They used to say that the Dutch Reformed Church was the apartheid-wielding Nationalist Party at prayer. The likes of the late, great Beyers Naude did their best to undermine that, of course, and nothing could ever be the same again.
The NP in those days used to respond by characterising the non-racial South African Council of Churches (then headed by Desmond Tutu) as the African National Congress and its communist allies at prayer.
Now we have a most undignified spat, emanating from the Presidency itself, that says that Tutu, Archbishop emeritus et eternitatem (I’m making up Latin as I go along here, just to sound clever), known as ”the Arch” to you and me, has no right to open his mouth and make comments about the blatantly undemocratic culture of the ANC if he is not a member of the ruling party himself.
There is more than a whiff of intolerance here for anyone who is outside the fold. This is particularly strange, considering that the ANC has always been, to coin a phrase, a ”broad church”.
From the day of its inception in 1912 at the unlikely venue of Bloemfontein on January 8 (as the Native National Congress, by the way) its founding fathers and mothers included churchy people, sangomas, Bushmen, intellectuals, common journalists, peasants, royalists, tsotsis, disempowered gold miners, general chance-takers, and communists.
The only thing they had in common was that they were all ”natives”. (In fact, if they had kept it that way, life would have been a lot less complicated today, as Hugh Masekela said in his Americanisation of Ooga Booga debut album back in 1964 or so.)
Because of this background, I have always described the ANC as a Christian Stalinist organisation — probably the only one in the world, which is something to be proud of. It is not just its collective make-up that makes it so. It is the culture of the way it lives and breathes, and responds to even the mildest forms of criticism, reproach, and reflection with fear, loathing, and righteous indignation. Which, of course, is what President Thabo Mbeki was referring to when he publicly told the Arch to keep his nose out, unless he was in with both feet.
There are parts of both fundamentalist Christianity and orthodox Stalinism that raise their hackles when the ”correct line”, as Aziz Pahad used to put it, during our days in the trenches of the struggle in Camden Town, Hampstead and Tuffnel Park, North London, is challenged. And what has happened in the past week is that the Arch has stepped out of line and challenged these orthodoxies. As a result, he has been effectively told that he has been cast out of the fold.
Of course, the democratic part of the ANC’s body politic has offered an olive branch. If the Arch will renounce his heretic ways and queue up for a party card, all will be forgiven.
Yeah, right.
I (and probably the Arch) quit carrying an ANC party card long ago. Which does not mean that I surrendered my rights to an opinion on the way the ruling party, whose cause we unswervingly fought for, and whose success we all ultimately celebrated (because it was part of our skin), conducts its business.
I surrendered my card because of an increasingly visible culture of intolerance and careerism that was not based on merit, but was about assumptions about what the correct party line was about. The English call it ”brown-nosing.” (But then again, the English could be wrong.)
In my day, and in the days of my mother and father before me, hanging around at the battered desk of the secretary general in exile in Earl’s Court, Dar es Salaam, Moscow or Lusaka (who was always a personal friend anyway) never meant surrendering your rights to a personal opinion.
And that, as I understand it, used to be the basis of what used to be the democratic culture of the ANC. Everyone had a say, and like all inputs into the scary question of democratic interventions, some were smart, some were wise, and some were full of nonsense.
In the perception of the Arch and myself, the ANC will always be a ”broad church.” There have been times when I have been told by some of its spin doctors and nouveau-witch doctors that heresy against the supposed party line meant nothing more nor less than that I am better placed in the arms of the despised Pan Africanist Congress (”one settler, one bullet, one percent”).
This roughshod, slipshod, slap- dash approach to democratic practise is but one of the reasons why so many people get pissed off and throw themselves into the arms of a devil they don’t know, rather than continue to have their credibility and integrity continually brought into question (remember Bantu Holomisa).
So all in all, what is one trying to say? For me, the Arch’s comments about the country and the ANC (and the two must not be confused as being the same thing) were actually pretty mild. The reaction that was forthcoming from the ruling party didn’t seem to warrant the severity that it was met with.
With almost 70% of the electorate behind it (an electorate that would, for the most part, itself never doubt the Arch’s role in bringing that party to power), what is the ANC so paranoid about?
Let’s take a friendly view. The party has reinvented itself, from that shaggy broad church of the 1920s, into a sleek mean machine that can deal with the harsh realities of the 21st century, American presidential dirty politics style. Winning is everything, even when you’ve already won. The party that we all voted for has to continue to be seen as top dog, in case anyone on the outside (those who don’t carry party cards, like you and me) has any doubts.
Well, I feel for the Arch. I feel for you and me. And even though the nouveau-apparatchiks of the party will never understand it, I feel for the ANC as we used to know it.