David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
A dreadful weekend, spent worrying over whether President Thabo Mbeki is a fool. One is used to describing politicians as fools, just as the referee is always blind – at least until he or she sees things the same way as oneself. But just as one does not expect to see the ref answer jeers from the stands by anxiously fiddling in his pocket and withdrawing his spectacle case, so one is somewhat startled to hear a politician, particularly a head of state, publicly questioning whether he is a fool.
The occasion for this twinge of self- doubt, or at least the confession to it, came on Saturday when Mbeki launched his panel of scientists to inquire into the causes of Aids. He took the opportunity to confide to the nation that he had been considering the possibility that he was a fool, after being denounced by so many “eminent scientists” for his stand in favour of the so-called “Duesburg hypothesis” that there is no connection between HIV and Aids.
Why it is described as a “hypothesis” is not quite clear. A “hypothesis” is surely a possibility as yet undecided by authority.
Whether authority has got it right, or wrong, is beside the point; the presumption must be allowed for the game to go on. The possibility, for example, that John Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy involving the government was a hypothesis until the Warren Commission decided it was the work of one man. After that the notion of a government conspiracy was rele-gated to the ranks of theories, which lack the imprimatur of authoritative judgment.
Even in an eager democracy such as ours “authority” should not be confused with the popular viewpoint. Market research has shown that the majority of Americans believe the Kennedy assassination was the work of a government conspiracy, but that proves little because the majority are not the designated authority. It means as little, in fact, as does the finding of the same research that more than 80% of Americans believe the aliens have landed and the truth of it is being covered up by the government for its own nefarious purposes. Together they add up only to a popular prejudice that governments are a bunch of lying, thieving and murdering swines, and a longing for an alternative life-form to supplant them.
In the same way, the notion that Duesburg’s theory remains a hypothesis would seem to be out-dated. The medical establishment, which is the authority where such issues are concerned, has long since pronounced against the hypothesis, if only by way of a loose consensus. At most what we have left is a conspiracy theory reflective of prejudices against the drugs companies (who are held to have dreamed up the HIV/Aids line for commercial gain), against the homosexual community (held to have brought the plague down on their own heads) and against colonialism (held to be eternally responsible for whatever woes visit Africa including, it seems, plagues).
It is in the nature of conspiracy theories that they enjoy a measure of popular support. Once a “hypothesis” has been dismissed by authority its only hope of survival is to cling to public prejudice, without which it has little hope of salvation from the dustbins of history, or at least that part of the teaching syllabus reserved for “quaint beliefs of the past”.
The president, in addition to his angst over his possible foolishness,has professed a concern that those like himself backing the Duesburg theory may be burnt at the stake as heretics. He can be reassured on that point. With popular prejudice on his side, burning at the stake is a fate far more likely to be reserved for representatives of the drugs companies, members of the homosexual community, or those who, for whatever reason, have the misfortune to be identified with a colonial heritage.
All of which may well be considered grist for the prosecution’s will, but it does not of itself answer the question whether Mbeki is a fool. To discover that one has to determine where authority lies in regard to judgment.
The president seems to labour under the misapprehension, in this respect, that the ultimate, all-encompassing authority is himself (having pronounced on Aids, he can now be expected to hand down a ruling on the state of the alien invasion as well as the confused and confusing trajectories of the bullets at Dallas). It is a delusion familiar to those who achieve high office, comparable to the disorientation arising from altitude sickness and should not alarm fiends, or relatives – a remedy being at hand by way of a splash with cold water at lower altitudes.
Whatever his delusions, his authority is self-evidently circumscribed where the charge that he is a fool is concerned, not least by the basic requirement that an accused should not sit in judgment on his own case, even if he was his own accuser.
A hurried perusal of the Constitution indicates that suspicion that the president is a fool, even if the suspicion was his own and thus presi-dential in character, is not sufficient grounds to mount an impeachment. The only other pro- vision for authoritative judgment on the president would appear to lie with the electoral college, which will have to decide whether he should get a second term of office, an occasion when the question whether the president is a fool will obviously be much to the fore.
The president and the country will therefore have to wait another four years to discover whether the president is an authoritatively constituted fool. But in the meantime we are at liberty to consider the defence the president has already mounted against the charge, when he purported to go on and dismiss it (under the misapprehension he was empowered to do so as the president) in the course of Saturday’s speech.
He said that one piece of evidence that militated against his being a fool was the fact that “so many eminent people have responded to the invitation of a fool to come to this important meeting”. If one concentrates hard one can see the point he was endeavouring to make. On the face of it, however, it is a line of argument likely to carry little weight, failing as it does to take into account the contrary weight of the prospect of a free lunch to “eminent people” and the curiosity value of a side-show featuring a fool strutting the international stage as a head of state.
Otherwise the president relies heavily in his defence (or is it a plea in mitigation?) on a piece of Irish poetry entitled The Fool by one Patrick Henry Pearse, beginning: “Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool …”
Pearse was also a head of state in a sense, as leader of the provisional government that raised the flag of Irish rebellion in the Easter Uprising of 1916. To my mind he was a second-rate poet. But he more than made up for it with the power of a single oration, delivered at the graveside of a veteran of the Republican cause, O’Donovan Rossa, in 1915. “Life springs from death and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations … the fools, the fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead.”
In time the words came to be recognised as the articulation of the semi-mystical demand for “blood sacrifice” on the altar of nationalism, which led to Pearse’s own martyrdom the following year in front of a firing squad and led his country down the road to partition and his people to civil war and endless, fitful rebellion. It is a bloody saga, which only now seems to be reaching a conclusion in the north of Ireland by way of stalemate.
In the eyes of many, Pearse is a hero and, as one who has witnessed at first hand the sort of heroism to which his rhetoric gave birth, I have myself thrilled to the words uttered over O’Donovan Rossa’s grave. But, looking back from less excited years, I cannot help but wonder whether, if Pearse were beside me to consider in retrospect the bloody view, he would not have considered himself truly to have been the fool.
But hush. Of this kind of fool only the dead are fit to speak.