barbarians
Millennial fears of Y2K chaos and resulting social disorder are merely expressions of intense political anxieties, writes Bryan Rostron
‘Imagine,” said the minister’s adviser, pointing at the sprawling squatter settlement on the mountain opposite my home, “as clocks tick over to 2000, if government computers crash, power failures, communications, police and army disoriented.”
He shook his head, terrified by his own millennial vision. “The chaos! Social disorder, anarchy. Hordes pouring down the mountainside, under cover of darkness …”
This macabre discussion occurred last January, when doomsday scenarios were more common. Jay Naidoo, then minister of posts and telecommunications, had just assured the public that the Cabinet had discussed the possibility of deploying the army in the event of computer-generated mayhem.
Such paranoia, however, has less to do with the potential of mass computer delinquency than with the expression, once again, of intense political anxieties. When my friend sketched his lurid image of midnight Armageddon, he was voicing a widely held view of the fragile veneer of social order in South Africa.
This persistent phobia, which last surfaced before the 1994 elections, is best summed up by CP Cavafy’s great poem, adopted as the title of a JM Coetzee novel: Waiting for the Barbarians.
We are still waiting. It is an archetypal fear, with deep roots. Before the last millennium, as people in Europe fearfully anticipated the dawn of the year 1000, the spectre of the apocalypse took the fearsome form of Gog and Magog.
These were the nations, in the dank north, of wild hordes who would, on the dread day, descend upon Christian and civilised folk, in the words of the Biblical prophet Ezekiel, “as a cloud to cover the land”. The Book of Revelations, after all, had predicated that Satan, following his 1 000- year incarceration in the bottomless pit, would rise up to free the foul hordes in order to unleash his revenge upon the world.
Has modern man escaped such murky superstition? One does not have to look very hard to see a proliferation of millennial terrors during the course of the 20th century. Nor, as the epoch ends, does one need dig very deep to uncover similar brooding apprehensions among the most educated in South Africa.
One dictionary definition of “millennium” is: “a period of general righteousness and happiness.” Is this, on the cusp of the 21st century, a widespread feeling around the globe?
On the contrary, the avenging phantoms of Gog and Magog have reappeared; despite unimaginable technological advances, we still live, perhaps more than ever, with a nagging sense of doom and apprehension. In South Africa, this dark vision is never far from the surface: a dread which has always haunted the country’s elite. It remains an index of our neuroses and fears.
Despite recent political changes, white middle-class South Africans might still be said to embody, as well as any other group in the universe, that state of material grace promised by late 20th-century abundance: big house, large garden, cool swimming pool, television, microwave, smart car, probably two cars, suntan and cellphone.
Are most white South Africans, then, in a blissful millennial state of “righteousness and happiness?” Are they hell!
One of our most striking paradoxes is that there is an almost inverse equation: the less you have, the more optimistic you are likely to be; the more you have, the more you brood.
Perhaps this is the psychological equivalent of responses to an earthquake in the Western Cape 30 years ago; a team of researchers, I recall, interviewed survivors around Tulbagh, the quake’s epicentre. There was a clear split in reactions to the seismic shake: white folk, on the whole, thought it was the End of the World; poor coloured farm workers, the Day of Judgment.
By your millennial visions shall ye be judged? Today, among well-heeled whites, there appear to be two conflicting responses to recent seismic political shifts: on the one hand, political pessimism; on the other, a spiritual flight inward.
There is an astonishing proliferation in South Africa of New Age fads. For many (white and black), there is a distinct sense that deliverance lies in personal development, rather than in political or social engagement. Often this amounts to an irrational turning away from the world.
The greater the problems, it seems, the more the affluent gaze in upon themselves, confusedly seeking their own spiritual salvation. As the millennium approaches, for example, there has been much talk of the potent spiritual power of Table Mountain.
In a local pharmacy, supposedly a temple of rationality and science, I picked up a pamphlet extolling the magic of essences “made on the slopes of the sacred Table Mountain where the ley lines of the African continent converge”. This was “a potent tool for transformation of the self and for spiritual growth”. At this difficult time of our history, the following was also vouchsafed unto us: “The deva kingdom, a parallel kingdom, is composed of elemental and angelic beings who govern and protect the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. These beings have always worked with humanity, offering the gifts of unconditional love and guidance whenever we are prepared to receive them.”
The people who believe such guff are likely to be well-educated professionals; yet rationality applied to daily life is somehow not employed in the search for “meaning”. It is an increasing phenomenon throughout the world, especially in developed countries, as material abundance fails to plug the spiritual gap. In South Africa, this is reaching neurotic proportions.
Take the case of David Icke, a former English TV sports commentator, whose unbalanced fantasies are taken more seriously here than anywhere else. He tours regularly, lectures to packed halls and is given deferential media attention.
This is a man who, a decade ago, went on TV to announce himself “the son of God”. When his wife discovered he’d had a “divine coupling” with his “spiritual adviser”, Icke announced he was merely doing God’s will. The wife left. Here, however, he is rapidly attaining guru status. I have been stunned at the number of otherwise sensible, rational South Africans who believe his paranoid gibberish.
A devotee recently thrust upon me his latest book, The Biggest Secret: a mad minestrone of conspiracy theory, New Age waffle and crazed reasoning. The biggest secret is that “a reptilian race from another dimension has been controlling the planet for thousands of years”. These reptiles take the form of humans, constantly renewing themselves. This small, self-perpetuating clique, the Brotherhood, organises events like world wars to extend its control over us.
Former United States president George Bush is not only a giant lizard, but a paedophile and serial killer. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were financed by Wall Street. Adolf Hitler was really a Rothschild (or the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s second son).
