Celebrities, or rather personalities, infuse our lives with laughter, anger, ideas and idle chatter. Personalities intrigue us as much in their lives as in their deaths. This year Peter Mokaba and Hansie Cronje made us rethink the way we regard the departed. Mokaba was a fiery radical and a haunted man. He was haunted by speculation first of being an apartheid spy, and then of being afflicted with Aids. He vehemently denied both. But, as was pointed out at the time of his death, a man of 44 with access to good health care does not die of pneumonia.
He rose to become president of the African National Congress Youth League and head of its election machinery, part of President Thabo Mbeki’s inner circle and icon of populists. We called him an icon to a generation and friend of the media and
asked whether he was a spy and a denialist to the end. What a pity dead men don’t talk.
Cronje once again showed the ability to arrest the imagination, divide and devastate. He died a tainted hero, trying to move on from the cricket-fixing scandal, when the aeroplane he was travelling in crashed into a mountain near George. Suburban housewives felt he should be left to rest as a hero. But as 702 talk show host John Robbie pointed out in a beautifully nuanced column in the Saturday Star, you do not look at Ben Johnson and say he is a hero, because he is not.
Sports offer a way for society to create heroes to immortalise. Ernie Els embodies greatness. His victory at the Nedbank Golf Challenge represents something of a quantum leap. Blasting the rest of the field by eight shots on a redesigned course is nothing short of phenomenal. Els also clinched the British Open at Muirfield in July. He is now World No 3, and has the same ranking on the European Order of Merit.
He caps all this with the title of European Tour’s Player of the Year. Then he brings through his personality astounding grace, humility and a keenness to be admired, and presumably remembered, for mastering a good walk spoiled.
Sport is also a source of inspiring comebacks. Lucas Radebe was among the walking wounded at the start of the year with the World Cup a few months away. He had played no part in the Leeds United season when he got up, as he did in 1996, to lead Bafana Bafana in the World Cup in Asia in June. In the process he became the country’s most capped player, with 70 appearances, and the only survivor of July 7 1992, when South Africa was readmitted to international football.
South African sport remains driven by race, so Chester Williams’s revelations of racial disharmony in the rugby national team’s set-up during his playing days were not totally unexpected. It is only the manner, motive and moment of revelation that caused uneasiness. In his autobiography, Chester: Biography of Courage, he reveals somewhat diluted courage. The courage to point prominently at James Small as his tormentor in chief is interesting. Small: the beloved pin-up boy of South African rugby’s post-isolation golden age with a bad-boy rough edge. Yet it remains unlikely that Small was the most serious offender, just the most sensational.
Williams then goes on to dismiss the moment of glory with Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela lifting the Webb Ellis trophy at Ellis Park as a facade. Well, first you profit and gain adulation from an illusion and then you seek to profit further by shattering that illusion. Williams’s rise to being a symbol of hope for black children everywhere is awe-inspiring, but it is difficult to shed a tear for him on this one.
Of course, there are times when genius captivates by displaying a propensity to self-destruct. The most immediate source of destruction is drugs. Kaizer Chiefs midfielder Jabu Pule’s flirtation with drugs earlier this year worries not so much in itself but in what it means for the future. What happens if he finds himself struggling to cope with a new team in a foreign league? Or if injury or loss of form sideline him from the World Cup in 2006? What are the chances of his falling off the rails again? Even now, one cannot help but wonder if Pule will actually fulfil his potential.
Any individual or institution whose behaviour warrants a commission of inquiry must have a dynamic personality. Thus, the rand, our fighting rand, is one of this year’s outstanding personalities. This time last year the currency was battered and bruised by mysterious forces in a thin market, shedding 37% over November and December. In the period since, just as inexplicably, it has powered its way back with a gain of 30% to being the best performing currency against the dollar.
Cartoon characters remain an encapsulation of our fantasies. Eve Sisulu and Gwen Anderson have shown us race and labour relations for a decade in Madam & Eve. All we can do now is plead that Sisulu gets her raise. But this year another character has staked his claim. Created by Angus Cameron and appearing daily in various newspapers, Lucky is a cheeky bugger who never allows life to get him down. His tribulations attempting to win the affection of Abigail, a white girl his age, is the stuff of the life of a township boy.
Once he tried to impress her by sporting a Lucas Radebe hairdo, leaving a crop of short dreadlocks on the front portion of his head. She responded by asking if Lucas Radebe was a sea urchin. Sometimes down but never out, he should be signing autographs at a shopping mall near you very soon.
Of course, there are people who are celebrities by default. The manufactured Coca-Cola Popstars group 101 should serve as a reminder of how being at the right place at the right time can be all you need to be famous. Yet we need to maintain perspective. Their member Pam Andrews cannot sing. All she offers is a look and attitude that fit the bill. Moreover, the story of how a global giant such as Coca-Cola lifted a budding, well, singer out of the mire of gang violence in the Cape Flats and set her on the road to stardom has universal appeal.
There comes a time when society must ask those celebrities whose presence no longer adds value, or never really has, to retire gracefully from the public scene. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Edith Venter, you seem to have outlived your usefulness. WMM’s only valued presence is making inconsequential court appearances on private matters. As president of the ANC Women’s League, she has not muttered anything insightful on matters such as relations in the alliance or the fight against the scourge of women abuse. She is only a shrewd political animal who is wise enough to behave well around events like this week’s congress or elections in two year’s time to save her skin.
As for Venter, what has she done to deserve so much attention? She must have lost count of the number of charities she is a patron of. Problem with her generosity is that it is self-gratifying. Whether she is part of the Pond’s Walk Against Breast Cancer or raises money for kids with Aids, she never expresses an opinion of the cause she is supporting or seems to act with conviction. What does she think of government policy on Aids? How do we educate rural women about the importance of having their breasts examined? For someone who attracts so much attention, she is muted.
Finally, personalities inspire us simply by doing what they believe needs to be done, in the best way they know. Patrice Motsepe used this year to consolidate his status as a force in business. A politically connected, mercurial entrepreneur, the story of how he established African Rainbow Minerals by purchasing loss-making shafts from Anglo American is now retold with admiration. When he tells it, he notes with disarming honesty, ‘Besingenamali [‘We did not have money].”
His company has now grown to have platinum and gold mining interests, with the latter now dominant following a successful listing on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange in May. His overriding philosophy of doing business is that it should be about taking risks to earn a profit, to build patiently and be guided by profit motive, not by the colour of a partner’s skin. At the 37th Congress of the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he was elected president, he struggled to escape the clutches of four female minders, throwing a ring of human flesh, to whisk him off to an interview. Later he mixed freely with business magnate Anton Rupert, at ease with white capital. It was at this event that he helped set in motion the process of uniting black business.
Speaking to him, one can never help but feel he is irked by this sudden attention. When he was quietly building his R5-billion empire, many black empowerment executives were flavour of the month. Now he has media, black and white business, foreign and local investors and hangers-on beating a path to his door. He seems cautious of ephemeral adulation, for he knows how fickle we can be.
So then, for reminding all of us how to do business and for being fastidious yet humble, for undertaking the faction-ridden and thankless task of uniting black business and imbuing it with credibility beyond reproach, risking his reputation in the process, Patrice Motsepe is my person of the year.
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