Sometimes you think it’s time for some of our top people to wake up and smell the coffee beans. The trouble is, us bottom people are in no position to tell them to do so. It’s rather like being a subject of the king of Swaziland. There are certain things that are done and certain things that are not done in our political culture.
There is no question that South Africa has made remarkable strides in the past decade. Only the most base of the sneering classes — and the shady and woolly-headed Boeremag and its ilk, of course —
would deny this.
However, there are those at the top who think that only the fiercest cheering is sufficient to demonstrate this. Criticism is anathema. I was on a public discussion panel in Cape Town this past week. The topic was the Culture in Another South Africa (Casa) conference, which was held in Amsterdam way back in 1987 — a time, I pointed out, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison, the African National Congress and other organisations were still banned or underground, or both, PW Botha was still snarling his loose-jowled snarl of defiance to the world’s press, and the South African police were still out in the streets lashing at people with hippo-hide whips.
We certainly have come a long way since those days. We are even allowed to say things in the press that would have been unthinkable in those times — and have a Constitution that protects our right to say these things. Who can deny that we have moved from dictatorship by the minority to democracy? And who can deny that democracy is a luxury that has to be continually scrutinised and, if necessary, criticised?
My colleague on the panel was a senior figure in the ANC. He opened up his presentation by launching into a long diatribe about how he had, up to the present, been urging right-thinking people to boycott the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Where this was coming from I had no idea. I think his point was that the M&G, in the view of many of the new ruling elite, has moved from the often-woolly liberalism of the 1980s to the hypercritical rhetoric of the Third Millennium. Although I have also been made to wince at times at some of the opinions expressed in these pages in recent years, I would not refute the paper’s right to express a variety of views. Besides, this is not the only paper that sometimes makes me wince. There are others that make me wince even harder — not out of astonishment at their wishy-washy political views, but out of shame at their consistently bad journalism and persistently bland thinking. But let’s let that pass.
The reason I say that it is time to haul out the coffee beans is that my illustrious co-panellist seems to have failed to notice a change in the paper’s ownership, and a subsequent change of editor. His implication that this remains a reactionary rag dedicated to counter-revolutionary mobilisation seemed to be completely out of step with what is going on in the real world — although even a black proprietor and editor have the right to be reactionary if they want to, as long as they don’t resort to violence to achieve their ends.
It got worse. In a response to a perfectly reasonable question regarding what was being done to preserve the more harrowing aspects of our heritage for the edification of posterity, my co-panellist proceeded to deliver a warning to the whole room: if we did not recognise that we had the world’s most progressive Constitution, that we could boast an impressive transformation, and that we had won freedoms we should all be proud of, then we were collectively asking for trouble, he said. If we do not unstintingly celebrate the path we have trodden, “then the shit will hit the fan”.
It was threatening language worthy of PW Botha at his zenith. I don’t know whether anyone else in the room could make head or tail of this line of argument. I certainly couldn’t.
I was about to try to turn the discussion back to the matter at hand, but the chief was sending notes to the chair warning her that he had a plane to catch — signalling that he did not have any more time to either talk, listen or debate.
I had wanted to bring up some of the ideas that had been raised at the Casa conference all those years ago, and examine what had happened to some of those ideas since we have achieved our hard-won freedoms. I had wanted particularly to refer to a keynote address by another senior ANC figure, who had used the analogy of the mythical Greek hero Odysseus to explain the relationship between popular culture and authoritarianism.
When Odysseus was sailing back to Greece from Troy, this other chief had told us, his ships had had to pass the island of the Sirens — women whose singing was so sweet that they drove men mad, and ships were known to be wrecked on the rocks because the sailors lost control of their faculties.
This other chief had told us that Odysseus’s solution was to stop up his men’s ears with wax so that they could not hear the beautiful music. Meanwhile, he had himself tied to the mast, ears unblocked, so that he, alone, could hear the Sirens’ singing. This, the chief explained, was a demonstration of authority figures hogging people’s culture for themselves, while the masses rowed, ignorant of what they were missing.
If this analogy was correct in pre-liberation times (and I am not convinced it was), it would seem the same analogy can be turned on its head post-liberation: that it often seems as if our leaders are the ones who have stuffed their ears with wax, and the masses alone are listening to the sweet sounds of robust debate — while continuing to row the boat for the new upper classes.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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