John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Is the Reverend Jesse Jackson an opportunist, or someone who simply knows how to turn any opportunity to a greater advantage? Is there a difference between the two concepts, anyway?
From that fateful day in 1968, when he was one of the first people to arrive on the balcony where Martin Luther King had been shot (and be sure to be seen by the world’s press with the blood of the martyr on his shirt) his timing seems to have been impeccable. He has made mistakes, but generally his has been a remarkable career, based on being in the right place at the right time – and making damn sure that there are cameras and scribes to record his presence.
The other essential ingredient is being consistently able to hold the high moral ground. Being an aide to King set him on that road. Since then he has made his own running.
Jackson was there through the turbulent Seventies, when America was simultaneously trying to extricate itself from unwinnable wars in distant Vietnam and Cambodia, and at the same time trying to come to terms with the rising tide in favour of racial justice back home. He, and others like him, were able to blur the distinctions between the two, and make them part of the same system of injustice that had to be challenged.
In the 1980s Jackson became a leading voice in the increasing pressure of world opinion opposed to apartheid in South Africa. At the same time, he was running for the job of president of the United States. Again, he was able to manipulate one cause in the interests of the other. It wasn’t too far-fetched for him to be able to make the equation between segregation in the American Deep South, and apartheid in South Africa.
During the US pummelling of Iraq in the wake of the invasion of Kuwait, Jackson was miraculously able to use the “brother” card with Baghdad and Damascus in order to gain the freedom of a black airman who had been shot down over Iraq. The move was able to win him credit both with a Third World inclined to side with the naughty but anti- Uncle Sam Saddam Hussein, and at the same time with war-frenzied America, witnessing the liberation of one of their prisoners of war.
Then, of course, he popped up in the tiny room at the top of the Cape Town City Hall where Nelson Mandela was about to step out on to the balcony to address South Africa and the world on the day of his release in 1990. The chain of association that had been built up over the years allowed for the subliminal impression that the release of the world’s most famous political prisoner had also largely been effected by the ubiquitous Reverend Jackson.
This week, once again, Jackson popped up in South Africa. The opportunity, this time, was provided by an entourage of African American technocrats and businessmen on a mission to establish business partnerships for Pan-African growth, particularly in the field of communications.
Jackson is no technocrat, but that didn’t stop him appearing as the undisputed leader of this powerful initiative.
There was an interesting scene at the Great Hall of Wits University on Tuesday, when the high-powered delegation sat in the front rows and watched Jackson expound to a packed gathering of students on the nature of their initiative. The Americans call it “taking the ball and running with it”. For Jackson, it doesn’t seem to matter whose ball it is, as long as it advances his own cause.
But there is more to Jackson than that. The reason he is able to put himself at the forefront of so many causes is that he is genuinely able to make them his own, and to merge them convincingly into the broader cause of black upliftment that he has always espoused. In addition, his extraordinary articulacy would seem to make him an immediate asset to any cause that is prepared to take him on board – not that Jackson would really take no for an answer, anyway, if his heart was set on a particular enterprise.
The thing is, he knows how to make sense inside a given situation. Whether or not that is an opportunistic trait is neither here nor there. His words are able to mobilise for the right causes, and there are few people in this world who possess, or are able to use, that kind of talent.
It is a talent that is able to pluck compelling verbal images out of the air. “Turn your scars into stars,” he told his rapt audience at Wits. “It is better to have scars than gaping wounds.”
The walls of exclusion have been torn down, he said. “But the absence of walls does not indicate the presence of bridges.”
The bridges he was referring to were many: the internal bridges, between long- antagonistic groups, both in South Africa and the US; and external bridges – between African countries, and between Africa and African-Americans – the commercial and emotional matter of the day. He was also referring to bridges between the past and the present, and into the future – expressed in his reference to his delegation: “We’re not ‘black-at-home’, we’re back home!” It’s hokum, but, hell, it works.
Like a blend between Muhammad Ali and Abraham Lincoln, Jesse Jackson is able to compress great concepts into folksy yet eloquent truisms, delivered as a kind of accessible poetry.
By the sheer power of his own self- confidence, he is able to inspire others to have confidence in themselves – while not allowing them to forget that self-confidence does not come before self-understanding, and an understanding of the nature of the world we live in. Lack of knowledge is no excuse for failure.
“Dull axes cannot cut down trees,” he exhorted the students packed into the Wits Great Hall. “Strong minds can break chains.” Amen. You could say that it is none of Jackson’s business how South Africans choose to go about their reconstruction. But since no one else is telling it quite like he is, perhaps it is his business, after all. Perhaps that is the meaning of the extraordinary career of Jackson: reminding people to mind their own business, and then moving on.
AND YET, YOU ALWAYS HAVE THE STRONG FEELING THAT HE’LL BE BACK. UNTIL GOD SENDS LIGHTNING AND THUNDER TO GET HIM, JESSE JACKSON WILL ALWAYS BE SEIZING THOSE OPPORTUNITIES THAT THE REST OF US ARE TOO SLOW TO RECOGNISE.