I am more than mildly perplexed by Achmat Dangor’s lashback at Breyten Breytenbach’s “attack” on Nelson Mandela.
Firstly, I confess I haven’t read Breytenbach’s article and would dearly love to do so. A subscription to Harper’s magazine, though perfectly justified at the price — it is one of the 10 best English magazines in the world — is quite simply way beyond my means given our exchange rate. If anyone has the article, ag please man, email it to me!
Anyway, assuming Dangor felt the bearded “albino terrorist’s” criticisms of our beloved nonogenarian icon were a tad unfair, what does he as its CEO or the Nelson Mandela Foundation achieve by snapping back? Or was it just a leaf taken from the ANC’s manual, “If You Can’t See Reason, Understand Logic Or Have Anything Worthwhile To Say, Call The Enemy Names”.
Whenever someone abroad (or here at home for that matter) levels criticisms, deserved or not, there is a blind rapid-fire response consisting of five mandatory steps — (1) ignore everything that is said, (2) make no effort to understand what is said, (3) deny everything, (4) retaliate with meaningless verbage or threats, (5) imply cowardice by telling the critic to stop complaining and do something to fix what’s wrong (oblivious to the implied recognition that the critic is right).
Few things in this country get me more riled up than this perpetually purile nettle-rash reaction by those suffering from Slashback Syndrome. SS is characterised by the uncontrollable primitive instinct to lash out at anyone who criticises South Africa, pointing out what fabulous weather we have and how nice the Kruger Park is and that crime happens everywhere and so on ad nauseam.
Among other distasteful and asinine displays, SS is the latter day version of floccinaucinihilipillification, which the OED defines as “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless”.
This marvellous word was explained to us yonks ago by Professor Guy Butler at Rhodes University as the sort of thing pre-schoolers do when one of them says something such as, “My dad’s so strong he can push the car with one hand,”. Without a moment’s thought, another kid will snap back: “That’s nothing!” and a totally pointless, but vigorous argument ensues. I think the great prof was only half joking.
It is the local-is-lekker version of Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot sketch in which Michael Palin responds to John Cleese’s complaint that the parrot he bought is, in fact, dead by saying: “Beautiful plumage, the Norwegian Blue, ‘ey? Beautiful plumage”.
“Your rulers are corrupt,” says the critic. “Table Mountain is so beautiful, isn’t it?” SA –The Good News says. “Why aren’t you bringing crime down?” the critic asks. “Crime happens everywhere. Oh look, what a beautiful day!” The Movement for Good says. “It’s time you took a firm stand against Mugabe,” the critic says. “The Namaqua daisies should be really beautiful this year,” says the Homecoming Revolution.
Although no cure has been found for SS, it is spreading and seems to have more money behind it than big tobacco had in its heyday. Like any syndrome, it is a cluster of maladies including Tour-ettes Disorder, Twenty-tenitis, SAchosis and Possibility Paranoia.
Ah yes, this “Alive with Possibility” rubbish. It’s the kind of deliberately ambiguous marketing mumbo-jumbo that is simultaneously accurate and completely misleading. After all it’s quite possible you’ll go home in a box. It’s also possible you will not. Fuck the possibilities. Where are the probabilities?
Unlike most other mental disorders, SS pays very handsomely — ask Moeketsi Mosola, head of the International Marketing Council (now out of the closet and openly dot-gov — and what became of Yvonne Johnston?), or Stuart Pennington of SA — The Good News or any of the legions of factotums behind the army of heavily funded fronts spin doctoring our way to Halleluja Day in 2010 when everything will magically come right!
In his slashback reaction to Breytenbach’s criticism of the government’s disgraceful inaction in fighting crime, Dangor politely commiserates with the specific incidents the poet mentions, but denies (shit, we’re good at denying aren’t we?) “the overall implication that our situation is irredeemable”. Wow! That is really helpful. Beautiful plumage, the Norwegian blue, i’nit?
