Bryan Rostron
Recently I sat for half an hour with a man from an NGO and hardly understood a word he said. The way his words washed over me, you might have thought we didn’t share a common language. In fact, he was English-speaking. But he talked in “NGOese”.
It is striking that those who talk like this employ words not readily understood by people on whose behalf they claim to speak. This is not due to any lack in ordinary language. It is a puffed-up exercise in professional self-promotion: a way to keep the dialogue among the initiated and exclude the “plebs”.
It is also a good bet that anyone who holds forth like this comes closely attached to an acronym: Wozapo, Kropatu, Nosamwu.
Such folk may speak in tongues – but none that resemble any of our 11 official languages. You know those strings of words that presage a light buzz in the head and a glazing over of the eyes: “Normative, transformative, transgressive, foreclosure …”
It is a sort of intellectual muzak. Language can be used as much to camouflage as to communicate. In the case of my encounter with “NGOese”, I suspect I was being quietly warned in so many (oh, so many!) words: “Butt out, buddy, and leave this to us pros.”
There is a similar game afoot in our political-speak.
Business and right-wing parties have long used fine-sounding locutions to disguise real intention: “flexibility” as a code word for job cuts; “restructuring” for more of the same.
These terms have now been adopted, practically the world over, by traditionally left-leaning parties. A favourite buzzword is “revisited”, a well- oiled euphemism for, “this cherished old idea will be ditched, but we’re not actually saying so yet”.
The result is that these politicians have to negotiate a verbal tightrope, balancing precariously between word and meaning. Both United States President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair frequently speak in bite-sized clichs, hard to pin down (or parody): “The future beckons. The sun will shine. Tomorrow is another day.”
Here, members of our tripartite alliance perform equally amazing linguistic acrobatics to square their political circle.
South African Communist Party Cabinet ministers try to persuade us of the wonders of free-market, Thatcherite economic policies, just as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) seeks to simultaneously oppose such policies and remain committed to them, while the SACP swallows its own dialectic whole.
Seasoned words are employed to endorse opposite meanings.
We surely entered a verbal wonderland when, last August, Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi – the deputy chair of the SACP – attacked public sector union wage demands by quoting Lenin, was promptly hailed by Beeld as “Thatcher-Moleketi”, and Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota, speaking as African National Congress chair, weighed in to accuse “highly placed comrades” of confusing the masses and creating a climate where agents provocateurs could thrive and promote “counter-revolutionary agendas”.
Surely the masses, even the non-masses, will be more confused when Marxist rhetoric is deployed to bolster “flexible” free-market ideology?
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink …”#
Much debate on economic policy takes place in this murky void, where words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean.
“Racism” is another term currently being redeployed, too often manipulated as a spurious defence against legitimate criticism.
Ink-squirting becomes addictive. But promiscuity with words might eventually rebound on the verbal contortionist.
Take President Thabo Mbeki’s scepticism about the HIV/Aids connection. To one renowned local immunologist, who doubted the wisdom of politicians querying this link, Mbeki replied: “I am taken aback by the determination of many people in our country to sacrifice all intellectual integrity to act as salespersons for the product of one pharmaceutical company.”
If I say, “X makes my headaches better,” do I promptly become the indentured lackey of the company producing that product? Of course not. To suggest so is a diversionary tactic.
Mbeki continued in his letter (leaked to the press): “I am also amazed at how many people, who claim to be scientists, are determined that scientific discourse and inquiry should cease, because ‘most of the world’ is of one mind.”
But hang on. What happens when “highly placed comrades” question unbridled free- market policies? Are they told, “Thanks, comrade, for questioning – with intellectual integrity – economic fashions now accepted by ‘most of the world'”? No, they are not.
They are savaged for lacking revolutionary discipline, confusing the masses, and pandering to counter- revolutionary agendas.
The querying of an HIV/Aids link, on the other hand, might more accurately be said to lack scientific (if not revolutionary) discipline, to pander to counter- revolutionary agendas (the far-right embraces the idea of Aids as a “disease of lifestyle”) – and it certainly confuses the masses (and the rest of us).
Follow the logic of this “dissident” view on Aids: that, in Africa, it is primarily a disease of poverty. If poverty deepens, and Aids continues to spread so swiftly, who should be blamed on the basis of the above logic? Not scientists, or even rapacious pharmaceutical companies for making their drugs too expensive. It might conceivably be charged, quoting “dissident” Aids logic, that not just poverty, but politicians, kill.
It can be dangerous to play with words. They may haunt you.
The people have spoken, yes. But now the question is: will we, at long last, be spoken back to in a way that we can all understand? The president’s stance on Aids, for example, has caused great bafflement. Yet when experts have tried to elucidate his views, instead of replying clearly, they have mostly been squirted with ink, clouding the issue even further.
There is, however, another approach, untried as yet by any government anywhere in the world at any time in history.
Its effect could be revolutionary. Say what you mean. Use clear words. Tell the truth.