/ 11 September 2007

The spook and the spin doctor

I meet the spook at coffee shops on the post-industrial fringes of town, past the tile warehouse, table at the back. He doesn’t look well: chain smoking, careless of his clothes. And his stories are impossibly spiralling tales of power, corruption and lies — utterly implausible, almost always true.

The spin doctor prefers a fashionable bar where art-school luvvies with constructivist haircuts serve espresso kissed with golden foam. We take a high-visibility table and I listen as he tells me the truth with a slant.

There have always been points of contact between these meetings, names and dates that flare not just in the spook-dense underworld, but also in the spin doctor’s bright new day. “Be afraid,” says the former, “take a look at my hard drive.” “Relax” says the latter, “look at the decor and the glossy, glossy people, everything is going swimmingly.” The contradictions are doing my head in, and it isn’t just the caffeine.

Everything exists; nothing has meaning. Or maybe it is the other way around. I blame Thabo Mbeki, who purports to share the spin doctor’s sunny outlook. But I also blame his gloomy detractors.

Critics of the president’s online letter say they don’t understand why he fires off these erratically conceived missives; they parse his prose for wounds and facial tics, pay rote obeisance to his intellectual capabilities and, in angry columns, suggest that he spare us the embarrassment by simply shutting up.

That is a mistake, but not for the reasons that Mbeki’s native assistants serve up — racism, imperialism, the manoeuvrings of “the enemy”.

If it wasn’t obvious before, the brutish month since the dismissal of Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has made it plain that the Mbeki letters are to be taken not as transparent windows into his thoughts, but as political acts.

To take just the simplest of examples, Mbeki keeps accusing journalists of making things up.

A Sunday Times report about racial preferences slowing down the hiring of medical specialists was “entirely false”, he told Parliament in June. The foreign editor of the Independent was telling “shameless lies”, he wrote on August 23, when she suggested that Madlala-Routledge had played a central role in the revival of South Africa’s HIV/Aids treatment programme; and the Daily Dispatch story about perinatal mortality at Frere Hospital which triggered the whole drama was “false”.

This isn’t subtle stuff. Mbeki did not say that the reporters in question were interpreting the facts in a way that reproduces racism — a debate we can certainly have; he said they were lying.

Journalists find this kind of thing upsetting. It is an attack on their most basic values and, when the charge is taken up in even cruder form across the African National Congress (ANC) and government, it makes them anxious about the future.

Perhaps we would worry less if we thought more about what it is that Mbeki’s claims, and the inevitable reactions, achieve for him.

For one thing they allow him to define himself against an enemy outside of the ruling party and to campaign for the ANC presidency, not against Jacob Zuma or Kgalema Motlanthe, but against the enemies of the National Democratic Revolution. That is a much easier job.

In his July 27 letter Mbeki gives us a kind of theoretical cartoon: he is Gradgrind, the Dickensian accountant, auditing “the facts” of South Africa’s progress and finding himself satisfied. The country’s newsrooms, he complains, are not staffed by the ink-stained clerks of the developmental state, but by a bunch of postmodernists who no longer believe in the correspondence between truth and appearance.

I wish he were right, but I am sorry to report that my colleagues are a literal-minded bunch. They would find little to disagree with in Mbeki’s insistence that “all of us face the demand to understand objective reality accurately and objectively”.

That is exactly why he upsets some of them so much and why they expend so much effort in trying to imagine the truth that hides just beyond the hem of his letters.

In fact, it is Mbeki who is the postmodernist. Like the spin doctor, he knows that the “facts” he keeps referring to are rhetorical devices rather than unmoving truths, that changing the world has a lot to do with how you interpret it and that, in the strange spring of 2007, the media might be more useful to him as an enemy than as a friend.

Because he understands these things better than his critics, we are now having a debate about press freedom, instead of dealing with the facts about his health minister. That is a victory for Mbeki.

Does that mean we can laugh off all the nasty rhetoric as the froth of the election season and go back to our cappuccino? Hardly. There are things on that hard drive to shiver the most laid-back of postmodernists.