Sapa reports that Dangor took particular issue with Breytenbach’s depiction of Mandela, who is 90 years old, retired and increasingly reluctant to take a public role. Maybe a poet sees an icon wielding power long after he or she is dead, but would rather they do so while still alive. Heck, every civil rights campaigner calls on Martin Luther King when they need to.
But Mandela has left it to his foundation to continue his development and aid work, so get on with it.
Dangor said Breytenbach depicted Mandela “as descending into frivolity while the country burns. In fact the opposite is true.” Dangor said Mandela “has used that world stage, yes, often in glamorous surroundings and in the presence of celebrities to make some profound calls upon his fellow country people — and the world — to act, against Aids, against poverty and inequality, to resist oppression and injustice. And most importantly, for others to take responsibility, to show leadership and to be courageous in that leadership.”
But since Madiba’s pleas are clearly falling on deaf ears — especially where his own “comrades” are concerned — Dangor called on Breytenbach to return to South Africa and help build the country. Yeah, right! We can’t even keep 20 000 people employed until next year, so inspan an aging poet. Even the normally sycophantic Business Against Crime has fingered government ineptitude, greed, corruption, cronyism and the lack of political will, intestinal and testicular fortitude as the biggest obstacles to progress.
Of course Mandela “did not choose to be an icon,” says Dangor, but now that he is — and bigger in Japan than in Jozi — what are you going to do with such incredible stature?
Then Dangor gets on the real roller-coaster. “We South Africans turned him into one.” What utter garbage! Mandela was an icon to millions worldwide while still on Robben Island. He is a global icon — maybe even THE global icon of our times. Mandela walked and the world hoped. Simple as that. Most of those great hopes have been dashed. That’s not the icon’s fault. That’s human nature.
The one place I find myself agreeing with Dangor is when he says South Africans clung to the iconic stature of Madiba “perhaps so that we can absolve ourselves from taking responsibility for our own destiny”. And we saw that in spades in his 90th birthday!
When it comes to taking responsibility for our own destiny we have failed. Now we have no answers because there’s silence from that house in Houghton where we received so much leadership before. Now look at the pile of discards we have left. We’ve got fruit salad. In the words of another poet, Koos Kombuis, “daar’s fokken baie fokkol in die land”.
So all the Slashback Syndrome spin doctors resort to the floccinaucinihilipilification song of South Africa — “Alive With Possibility”.
By Llewellyn Kriel
An Interview with The Trayvon Hoax Director Joel Gilbert
-
America got played by an epic race hoax that divided us for no reason.
18 hours ago
3 Opinion(s):
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20081217111447605C775522
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/26/a_conversation_with_south_african_poet
The whole show.
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/11/26
Mandela’s Smile: notes on South Africa's failed revolution
By Breyten Breytenbach – Harpers Magazine December 2008
I did not struggle to be poor.
—Smuts Ngonyama, spokesman, African National Congress
The “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the
rule.
—Walter Benjamin
Dear Madiba,
This is the year of your ninetieth birthday; the whole earth is
celebrating—to excess, I am tempted to say. Why? Because we cling to
you, Nelson Mandela, as a living icon, as a liberation hero who did not
renege on his commitments to freedom from oppression and justice for
all, as the father of the rainbow nation, as a man of nearly
incomprehensible moral resilience who walked out of prison after
twenty-seven years of harsh incarceration and forced labor seemingly
without bitterness or a thirst for revenge, and who is still giving
unstintingly of himself. And I would add: because you are a wise and a
curious and caring humanist with so much humor and such a lovely smile . . .
