A `necessary pretence’ seems common practice in politics worldwide. David Beresford wonders if South Africa will suffer the same fate
The most intriguing aspect of Thabo Mbeki’s recently released collection of speeches (Africa, the Time Has Come, Tafelberg Mafube, R80) is not the speeches, but the introduction which contains a brief biography of the man, attributed to an anonymous “editorial board”.
As is well known, little is known about the man who is now de facto leader of South Africa and is shortly to become our de jure president.
Biographical detail on the man is like gold-dust for political journalists and the Mbeki anthology offers a few grains of the stuff, such as the disclosure that he writes most of his own speeches; that between 1969 and 1971 he studied at the Soviet Institute of Social Sciences and underwent training as “a guerrilla regimental chief of staff”; and that he contributed to the defeat of the Tories in 1964 by his membership of the Socialist Society at Sussex University (“Alec Douglas-Home: My Part in His Downfall”?).
Perhaps more striking, however, is the detail which has been left out, seemingly with deliberation. For example, in the early 1970s, his biographer(s) record(s): “Mbeki participated in discussions with Dr MG Buthelezi which led to the establishment of the Inkatha Freedom Party.”
Nothing else is said about that turning point in post-World War II South African history which led to the chief’s split with the African National Congress and a civil war which cost the lives of tens of thousands. And while Sussex University’s Socialist Society gets its honourable mention, the biographical sketch also offers virtually no recognition of the existence of the South African Communist Party, much less Mbeki’s membership of its central committee which has been reported elsewhere and has not, to date, been denied by the deputy president.
It is interesting to speculate whether these exercises in the airbrushing of history represent command decisions by a “guerrilla regimental chief of staff”, or the toadying of a bunch of obsequious consultants hired by the publishers to protect them from charges of political incorrectness.
While it might appear to be in line with his campaign to rehabilitate Mangosuthu Buthelezi, it is difficult to believe that Mbeki would go so far as to try and convince the country – as the biographical sketch appears to be doing – that he (Mbeki, that is) was in fact a founding father of the IFP. And while he might hesitate in boasting about his communist party background to our American “allies”, it is unlikely that the ANC president thinks to avoid embarrassment on the subject by wiping out references in our history books to the existence of one-third of the tripartite alliance.
Of course, one never knows what effect the assumption of power will have on the individual, history being littered with leaders who would have done mankind a greater service by surrendering themselves to the nearest lunatic asylum, rather than accepting the added psychological burdens of public office. And airbrushing is familiar to the practice of government, as we have should have been made well aware by the recent contretemps between the executive and the judiciary and the dust-ups between the Bench and the offices of the attorney general.
There can be few areas of society where pretence is as important to governance as in the judiciary. “The awful majesty of the law” is a fiction which can only be sustained so long as his lordship keeps his knobbly knees from the public gaze. Or, to put it more literally, a belief in the irrefutable nature of judicial decision is an essential prerequisite to judicial authority.
How could society accept the death penalty – or, in “civilised” post- apartheid South Africa, the entombment of fellow human beings in C-Max – without the reassurance that they have been found guilty of equally horrendous crimes by unchallengeable authority? There is, after all, only one small step from the conviction of an innocent man to our own, wrongful incarceration.
And yet the small print brings it home how thin is the judicial ice on which we all skate. After all, the law itself stipulates that all that is required for criminal conviction is proof “beyond reasonable doubt”. The test before sentencing a man to a living death is therefore not certainty, but mere reasonableness. It was once “beyond reasonable doubt” that the world was flat. And consider how intolerant of coincidence is a test of reasonableness.
Everyone has their favourite stories of coincidence; mine is how I was once dispatched by a news editor in search of the duke of Edinburgh’s “mistress” in a city of 11-million and found myself interviewing my mother’s one- time best friend with whom she had lost contact 20 years before on the other side of the world.
