I had just passed the baroque gilt gates of ”Chez Guevara”, the summer residence of a Marxist of the 1970s who had recently discovered the joys of broad-based empowerment, when I realised I was being tailed. The metallic new model Mini Cooper hung back at a safe following distance, its driver almost buried under enormous bags of laundry. A clever ruse: the tablecloths of Bishopscourt, stained with Merlot and quail-egg vomit, were shuttled down to the brown people in Not Bishopscourt every other day. Nothing unusual there.
But soon the Mini accelerated, and swept past me. The bags of laundry, I realised, were enormous shoulders and a voluminous chest, and the fifth columnist of my imaginings was Brett Kebble. He looked sombre and huge, like a grumpy bear driving a Fisher-Price pushcart.
Columnists who recount personal anecdotes or shoehorn themselves into their writing are invariably loathsome: I step fleetingly across this line with no small shudder. But I feel it is my duty as a journalist to add this impression of Kebble to the steaming heap of sentiment, opinion, hearsay, speculation and generalisation currently obsessing the local media. Indeed, were this newspaper less august, I would demand a lamppost placard advertising my anecdote through pithy insinuations of drive-bys in high-performance compact cars.
Ludicrous, perhaps; but no more so than the extraordinary explosion of opinion-shaping media gabble about the death of a businessman. Governmental finger-wags haven’t helped: on Wednesday Presidential Hanger-About Essop Pahad accused the media of considering Kebble guilty until proven innocent; thereby officially cutting the ribbon on a bona fide polemic and opening the floor to all comers.
At the front of the queue, of course, has been the African National Congress, letting the impoverished masses know exactly where they stand by eulogising a loaded umlungu. It must have gone down a treat in the townships, especially in Delmas, where the locals would have learned a vital life skill: if you want ministers and ANC Youth League apparatchiks to stand sombrely at your graveside as they lower your RDP-issue pine box into the landfill, don’t go dying of some unpatriotic anti-ubuntu ailment, such as HIV/Aids compounded by tuberculosis aggravated by lung cancer precipitated by birth defects caused by apartheid-era asbestos-lined shanties. Typhoid? That’s not even funny.
But at least the ANCYL didn’t commission Elton John to revise Candle in the Wind into something fitting, such as Blowtorch in the Haystack or Cat in the Cream: the traditional sycophancy and fickle rhetoric one expects of politicians has been nothing out of the ordinary.
Not so the partisan hysteria of the media. Deeply stupid reporting has kept insisting that the general public care about a man who meant very little to them; a good man; a wicked man; whatever. It seems it doesn’t matter what you think of Kebble, as long as you think something.
It is a typically middle-class preoccupation with unsubstantiated opinion, best illustrated by the constant harping on Kebble’s relationship with the art world. Cub reporters have dutifully listed his favourite artists — Maggie Laubscher, Irma Stern, Walter Battiss — unaware of what they were revealing. A good barometer of nouveau-riche taste is the renown of the art on display. The moneyed peasantry, vastly wealthy for a generation and monstrously ignorant of the last millennium, invariably see art as a currency, and currency — whether cash or cachet — must be displayed to be of any value.
Had we been told that Kebble was entranced by an unknown sculptor of the 1920s, whose entire oeuvre he had been voraciously collecting, we might have been convinced. But presenting a who’s-who of South African art, the kind of list that matters to the culturally rudderless, simply confirmed the prejudices of those who have regarded his venture into the art world as a something of a passing circus act.
When Suleiman the Magnificent travelled through Africa in the 16th century, he gave away so much gold that he devalued the metal for years. It was an impressive show, but ultimately irrelevant to the development of the continent, not least because some of that wealth came from slaves. Patrons of the arts have to do more than write cheques. They need to represent a way of life in which monetary value is not paramount, in which exploitation is not business as usual, and in which anonymous patronage prevails over public grandstanding.
By all accounts (in other words, written by those with time and space constraints, editorial policies, and carefully defined target markets) Kebble was a jovial fellow, adored by his family, drooled over by those whose palms he kept greased, genuinely admired by those who his philanthropy had lifted into a higher tax bracket. No doubt, like many powerful men, he had some filthy secrets: anyone who tries to insist that money and power don’t accumulate slime is probably on lunch from the Presidency.
No doubt the organ of public opinion will continue to be cranked. It will tell us Kebble was a patriot, a reformer and a blithe spirit; it will insinuate that he was a rogue capitalist jostling with puckered lips for position around the sphincter of the government.
But it can’t make us care, and it can’t insist that we should.