We all stood up stiffly and attempted to sing the new national anthem that most of us have not bothered to memorise as yet. ”Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika,” we sang, slightly off-key in the usual way, under the oppressive weight of the plastic tent that had been hastily erected to protect us from the thunderstorm that never materialised as the ruling party launched its latest book of common sense, entitled Legacy of Freedom.
This is always a tricky moment these days, especially when the participants have been given no clear idea as to the difference between what is ”state” and what is ”party”. And more especially since the African National Congress, the ruling party ad nauseam in question, has not really given us a clear understanding of the difference between the two. Probably because it does not, itself, have a clear idea of the separation that should exist between the organs of state, party and ecclesiastical order.
When we are admonished, therefore, to stand and deliver the triple barrels of the hastily cobbled New National Anthem that is supposed to satisfy the many constituencies that the New South Africa is made up of, there is inevitably some confusion in the hall, wherever that hall may be.
In our case, the hall was, as I say, this plastic marquee on the grounds of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, standing proudly among the studied ruins of the old Johannesburg Fort Prison, lovingly referred to by its anguished old lags as ”Number Four” (because the old remand prison, where untold thousands of pass offenders, murderers, petty thieves, naughty politicians out on a limb, and angry shebeen queens, to name but a few, were held, was called that). Anyway, this makeshift hall we were standing in was the venue for the launch of a book called Legacy of Freedom. The legacy of freedom we were joined in celebrating on this day that had coyly been sanitised from ”Sharpeville Day” to ”Human Rights Day” related to what the book’s subtitle called ”the ANC’s Human Rights Tradition”.
Forget the fact that the Sharpeville massacre, in which hundreds of native Bantus were killed or injured, was a Pan African Congress shindig, and sent shock waves reverberating around the world (and kick-started several international anti-apartheid campaigns to boot). The past is to be either buried or absorbed.
And so, too, with the national anthem. Enoch Sontonga’s great hymn Nkosi sikelel’ is now to be ‒similarly buried or absorbed into the arms of the eagerly awaiting Afrikaner nationalist (and decidedly unfunky) Die Stem van Suid Afrika. Which, as I say, most of us have still not bothered to learn. The children of the revolution tend to have thick and stubborn heads that do not easily adapt to change. Especially when change involves swallowing and regurgitating unpleasant landscapes from the bitter past. But enough of that.
We got through this awkward moment of passive resistance against the new anthem without anyone getting arrested for contempt of court, and proceeded to
the business of the day. And this is where the potential for passive resistance under a new dispensation could really have kicked in. But, predictably, did not.
No, Boer and Bantu alike sat passive and impassive as the Deputy President of the country, one Jacob Zuma, delivered the keynote address.
The problem was that no one among us really knew what the deputy president (who we are also told is the next-president-in-waiting) was talking about. And it was all a matter of delivery — not delivery in the sense that Finance Minister Trevor Manuel does a masterful circus act every few months, but the more direct matter of delivering a text about the matter in hand in a way that this captive audience can grasp and get to grips with.
One had the impression that we in the front line were at the receiving end of a speech the deputy president had not only not written with his own hand, out of his own brain, but had apparently not even seen until just a few moments before he unleashed it on us.
It had probably been quietly handed to him by a faceless bodyguard out of a sleek, slim briefcase just moments before, and was now being read haltingly, for the first time, with many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, by the second-most powerful voice in the land—soon, by all accounts, to become the most powerful.
This was cause for consternation among the glazed faces of the political, cultural and foreign diplomatic community gathered for the occasion.
I have always argued that politicians should stick to politics, and leave public presentation of their convoluted logic to trained actors (who should, incidentally, also be extremely well paid, given the burden they would carry of turning leaden thoughts into soaring golden phrases, accompanied by appropriately uplifting gestures).
Leaf through the pages of history. The world’s greatest leaders, if they have taken this burden upon themselves, have all been natural actors of one sort or another—or at least reasonably capable hams, as in the case of characters like Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, and Abraham Lincoln who, you will recall, was himself shot dead by an out-of-work actor called John Wilkes Booth for bringing the performing arts into disrepute with that outrageous, comical, Mormon-woodcutter beard of his.
Then there have been failed Hollywood actors like Ronald Reagan and music hall starlets like Eva Peron of Argentina. Even the dreaded Ice Queen Margaret Thatcher of the British Isles took a leaf out of Adolf Hitler’s book and hired a professional actor to help get the squeak out of her voice, trick some sincerity into her cold eyes, and convince a cynical British public that she, and she alone, was their hope for the future.
Our ruling party politicians seem to place themselves way beyond such trivial pursuits. Like Roger Moore’s James Bond, they prefer to do all their own stunts, and tell all their own lies, instead of passing the buck further down the line, where it can no longer be traced to an original source.
Our ears, brains and sense of self-esteem suffer as a result.