Less salacious, but more extraordinary, from a statistical perspective at least, was the occasion in Belfast (the Northern Ireland one) when a colleague with whom I was drinking was summoned by the hotel’s public address system to take a phone call. He arrived at the in-house telephone just in time to hear a stranger claim the call. Denouncing him as an impostor, they came close to blows before discovering, to their astonishment, that they shared not only the same first name and surname as well as profession, but had been born on the same date in towns bearing the same name, all on separate continents. There is, surely, enough coincidence there to undermine anyone’s faith in the concept of reasonable doubt.
It is in order to cover up the flimsy foundations upon which the criminal justice system is based that the courts have recourse to theatrical devices to maintain the facade of authority, such as the physical elevation of the Bench above everyone else in the courtroom. (The notorious FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, used a similar device, seating visitors on a wind cushion with a slow puncture which would gradually subside as he berated them. Perhaps their lordships should be advised to follow his example by requiring prisoners to be seated on a similar cushion during sentencing, as a device likely to convince even the innocent of their guilt?)
It also explains much about the recent row over the appearance of President Nelson Mandela before the Pretoria High Court as well as the controversy concerning the Eikenhof Three.
Judge Piet van der Walt’s dismay over the Eikenhof case is understandable when one sees it not as a reaction to a probable miscarriage of justice, but to the idea that “justice” as defined by judicial authority is open to question. His is an appreciation as to how society works … or at least has worked in the past.
Then along comes an innocent, in the form of our newly appointed National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, who lends an ear to the defence team’s protests and is so shocked by the case they present that he orders they be allowed bail.
The protest that the emperor has no clothes is easily dismissed when it comes from a boy in the crowd watching the imperial procession, but society is truly threatened when the grand vizier takes up the cry.
Behind the pretence contained in the old rubric that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent to be convicted lies naked reality of a cynical calculation – intrinsic to the concept of reasonable doubt – that “X” per cent of society’s innocent number must needs be sacrificed on the altar of law and order. The incineration of their lives is required to persuade the “reasonable” man on the top deck of the proverbial Clapham omnibus to maintain his faith and abide by the laws of a “just” society.
The “necessary pretence” demanded by the social contract is not limited to the judiciary, it is also intrinsic to the presidency – an understanding of which goes some way towards explaining why it was entirely inappropriate for Judge William de Villiers to have subpoenaed Mandela in the South African Rugby Football Union case earlier this year.
Although the pretence is more brittle in the presidency (where it is built around an individual) than the judiciary (a system), it is justified on similar grounds; that society could not tolerate the “necessary” concentration of power in a single office (an office which takes in the collective wisdom of the main occupant’s personal, political and government advisors) without a concomitant belief in the unchallengeable authority of the presidency.
The impeachment of President Bill Clinton – in particular the apparent dichotomy between public support of him and the implacable pursuit of him by the Republicans – should therefore be understood not as the consequence of his perjury, but in direct relation to the public peregrinations of the presidential private parts which threaten to fatally undermine the charade of presidential authority.
The US public recognises that it is human to err, but the professional politicians (at least those whose instincts are not overridden by party loyalty) fear the challenge that such recognition represents to the facade of high authority on which they, too, believe they ar dependent.
We are afforded a refreshing glimpse behind this mask of political pretence because we are a new society travelling through the dislocations of rebirth. As we lie there, squalling in our glorious nakedness, we have a moment to examine ourselves before being snatched away by the professional midwives and wrapped in swaddling clothes fashioned from the soiled remnants of the shroud left by the previous regime.
Do we want to go down the road of “necessary pretence”, do we want to buy into those clauses of the “social contract”? Do we want to re-write history as a way of minimising further hostilities in KwaZulu-Natal? Do we want to wipe out the memories of the Bram Fischers to spare the sensibilities of the Al Gores? Do we want the innocent freed at the price of seeing criminals escape? Do we want the judges to show us their knobbly knees?