Bryan Rostron
A Second Look
Thabo Mbeki first prompted the comparison with talk of his renaissance. Italy has long baffled the Anglo-Saxon mind with its knack of reconciling contradictions, and today our new president displays an equally acrobatic flair for juggling opposites.
Why, we now even have a pacifist as deputy minister of defence and a communist responsible for privatisation. Verily, these are urbane conundrums worthy of a renaissance pope.
Nevertheless, Mpumalanga/liar Premier Ndaweni Mahlangu still has a long, long way to go to match modern Italian politicians in the brazen art of defending the indefensible. Once, in Naples, I heard local political “Godfather” Antonio Gava, a Cabinet minister, justify the large numbers of his votes that appeared to come from names registered only in cemeteries. “If even the dead vote for me,” he said, “I can’t be all that bad!”
Signor Gava not only got away with that; he was promoted. After all, Neapolitans have an old proverb: “The king gave us the law – but he also taught us how to break it.”
Hopefully, this will not now become Mpumalanga’s motto, too. Yet it has struck me lately that there are several instructive affinities with current South African politics – beyond the obvious parallels of stifling bureaucracy, organised crime, and Italy’s simmering north/south racism that has led one northern party to demand their own homeland, as absurd as a boerestaat.
The main thrust of Italian politics this century is what political scientists call transformismo: a centrifugal tendency whereby principals surrender to pragmatism, and left becomes blurred with right. Both move inexorably towards the centre, exchanging ideology for power.
Transformismo is a veiled process, seldom openly admitted, leading to a widening gap between rhetoric and practice. In South African terms, it is the switch from the Reconstruction and Development Programme to the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy, with the South African Communist Party no longer daring to say boo to a bourgeois.
Today, very quickly, African National Congress dominion looks an immutable fact of life. So, once, did Italy’s Christian Democrats – until, virtually overnight, the party imploded. It was a hydra-headed organisation with half-a-dozen separate factions, ranging from far left to Thatcherite right, each with its own headquarters. In ANC terms, that divide was as wide as that between the SACP and recent defectors from the New National Party.
The only thing uniting the “Demo-Christians”, many of whom were neither Christian nor democrats, was the pursuit and preservation of power. Finally, the reconciling of opposites proved too much even for the cynical power-brokers of modern Rome. The ANC might do well to study the fate of Italy’s once mighty Christian Democrats; it is a salutary cautionary tale.
The ANC, almost equally hydra-headed, currently manages to skilfully balance its own internal contradictions. But for how long? Listening to the semantic somersaults of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and SACP representatives, rationalising their compromise with market forces, can feel like a cruel spectator sport.
Something will have to give. There will come a point when the circle will simply no longer square: will Mbeki then feed the Christians – sorry, the Communists – to the lions?
There has been no better definition of the ANC governing alliance than that given by former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, explaining the uneasy multi-party coalitions that ruled Italy during the turbulent 1970s: convergenze parallele. It was, said the wily Moro, a matter of “converging parallels”.
But last week, hearing Mbeki’s soothing words of conciliation in Parliament to NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk, I suddenly remembered another of Moro’s Byzantine, tongue-twisting phrases. Mbeki complimented Van Schalkwyk expansively, warmly welcoming his proposal that the NNP engage the ANC in a constructive policy debate – in short, corresponsibilizzazione.
For Moro, this meant that while remaining outside the Cabinet, the Italian Communist Party would have more say in the government. It was a prelude to gradually drawing the former foe into the inner sanctum: an exchange of ideology for power.
In South Africa, could the end-game be the exact opposite? The gradual exclusion of Cosatu and the SACP, and the slow, sly courtship of a new, formerly unthinkable ally?
As I listened to Mbeki’s praise for Kortbroek, I had a deeply disagreeable premonition: a fleeting vision, some years into the uncertain future, of an ANC/NNP alliance.
Ag, no. Paranoia. Too many conspiracy theories. Shame, during a brief career in movies in Italy, I once played a CIA agent who conspired with a machiavellian monsignor (Marcello Mastroianni) to kidnap, then kill, a politician with an uncanny resemblance to Aldo Moro. Hardly had filming ended when Moro was kidnapped, then killed. The film was immediately banned.
Moro was crushed by his converging parallels: but what he attempted to engineer has today, effectively, come to pass.
The one thing Italian politics taught me is that, in a world where parallels converge, the unthinkable can actually happen.
Our renaissance, for example? Hmm. Frankly, for now I’d say modern Johannesburg is more like ancient Rome. So, please, just remember the wise words of the first- century satirist, Juvenal: “It is a careless man who goes out to dinner without making his will first.”