It was a casual chat with a colleague ahead of the start of a long weekend. I told her I would be spending some time at a drinking hole somewhere in Soweto.
She pointed out that she did not like Soweto pubs much because they seemed too “nice”. She preferred those of the rural Eastern Cape, crowded little places where people sit on crates and drink from 750ml bottles.
Since there is no accounting for personal taste, I will live and let live.
I’m concerned, though, about the constant portrayal of the poor and working-class communities as if they exist to satisfy the curiosity of the better-off classes.
Like taking pictures with the Masai warriors in Kenya or Tanzania is the thing to do when in those countries, so when you are in South Africa, you just have to do the poverty trail to experience the real South Africa.
I’m prepared to be called all sorts of names, but spending time with the great unwashed, drinking from vessels I would not normally drink from and spewing nonsense (such as happened the other day, when a drinking partner was adamant about the best route to get to Spain by car), is not my kind of fun.
I’m sure my colleague was well-meaning. But for some, being pro-poor and working class has come to mean internalising impoverished circumstances as the defining character of a people.
It is also unfortunate that some of those who perpetuate the myth about how “cool” it is to be poor and working class, are seldom poor or working class themselves.
For my colleague, sitting on a beer crate and listening to a lot of nonsense from people afflicted by ignorance (not necessarily of their own making), might sound like having a whale of a time. But, as that famous leftist who wrote the great communist bible once pointed out, in a roundabout way, the idea is not to understand poverty, but to eradicate it.
For as long as the working class and the poor remain sources of scholarly endeavour and an outlet for “alternative” fun for some people, we will never get close to eliminating this scourge. Sure, it is important to study the causes of poverty if it is to be properly dealt with, but it appears to me that this has been overtaken by the love and tolerance of poverty as inevitable. Those who do their best to run away from it must live with the shame of having committed “class suicide”.
It has become politically incorrect in left-wing circles to suggest that working-class life is not ideal. They can quote as many writers as they want, but know of no working-class parents who want their children to perpetuate their circumstances.
They may not tell their children to go out there and become “middle class”, but parents in working-class communities always stress why it is important to go to school and get a “better” job and, with it, have improved circumstances. I read them as saying to their children: don’t be working class if you can help it.
I doubt if any of the leftist intellectuals and academics would honestly want their own children to swell the ranks of the proletariat.
For beyond the fascination with the habits of the class, lies the cold reality of exploitation at the workplace, degradation in society and the ever-present possibility of all sorts of violence, physical, emotional and sexual. Only those whose relationship with working-class life is theoretical or academic repeat the nonsense that the poor are happier than the rich.
My colleague may not know it, but those of us who have lived in these communities know what the police statisticians mean when they say most violent crimes and deaths happen between people who know each other and when people have been drinking.
After she leaves the dingy and stuffy shack, satisfied that she knows how the other half lives, those left behind will continue in the awareness that their life is a powder keg, where the frustrations of an unequal society are only a wrong move or statement away from blowing up.
This fixation with working-class life as a good in itself is the real opiate of the masses. It is a falsehood, created elsewhere, that makes people think coming from a “tough” neighbourhood is something to boast about.
I can only repeat Marx’s sentiments: he said the sociologists and other intellectuals have made a big deal of understanding the working class and not enough of eradicating the things that define this class.
Dingy little shacks full of those who have lost all hope are a reminder of the evils we continue to live with — it is not a source of merriment.