Oh, and the British royal family haven’t died in ages; the lizards simply re-clone themselves in new majestic guises. When the 99-year-old Queen Mother turns into a lizard, Icke assures us, she becomes capable of ripping out hearts and feasting on human flesh. The death of Princess Diana was orchestrated by the royal family, seen plotting at an orgy in a castle near Brussels, attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And so on and on.
At the time of Icke’s last visit, when he was even accorded a respectful interview on the Tim Modise show, I was reading Jeff Peires’s magnificent book, The Dead Will Arise, about the great Xhosa cattle-killing movement.
Which was more irrational, I wondered: the prediction by a teenage prophet, in 1856, that on an appointed day, two suns would arise, collide, then darkness fall, whereupon the righteous dead would resurrect and new cattle appear, while the English would retreat into the sea, which would divide in two for them to return whence they came … or Icke in 1999? The former was a response to repeated military defeats by a technologically superior invading force. But what is the latter, modern madness about?
The explanations, in part, might look remarkably similar: a sense of powerlessness, confusion, of being in a universe no longer understood, and seemingly out of control. There is little doubt many white South Africans, despite their material well-being, fear a loss of status and security, while feeling a coherent order has been turned upon its head. In such disarray, an all-explaining plot restores some sense of comprehension.
In fact, the history of the 20th century is a long parable of the folly of believing education and technology automatically eradicate mass delusion. Instant global electronic communication does not, by any means, ensure those with access to such sorcerer’s tools have either a greater sense of control over their own lives or even a comprehensible picture of the world.
Instant amnesia, it seems, is one of the devil’s bargains for the gift of instant global communication.
“The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century,” writes the historian Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes. “Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times we live in.”
Hobsbawm identifies the death of the peasantry and simultaneous urbanisation as the most dramatic change in the second half of the 20th century, which cuts us off forever from the world of the past. Because South Africa straddles such disparate economic and social divides, it experiences the dilemmas and crises of both developed and developing worlds.
In the future, says Hobsbawm, the most likely cause of international tension will be “the rapidly widening gap between the rich and poor parts of the world”.
This puts an ironic spin on South Africa’s tourism slogan: “A world in one country.” Hence my friend’s millennial prophecy, as he contemplated the shack settlement on the mountainside near Cape Town.
That fear, now voiced principally by whites, is one that will be increasingly shared by a growing black bourgeoisie.
This sense of angst, on a global scale, was crystallised in a famous article published, about the time of our first democratic election, by American author Robert D Kaplan. It became required reading at the White House, the US State Department, and on the international think tank circuit. Its title summed up a pre- millennial First World dread: The Coming Anarchy.
Kaplan painted a vivid picture of total social breakdown, a return to “pre-modern formlessness”. It is a Mad Max scenario: with globalisation, the withering away of the state, and fierce competition for scarce environmental resources, there develops a perpetual war between “haves” and “have nots”. The wealthy employ private armies and withdraw into security compounds. The “haves”, besieged in fortified ghettos, have more in common with other “haves” around the globe than with the poor in their own country. It is a projection that will be readily identifiable to anxious, affluent South Africans.
In Kaplan’s scenario, Africa (“this dying region”) is the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, a cautionary fable of what will happen globally as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop by.
“West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger,” wrote Kaplan. “Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels …”
It is a litany repeated every evening round dinner tables all over South Africa. The message is clear: the waiting is over, friends – the barbarians are at the gate.
This siege mentality is behind a development I visited recently near Cape Town, cutely named Heritage Park. When completed, it will be a fortified citadel the size of Monaco which one need never leave for work, rest, prayer or play. A colony of “haves” will huddle behind electrified fences with their own private security force, the modern version of a medieval walled city.
This anticipates Kaplan’s image of the future: “Outside the stretch limo would be a run-down, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern …”
While many here have internalised this “coming anarchy” panic, it can be seen on a wider scale in the increasingly tough “Fortress Europe” policy. It is the despairing philosophy of an overcrowded lifeboat: the lucky few beating all others back.
What is striking, both locally and globally, is the pessimism and fatalism of this psychology. We live in an age of fundamentalism. As the century bows out, raw capitalism reigns unchecked. It is a time when the globe’s 225 richest people have more resources than 47% of the world’s population.
There is a general sense of helplessness that this is the only ordained way; that, in Margaret Thatcher’s pungent phrase, There is no Alternative. The challenge of the 21st century will be, however, to evolve an economic system that can deliver a sustainable environment for human life and avert a Mad Max world.
The likelihood is the imposition of unbearable strain on the central discrepancy of the “free market”: that there must be absolutely unfettered free movement for capital, but not – oh, certainly not – for labour. Fortress Europe and South Africa’s growing xenophobia are but two symptoms of this. Thus, come the millennium, we are still fearfully waiting for the barbarians.
“What are we waiting for?” asks Cavafy’s haunting poem, “assembled in the forum?”
Comes the answer: “The barbarians are due here today.”
Citizens wait, terrified. But by nightfall nothing has happened, and scouts arrive from the border to announce there are no barbarians any longer. The poem, written 94 years ago, concludes: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.”
They are certainly a kind of solution in a world where there is more than enough food to feed everyone, but millions starve. Who, then, are the barbarians?
The minister’s adviser clearly thought they were the poor people living in the shack settlement on the mountainside opposite my home. A year ago, he told me he had no intention of being in South Africa for the advent of the millennium, just in case those computers failed and precipitated social bedlam. Me? I wouldn’t be anywhere else.
The revolution, if it comes, will not be triggered by machine malfunction; but by default of social and economic justice. We can shape our fate.
As the year 2000 dawns, there will be no divine intervention, flaming comets or Apocalyptic revelation. Only one sun will rise. No barbarians will come streaming down the mountainside. It will merely be another millennium, another day.