/ 23 February 2009

Nothing has broken yet, but –

Mood of the nation, eh. Seems to be darkening from where I sit. It’s partly the economy, partly the anxiety occasioned by the decline of the Rome of our time, which leaves the rich with nowhere to flee. Mostly, though, it’s the fallout of years of silly buggery in the ruling party, whose shortcomings have been laid bare for all to see. And yet, the ruling party is about to be returned to power, possibly with an increased majority.

This last bit utterly confounds foreign observers, who cannot understand why South Africans would fail to punish rulers whose delivery record is, by most accounts, dismal and whose leader faces unresolved corruption charges. Thank God there’s no need to explain this to local readers. Suffice it to say that events seem to be propelling us towards a watershed of some sort.

Pardon the brute-force generalisations to come, but our complex dilemmas are becoming increasingly simple as I enter my dotage and years of habitual pessimism bear the malformed fruit so long anticipated. Let’s isolate one tiny aspect of the challenge. As we know, shit and its disposal present a challenge we are struggling to cope with. It’s partly an ecological problem (rapid population growth and urbanisation) and partly a financial one (too little money to build new plants). The scale would be daunting even if we were as rich and well-governed as the Swiss, but we’re not: we are African, and a peculiar form of African to boot, burdened by a history that compels our leaders to sideline those who actually understand sewage and replace them with candidates considered morally and politically more suitable for municipal employment, thereby weakening our ability to deal with a crisis that would probably overwhelm us anyway, given our limited resources and relatively tiny tax base.

As go sewage plants, so goes almost everything else — schools, hospitals, roads, border posts, police stations, Parliament itself. Nothing has actually broken yet, but we all know where it’s heading. If you drop an egg, it breaks, okay? And if a sub-Saharan African country achieves independence, it turns into a basket case, nine times out of 10. The Zimbabwean egg bounced anomalously for a decade or so, but now it too has smashed, and that leaves us. Seems to me that South Africans ought to be obsessed by one question only: what went wrong in the rest of Africa and how do we avoid the same fate?

Here we run into a taboo that makes further progress difficult. A lifetime of reading banned ANC publications taught me a great deal about slavery, imperialism and capitalism, but I never once saw the problem addressed in the bald manner here stated. In the ANC’s worldview Africans are victims of hostile external forces bent on forcing the continent to its knees. They are never masters of their own destiny, capable of squaring their shoulders and saying, we will by our own labours create a sewage system whose glories will blind the world.

It is against this backdrop that I would like to doff my hat to some brave brothers and sisters whose recent intrusion into this debate strikes me as the most hopeful thing that has happened in this country since the miracle of l994. I first became aware of their existence when The Pure Monate Show smashed its way into my suburban cocoon, featuring a skit in which a demented gunman is seen tutoring a class of schoolchildren in the arts of armed robbery. ”And if you get caught,” he concludes, ”you always blame the legacy of apartheid. Okay! So what have you learned today?” The children chorus, ”Blame the legacy of apartheid.”

So yes, it was just a TV comedy, but the effrontery was dumbfounding, given that the perpetrators were young and black. Their names were Kagiso Lediga, David Kibuuka and Loyiso Gola (among others) and their every show contained material that shamed me for imagining blacks were incapable of confronting awkward truths about Africa. They lampooned the pretentions of our new aristocracy, mocked their foibles, ridiculed their attempts at combating crime. ”Our job,” said ringleader Lediga, ”is to talk about things that are wrong, and we’ll keep doing it unless you kill us.”

Lediga will probably cringe at this elevation to soothsayer, so let’s move on to a man upon whose shoulders the mantle more comfortably rests: businessman Moeletsi Mbeki, whose criticism of ”parasitic” black empowerment policies harmonised nicely with Pure Monate’s heresies and was all the more startling considering Mbeki’s relationship with you-know-who. As the decade advanced, the Mail & Guardian‘s Sipho Seepe became ever more willing to slaughter sacred cattle, a pastime in which he was later joined by Mondli Makhanya, Justice Malala, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, Xolela Mangçu and others too numerous to mention. ”Maybe it is in the nature of things that we follow the path of our brothers and sisters up north,” wrote Mangçu in December 2007. ”Not even under apartheid was I ever this depressed.”

By 2008 the New Critics seemed to be coalescing into a movement. Tutu’s son Trevor called a radio station to ask by what logic rich blacks should continue to have privileged access to jobs and other race-based freebies while the poor suffered and services deteriorated. ”This nonsense has to end now,” said he. Ndumiso Ngcobo’s book of ”subversive thoughts from an urban Zulu warrior” offered some withering and very witty insights into the problematics of blackness, and then came Congress of the People (Cope), whose rhetoric on such subjects as morality and corruption provided several uplifting yes-we-can moments. Cope’s larger significance is presently inscrutable, but at the very least they forced Jacob Zuma to guard his rightward flank, inter alia by promising to light a fire under the police and send pregnant schoolgirls to Siberia.

Why are these developments significant? Because there is no hope for salvation unless we diagnose our condition correctly and that was impossible so long as blackness shielded its possessors from criticism of the killing sort necessary to save us from the shattered-egg syndrome. Yes, white reactionaries whinge in similar vein, but who cares? What counts is that the New Critics are black. Those who dismiss them as coconuts miss the point entirely. Nothing shames a racist so much as Africans raising awkward questions about themselves. The New Critics have forced whites to confront the unspeakable stupidity of denying the vote to people once held incapable of rationality and to consider the humiliating possibility that this country might defy our predictions by succeeding.

I spent January in Europe, which is close to writing us off in this regard. The Aids and Zimbabwe fiascos did mortal damage, and what compassion remains is draining away as the West comes to terms with its own grimly diminished financial status. The river of aid that shielded Africans from the consequences of misrule is drying up and, after that, we’re on our own. So let’s not waste time debating the merits of this leader versus that policy. We need a paradigm shift. We need leaders who will not countenance failure, who fill our skies with pillars of smoke and fire. Above all, we need to heed those who value truth above racial solidarity.

Rian Malan is a musician, journalist and the author of a seminal book on apartheid, My Traitor’s Heart