Howard Barrell over a barrel I have spent several days this week trying to understand the basis on which Thabo Mbeki says Tony Leon is a racist. I have read, reread and read again the speech in which Mbeki did so – the second Oliver Tambo Lecture, delivered in Johannesburg last Friday. I have enlisted literary and semantic authorities to my effort. And I am none the wiser. I am left with the conclusion that Mbeki has made this inflammatory charge without providing an iota of evidence. He has, instead, relied merely on a dubious grasp of the literary classics and assertion. Those of us who have concluded in the past that the reckless allegations of racism that have emanated from the presidency against its occasional critics can have had nothing to do with Mbeki may now have to reconsider our view. Mbeki’s Tambo Lecture is an extraordinary piece of work. In an evident attempt to imbue it with a rhythmic literary refrain, he opens it with a quote from Shakespeare. In this case, the extract is drawn from the play The Tempest. To grasp the quote’s significance, we should perhaps quickly recall the bare bones of the plot of this play. Prospero, a gifted magician, is the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s jealous brother, Antonio, overthrows him and casts him and his daughter off to sea. Prospero and his daughter end up on a sort of desert island. There Prospero finds, among other things, an apparition, Caliban, whom he enslaves, and an obedient spirit, Ariel, who delights in tormenting Caliban whenever he disobeys Prospero. One day Prospero uses his magical powers to cause a storm at sea in order to wreck a ship carrying Antonio and others. The ship’s company are swept ashore on to his island, terrified. There, Prospero plays several tricks on them and manages, eventually, to engineer a rapprochement with Antonio, while Prospero’s daughter falls in love with the son of his other great enemy. Some critics, such as Harold Bloom*, interpret the play as being about taming untamed nature, about reconciliation and the depth of human spirituality. But there are many other views of the play. The fact that Prospero finds himself on an island, where he has a slave and a serving spirit, has led other critics to interpret the play as Shakespeare’s treatment of colonial oppression. In this construal, Prospero is the colonist, Caliban the oppressed, and Ariel can be cast as a sort of comprador figure overseeing Caliban on Prospero’s behalf.
Mbeki, in his Oliver Tambo Lecture, seeks to deploy the colonial interpretation of The Tempest. He does so, however, in a rather eccentric way. He starts off by quoting an extract of the play in which Prospero tells his daughter how he lost his title to Antonio.
Mbeki explains why he is using this passage. Black people, he says “occupy the same positions that Prospero and [his daughter] occupy in The Tempest. We, too, have lost our country and our identity …” In other words, for Mbeki, Prospero, the slave owner, represents the oppressed. The coloniser is the usurper Antonio, who, Mbeki tells us in his lecture, is personified by Leon and whites. Mbeki’s interpretation of the play becomes even more nonsensical when he portrays Prospero’s slave, Caliban, as the “native petite bourgeoisie, with the native intelligentsia in its midst, that, in pursuit of well-being that has no object beyond itself, commits itself to be the foot-lickers of those who will secure the personal well-being of its members”. “Mbeki,” in the words of an eminent South African Shakespearian scholar, “has misunderstood the play.” Am I quibbling? To some extent, yes. Righting the historical injustice meted out to black South Africans is far more important than whether Prospero might be said to represent the oppressor or oppressed. But I am quibbling with a purpose: the quality of research Mbeki is content to employ in insulting an opponent is abysmal. Let us now turn to the quality of Mbeki’s reasoning. Mbeki reasons thus: Leon is, like Antonio, a usurper – in this case of Africa from its rightful heirs (paragraph six); Leon has said Mbeki is obsessed with finding African solutions to every problem (eight); this means Leon is contemptuous of African solutions and of the challenges that Africa faces (nine); it follows that Leon believes all African solutions consist of pagan, savage, superstitious and unscientific responses (10); it follows that Leon is enunciating entrenched white racism that is a millennium old, the same racism that produced slavery, colonialism and apartheid (11 and 13); and Leon would never have questioned what he sees as Mbeki’s obsession with seeking African solutions unless he considered it a matter of fact that African solutions amounted to no more than snake-oil cures and quackery (14). Non sequitur follows non sequitur in circular fashion. Done often enough, some of the content might stick. Dignified with a quote from Shakespeare, even if the passage is absurdly applied, it may even fool some that it is worthy of consideration. What might Mbeki’s purpose be? It certainly is not to take issue with what Leon has said in front of South Africans and leave us to judge the merits. Rather, it appears that Mbeki’s purpose is to say that Leon does not deserve a hearing – because, according to Mbeki, he is a racist.
What Leon actually said that so upset Mbeki was the following, in Stanger Town Hall, on July 25: “Not all news [recently] has been good news for South Africa. The president has done considerable damage to his government’s – and his own – reputation. His mishandling of the Zimbabwe crisis and HIV/Aids policy are two cases in point. President Mbeki’s speeches convey a paradoxical suspicion of developed nations, yet a sense of entitlement – that they somehow ‘owe us’. There is also a near- obsession about finding ‘African solutions’ to every problem – even if this means flouting scientific facts about Aids in favour of snake-oil cures and quackery …” Somewhere in that passage, Leon struck a nerve in Mbeki. Perhaps it was the reference to “snake-oil cures”. Perhaps Mbeki recognised the Virodene fiasco, when a couple of years ago the South African Cabinet applauded a supposed miracle cure for HIV/Aids, the active ingredient of which turned out to be an industrial solvent. Or perhaps Mbeki thought “snake-oil cures” was a prejudiced reference to African traditional medicine – whereas in fact the expression originates in the United States and refers to the concoctions, including supposed “snake oil”, which were offered to the gullible (mainly white citizenry) by smooth-talking (invariably white) salesmen in the days of the Wild West. Whatever the case, it is not my job to bandage Mbeki’s sensitivities, nor to defend a man like Leon, who is more than capable of handling himself in a political knife-fight. What it is my job to ask – and perhaps all of ours to answer – is: Does the president not let us all down when, in our highly charged situation, he levels an allegation of racism against the leader of the opposition without providing a single bit of evidence for doing so? And why the silence from those in the African National Congress who have always sought to have us believe that they know better than to tolerate racial provocation? *Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Fourth Estate, 1998)