or highly interventionist economics is probably crap and inappropriate to South African needs.
I see no reason for uncertainty or embarrassment on this point. It is widely acknowledged. It can be said simply and clearly, and many have done so.
The authors need to tell us: if they won’t say their piece simply and clearly, why say it at all? Unless, as I have suggested, their intention is to confuse, intimidate or deceive.