It is difficult, when punched in the guts, to take a deep breath, although air is what you most fervently desire. Exhortations to stay calm seem to float in from some impossibly distant and irrelevant realm.
Thabo Mbeki seemed to manage it in his resignation speech on Sunday, although people who know him well could see the rage and humiliation he was holding in check.
Gwede Mantashe, too, did a plausible job of looking unruffled on Tuesday as Mbeki’s staff took advantage of their waning time in office to glory in the virtual implosion of the Cabinet.
The rest of us may need to spend a little more time in political Pilates classes before we can stand up to the pummelling the ANC has been delivering to our basic belief about how power is exercised in this country. Not since the early Nineties, when we learned to live constantly on the cusp of transcendent success or bloody disaster, has there been such deep anxiety and such utter bewilderment at every level of society.
To be sure, it is people who identified closely with the Mbeki project of modernisation, racial transformation and the sovereignty of the technocrats, who are most at sea. They are alienated from the party that is the cradle of their political and social identity and are angry and powerless in an unfamiliar and deeply disturbing way.
But many of those who sought Mbeki’s ouster, and with it the establishment of a government they see as closer to the founding ideals of the ANC, are worried too. They fear not just the gathering anger of Mbeki’s fight-back, but also the rampant populism, rogue intelligence agencies, arson and violence in the ANC branches that the long campaign against Mbeki has nurtured and unleashed.
Despite rising frustration over service delivery and increasing detachment from politics among better-off minority groups, South Africans seem, generally, to have accepted life under a limited democracy. They trust the internal mechanisms of the ANC, subject to very limited modification by the bureaucracy or Parliament and occasionally checked by the courts, to keep life on the commanding heights ticking. If the questions that small business owners, technical workers, cleaning staff, university professors and waiters were asking journalists this week are anything to go by, that trust has crumbled away almost overnight.
”What is going to happen to our country?” was the standard refrain, varied only with, ”should we be packing?”
In that sense Jacob Zuma’s ”coup” was just that — a blow.
But there will be plenty to welcome when we all get our breath back. Not the new, more democratic ANC that Zuma’s supporters keep promising us, nor, necessarily, better policies or a government more in tune with its people.
Our main gain is the space that has been opened for the real battle to determine the future. For too long we have been distracted by a conflict of shadows.
Mbeki’s most effective ruse, and one that he was able to pull off for far too long, was the creation of the impression that he was the true custodian of good governance and the champion of democratic institutions.
Too many of us, for too long, bought this version, and its corollary, that where he undermined democracy, he did so to save it.
Meanwhile, Zuma, who seemed to go out of his way to confirm his image as the corrupt, bumbling, sexually incontinent creature of comprador business and the loony left, provided cover for Mbeki’s manifest weaknesses.
Fortunately now the phony conflict between the managerialist and the peasant is over, bar what will no doubt be some prolonged and unpleasant shouting.
But the real threats this shadow conflict raised have finally made it possible for a defence of the Constitution and its basic democratic values to emerge, not just from the rightward margins of our politics but from within the ANC and civil society.
It is a truism that civil society struggled to define its role in the immediate afterglow of the transition to democracy. The ruling party seemed to have filled up all the space in national life available for those who wanted more attention paid to the concerns of the poor and those who wanted a more liberal, open social and economic dispensation.
Even as the austere financial regime of the late Nineties brought increasing disappointment for the left and as evidence mounted that powerful figures in the ANC were willing to subvert institutional independence and civil liberties, for many organisations and individuals vocal opposition seemed embarrassing, or impossible, except in the terms made available within the tripartite alliance.
That may be why so many anti-poverty campaigners, for example, shared platforms and messages with Cosatu, which lent a patina of struggle respectability to their calls for a more redistributive economic policy.
Concerns about the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the media, corruption and the abuse of state power were mainly voiced in the press, opposition parties and think-tanks such as the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and the Institute for Security Studies. These worries were too easily dismissed from within the ANC as liberal shibboleths.
The brutal endgame between Mbeki and Zuma has stripped us of that critical coyness. Calls for the creation of a new political party, or at least a campaign to spoil ballots, are being formulated in mainstream civil society and the upper ranks of the ANC itself.
Hugh Glenister’s campaign to save the Scorpions represents a new kind of citizen activism, and the very different, but equally powerful refusal of state figures such as Vusi Pikoli, Chris Nicholson and the judges of the Constitutional Court to be politically manipulated, is evidence that democracy still has powerful resources to draw upon in this society.
Perhaps we should thank our errant leaders for this: even as their battles threatened our most basic values, they reminded us of what those values are.