In the Free Republic of Aburiria, the fabled subject of Ngugi wa’Thiongo’s latest novel Wizard of the Crow, a nationwide queuing epidemic symbolic of a poverty-stricken nation whose basic needs are never met is fatally misinterpreted by The Ruler as a nefarious political conspiracy to usurp his power.
In the democratic Republic of South Africa, on his way to relieve himself during a football match at Ellis Park three weeks ago, Young Communist League national secretary Buti Manamela was jumped by a gunman. The YCL immediately suggested this could be part of a political conspiracy, not the crime his impoverished constituency faces every day.
All this raises the perennial question: is truth stranger than fiction?
”After a long tussle, the national secretary managed to escape unharmed,” a YCL press release declared. ”This accident happens in the midst of growing sinister accidents (sic) attempts (sic) directed at senior leaders of the ANC and the SACP, namely the Deputy President of the ANC, comrade Jacob Zuma, and the general secretary of the SACP, comrade Blade Nzimande (pictured below left).”
Precisely a week later the maladroitly titled Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report came ticking through on a fax machine at Cosatu House while the postman simultaneously hand-delivered a copy at reception for federation general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi (pictured below right). The ”browse” claimed Zuma was being funded by Libyan President Moammar Gadaffi and Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos, among others, to organise a popular rebellion against the current government.
Two weeks earlier a ”sniper”, purported to be a former South African National Defence Force member in a plot to assassinate Zuma, was exposed as a beach vagrant called Ben Wyland Coetzee who had been offered a cool R1-million to pose as an assassin.
Questions about the authenticity of the ”hoax” emails, which began circulating in November 2005 and implicated top government and ANC officials in a plot to thwart one set of contenders in the ANC succession race, remain unanswered.
In politics one expects a certain level of duplicity, but in post-apartheid South Africa there was an expectation that the ANC, both as a political party and in government, would not sink to this level of such self-destruction. Pixley ka Isaka Seme must be turning in his grave as the party he founded degenerates into an arena for paranoid minds.
The common denominator in all these ”conspiracies” is the victimhood of Zuma. Conspiracy claims provide an expedient, if not infantile, smokescreen for his corruption allegations and the humilia- ting publicity attached to his sexual exploits as he scrambles to save face ahead of the ANC national conference in December.
Rationally, conspiracy theories should be dismissed for what they are — the ”exhaust fumes of democracy” as they are described by commentator Christopher Hitchens. But the danger in South Africa is the communal reinforcement of this drivel by sections of the country’s leadership.
Prominent leaders of Cosatu and SACP throw their weight behind each new conspiracy claim, partly as a knee-jerk reaction to their alienation from the ANC government under President Thabo Mbeki (which has its own history of ”plot” allegations). But, the flippancy with which they have, for example, recently compared the Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report with the disinformation that preceded Chris Hani’s murder is dangerously populist and contradicts their own calls to their constituencies to ”maintain cool heads”.
This has all been exacerbated by the perception — real or not — that the country’s security agencies have had a heavy hand in stirring this conspiratorial pot.
Don Foster, a psychology professor at the University of Cape Town, says the origin of conspiracy theories lies in seeking a scapegoat.
”Conspiracy theories are a collective phenomenon of cells of people inventing stories to blame ‘the other’ when things go wrong. The issues become over-simplified and massively exaggerated, leading, in a final push, to genocide. Rwanda and the holocaust are two examples. South Africa is nowhere near this situation but, historically, conspiracies have led to a depth of fear in society so that the only solution becomes to kill.”
Of course, conspiracy claims wouldn’t gain the currency they do without a credulous media. In the past year conspiracy claims have flowed like effluent at a sewage plant as journalists scramble to find ”the lead that bleeds” and subsequently get tangled up in political agendas. This newspaper, for example, lent credibility to the apparent hoax assassination plot against Zuma by publishing it as a front-page story.
We need to take more care. The difficult balancing act of accurately recording the cut and thrust in a highly political year without compromising any of the parties involved — including the journalists themselves — is as critical to the succession battle as distilling the fantastic claims from reality.
Let’s keep fiction where it belongs.