Throughout history humankind has professed an aversion to war. Yet, strangely, our heroes and heroines have tended to be warmongers, warrior kings and queens, conquering emperors and gallant soldiers.
Ask the average citizen of planet Earth to trot out the roll call of history’s great leaders (admittedly not universally admired) and it is the names of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Boadicea, Angola’s Queen Nzinga and Genghis Khan that spew out. It is only upon further reflection that peace crusaders like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Luthuli come to the fore.
The reason for this is that war has an amazing ability to galvanise nations, ethnic groups and clans behind a cause they would have otherwise cared little about. It has that quality of being able to turn reasonably intelligent people into enthusiastic fools. Even the world’s great religions, which have peace greetings as their mantra, get caught up in this frenzy and bless soldiers on their way to the killing fields.
As you will discover in subsequent pages, the inherent attractiveness of the concept of war has seen it wriggle itself into our everyday lexicon. We discover that there are now bad wars and noble wars. The bad wars are those the George W Bushes love and the noble wars are those on poverty, disease and social ills. And then, of course, there are the sex wars, history’s most protracted conflict.
So as we leave 2002 we are faced with the prospect of a very ugly war in the deserts of the Middle East. If the warmongers who run the United States have their way, we could very soon be glued to our TV sets watching the barbaric sport of war live. We are also faced with the continuation of the myriad wars in other parts of the world, some of which have raged for decades.
This impending war on Iraq is one that intelligent humanity should all war against.
Here at home we leave 2002, having managed to score little victories in some of our noble wars.
With the government finally having joined the rest of South African society in the Aids trenches we are now well placed to enter 2003 with the battle strategies in this all-important of wars. If we are to score significant victories against HIV/Aids in the coming year, it will have to be without the presence of one Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in the front ranks. There may have been a time in the past when South Africans could afford a wry smile, a shoulder-shrug and a shake of the head whenever Tshabalala-Msimang gaffed. But now she is a serious liability and the African National Congress should just this once dispense with all comradely loyalty.
Another gratifying development in 2002 was that the ANC bravely accepted that its efforts to eradicate poverty were not achieving results quickly enough. This may not have been a seismic development, but it was refreshing that the ANC finally moved beyond its boring refrain that the “economic fundamentals are sound”. Now we can tackle poverty head-on in the coming year, without the government feeling shy about its shortcomings.
Another critical war we have to fight in 2003 is much subtler, nuanced one. It is a war in defence of the political space that South Africa’s people acquired in 1994.
Addressing the 51st national conference of the ANC, the party that admittedly created the political space we now have, President Thabo Mbeki sounded a clarion call. The ANC, he said, should mobilise against the “negative tendencies” on its left and against “unashamed proponents of neoliberalism” on its right.
“We must expect that this struggle [to determine the national agenda] will intensify with both the ultra-left and right-wing forces battling to secure the hegemony of their ideas over those of the national democratic revolution and our movement,” said Mbeki.
Decoded: those who adhere to different ideologies will try to use the democratic space our Constitution provides to promote ideas that are different from those of the ANC centre. Surely a treasonous thing to do!
One would expect that the last thing the delegates to the ANC conference would want is to leave Stellenbosch determined to muffle other voices. That would be a betrayal of the very victory that the party scored against tyranny in 1994.
But history tells us that when ruling elites feel vulnerable, the hard men step forward and make war against democracy, the people and the values of the society.
That is why it is in the interest of the ANC that it joins in this war to increase political space rather than act to shrink it.
Mondli Makhanya, editor