There are, these days, supposed to be no victims no living ones, anyway. There are only survivors. There are rape survivors, Aids survivors, racism survivors, assault survivors you name it. I am an African National Congress survivor. Only the dead, it seems, can now respectably lay claim to having been victims. And the dead, as we all know, find that a rather difficult thing to do. This ban on victimhood has been inflicted upon us by those who always know best. They are the apostles of political correctness. They have determined that, if you or I call someone a victim, we are stressing the misfortune visited upon that individual. And doing so, they add, inveigles us into legitimising or fostering passivity in the face of adversity. What we should be doing, they say, is stressing the active courage of the sufferer (always assuming the sufferer is not a dreadful coward). That means we must always celebrate the sufferer’s survival. Put another way, as some sceptics in the ANC in exile used to proclaim: “The victory continues, and struggle is certain!” I have no idea how many readers of the Mail & Guardian need to engage in denial of this kind. As editor of the M&G, I feel no need to. But I am relatively fortunate. Soon after taking up the job, I developed an immunity to most misfortune. I was so pummelled by circumstance and enemies I never knew I had that very soon I descended into a punch-drunk stupor impermeable to most horrors. Ever since, befuddlement has been my fail-safe survival strategy.
Achieving the right degree of befuddlement or oblivion is, of course, the key. And I have been assisted in this quest by a recipe I am not about to share now. Its benefits are, however, limited. It can mitigate only the terrors within. It cannot soften the sharp end of, say, a passenger aircraft entering my office window in Milpark, Johannesburg. The kind of insensibility I am celebrating is scarcely original as a survival strategy. For as long as we humans can remember we have been brewing, fermenting, distilling or smoking leaves or fruits or chemicals to blur our encounter with the world out there. Others have got drunk on power or on dreams of their own significance though these strategies appear designed to protect them from an encounter with their inner, rather than the outer, world. Yet others have been willing to make themselves intellectually and morally insensible in order to survive. Over the past year, the upper ranks of the ANC and government have shown us just how easy it is to achieve this state of grace. They have either been prepared to believe the nonsense spoken by President Thabo Mbeki about HIV and Aids, or they have been willing to pretend they do. In the process, they have not only made cowardice the principal virtue of their organisation. They have also gravely endangered the survival prospects of tens of thousands of South Africans, overwhelmingly poor and black. And it is debatable how well, if at all, the credibility that these ANC and government leaders once enjoyed among us has survived the year. There are those whose survival we delight in: the feisty Patricia de Lille, Pan Africanist Congress MP; the honourable Gavin Woods, Inkatha Freedom Party MP and chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee; Malegapuru Makgoba, hard-pressed head of the Medical Research Council; and our national icons Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Desmond Tutu. There are others whose survival in their chosen roles we lament: Chippy Shaik, the defence department official who oversaw much of the arms deal; Magnus Heystek, financial adviser; Tony Yengeni, ANC MP, who made a Mercedes 4X4 a symbol of something other than earned wealth; McCaps Motimela, chairperson of Unisa’s council, at the centre of a row over the university’s future; Seth Phalatse, former chairperson of the Strategic Fuel Fund, who admitted taking a $20 000 bribe to ease an unauthorised oil deal but has since managed to get appointed to the Armscor Board; Peter Marais, the Teflon tippler resurrected as Western Cape premier; Saki Macozoma, CEO of Transnet during the Coleman Andrews fiasco; the pathetic thug Robert Mugabe; and, at the time of writing, Osama bin Laden. Joe Modise, former defence minister-turned-arms dealer departed this world to appear, so to say, before a higher court. We celebrated the downfall of Keith Kunene, former chair of the Central Energy Fund who allegedly gave Phalatse the bribe, and also of Cromet Molepo, fired as CEO of Umgeni Water after using company funds to tap employees’ telephones. And we cheered the jailing of four racist cowards Johannes Smith, Andries Viljoen, Wetzue Botes and Eben Kruger who beat two elderly black men to death just because they were black. If ever the rand was a national virility symbol, it can no longer keep up the pretence. Nor, for that matter, can the Springbok rugby team. Llewellyn Herbert failed to deliver yet again … and again. And Hansie Cronje declined to take our advice and fuck off. There were, in reality, many victims this past year. They fell to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11; in the resultant war in Afghanistan; in other wars in Angola, Congo, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Burma, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere; to Aids and a score of other diseases we have everything except the political will to eradicate. What is worse is the sense of foreboding that hangs over the world. There is the kind of uncertainty not experienced since the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s. It is as if we are all standing on the cusp of something cataclysmic.
To the victims, we offer our tributes and goodbyes. Let us, the living, raise our particular recipes for survival. We are likely, again, to need them in the New Year.
Howard Barrell, editor