Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL
Who would want to be President Nelson Mandela? Not me. And my reasons have nothing to do with spending nearly 30 years in prison. What would convince me I could do without international adulation and the Nobel Peace Prize would be the exasperation of having to placate, encourage and cajole South Africa’s five million whites. Because of their international linkages and economic power they are too important to ignore. Yet they must often make the old man feel as if he is on a hiding to nothing – as if there is no pleasing them.
There he was again last Friday, this time at the opening of Parliament in Cape Town, trying, among other things, to jolly whites up. There was cause for hope, he declared, as he set about pushing all the right buttons: language and culture would be protected; economic management would continue to follow prevailing international orthodoxies; crime would be beaten and personal security improved; and progress was being made in education and health. Though by no means solely white concerns, these are the issues which cause whites to look either miserable or towards Australia, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere.
As if asking for something in return, Mandela made an appeal. All South Africans should be proud that they had managed to turn around the drift towards civil war that haunted the country in the 1980s.
There was, however, another kind of death being visited on our hopes for a better future. Now, he said: “We slaughter one another in our words and attitudes. We slaughter one another in the stereotypes and mistrust that linger in our heads, and the words of hate we spew from our lips. We slaughter one another in the responses that some of us give to efforts aimed at bettering the lives of the poor. We slaughter one another and our country by the manner in which we exaggerate its weaknesses to the wider world, heroes of the gab who astound foreign associates by their self- flagellation.”
It was purple stuff. But Mandela had a point in suggesting that, rather like diplomats, many of us have learned how to conduct war by other means. We are no less hostile; we are just more subtle. In addition, it is as if some of us want South Africa to fail; we need South Africa to fail. This imperative is the subtext of countless conversations within white society each day. It is as if, no matter what the attendant cost, some of us hanker for the satisfaction of being able to say: “I told you so.”
This means that when things do actually go wrong – a hijacking, the murder of a friend, a sharp fall in the value of the rand which destroys the prospect of a long looked forward to holiday abroad – real grief, sadness or loss is sometimes mixed with a bitter triumph.
This is the despair of disempowerment. Many more whites than care to admit find it hard to take their removal as the rulers and, particularly in the case of conscientious liberals, as the imagined moral arbiters of our society.
Another symptom of the same malady is the sharp fluctuations many experience between optimism and depression about the country and its future. Hopes are easily dashed against any adversity in the heroic struggle conducted by those who want, or who (temperamentally) need, to believe in the new society. For the feeling that they can any longer make a real difference has been lost.
These feelings and the negative and alienated behaviour that can result from them are sometimes called unpatriotic, “racist” or (more recently) “subliminally racist”. They may, for all I know, be all those things. But attaching pejoratives to them is about as helpful as throwing itchy powder at a case of chicken pox. It will merely exacerbate the irritation and worsen the scars.
Moreover, overuse has greatly diminished the power and meaning of these words. As John Leo, a columnist in US News & World Report, pointed out a few years ago, calling someone a racist has recently become merely a politically correct way of saying, “I disagree with you on that.”
Whereas behaviour can be changed by laws and instructions, feelings tend to be altogether more autonomous. Optimism is something people either feel or do not. It is a product of our glands and circumstance. No amount of sunshine journalism will induce it. And it cannot be ordered or legislated into or out of being.
The same is true of pessimism, depression or despair, for which there is no more counterproductive prescription than the statement: “But you shouldn’t feel that way.”
The worst to be said of these negative feelings is that it is a pity some of us have them; that they are a drag, a whining tinnitus on the national brain, a pain in the national backside, a failure of humour.
What, then, are we to do about the alienation and negativity felt by some whites and, I dare say, some coloureds and Indians, too?
Probably the less done the better. Mandela – or, perhaps a very good new speech-writer he seems to have got himself – got it right last Friday. The government can try to reassure people. But, for the rest, glands and circumstance will determine the mood. Or as Mandela put it, the future will have to show that these feelings were unjustified. On this, in his words: “History will be the best teacher.”
But as history moves on – who knows? These negative feelings may even prove to have been justified. Our country may, indeed, go up in flames or down the tubes. There is no guarantee of success. Success is something we will have to make: with each brick in each new house, each new water or electricity connection, each new job, each improvement in matric results, each new HIV infection avoided and each crime prevented or solved.