I, too, want to celebrate your achievements, your example, the frail
dignity of your old age. And yet when a South African newspaper
approached me to be among those invited to address you publicly on this
occasion, I balked. Why? Partly because I find it obscene the way
everybody and his or her partner—the ex-presidents and other vacuous and
egomaniacal politicians, the starlets and coke-addled fashion models,
the intellectually challenged and morally strained musicians, the hollow
international jet set—treat you like some exotic teddy bear to slobber
over. You have become both a vade mecum and a touchstone: those who
touch you—but it must be in public and caught on camera—believe (make
believe) that they have now been edified to a given moral rectitude. Of
course they pay for it—exorbitant sums, I’m told. (Not for nothing your
nickname, “Moneydeala”!) After all, your aura is for sale, and your
entourage is very needy and greedy. I expect your many years of
apprenticeship must mean that you see people for what they are, be they
friend or foe, and that you are immune to sycophancy. Still, did you
really distinguish between comradeship and obsequiousness? Your sense of
fidelity is legendary. And I don’t think your self-deprecating
humbleness is faked. Why, then, tolerate the scroungers, the charlatans,
and the chancers feeding off you?
Why did you opt to bilk the rich—who are only too keen to pay and be
seen to share, for charitable purposes or out of “base” instincts to
protect their larger business interests, and thus cheaply identify with
and benefit from a suggested correct political stance in the new
dispensation? Was blackmail the better way of extracting the riches and
privileges to be distributed? Were they vulnerable because they felt
some guilt about the ways in which they accumulated their wealth? And
was the possible alternative—socialist redistribution—too horrible to
contemplate? Too horrible for whom? Or did you do this because you
believed there was no other possibility of finding urgently needed
support for the very poor and destitute, or to advance the positions of
those close to you? Was this perhaps also just an expression of the
prevalent materialist values of the world, and you didn’t want to
strangle the geese producing golden eggs?
Forgive me if I do not discern the forest of deeper initiatives for
social change because of the grandfatherly tree of easy gratification
everybody wants to be seen stroking or carving his initials into.
Sometimes I think our problem is not so much that we’re supposed to have
come to “the end of history” but that historians no longer have the
voice or the incentive to decrypt and transcribe an understanding of the
events and movements shaping our world.
In due time there will probably be an assessment of your political
career and the impact you had as president of the country—and you were
nothing if not a consummate politician. Your being the historical vector
for controlled compromise and change may ultimately be equated with
statesmanship. Already we know you saved us from civil war. This should
be remembered as your single most important legacy, and we must never
forget how lucky we were. Some will say you could only do so by aborting
the revolution.
But my own unease, now, is of a slightly different kind. I wish to
express my deep affection for you. You are in so many ways like my late
father—stubborn to the point of obstinacy, proud, upright,
authoritarian, straight, but with deep resources of love and intense
loyalty and probably with a sense of the absurd comedy of life as well.
A cad also, when tactical considerations made it necessary. I think I’ve
told you this.
And now you are very old and fading. (“The word of the voyage is subject
to the wind.”—Edmond Jabès) It is not our custom to remonstrate with an
honorable man going into that night which awaits us all. Even less so
inAfrica, where it is assumed that extreme old age brings wisdom and
should be venerated. And yet—all along I respected you as a man of
integrity and of courage; all along I felt I could disagree and say so,
even when my insights were uninformed and my positions unwittingly
partisan. Why would it be any different now? Am I to assume you have
gone soft in the head? Should one, for the sake of worldwide euphoria,
because we need to believe in human greatness, avoid sharing one’s
confusion and disappointments with you?
Again, my respect and affection for you can only be expressed in telling
what I see and understand of this country. You could be my father; you
were always a mentor and a reference; you are also a comrade.
I am talking of where we are now, in 2008. Recently, I had the occasion
to spend some time in South Africa. I don’t get to go there very often
anymore, and I realize the extent to which I’m no longer able to “read”
the environment instinctively. I’ve lost touch, maybe because the
surface is so often slick with blood. I also realize that, like so many
others, I’ve become conditioned by expectations of the worst. The
seemingly never-ending parade of corrupt clowns in power at all levels,
their incompetence and indifference, indeed their arrogance as historic
victors drunkenly driven by a culture of entitlement, the sense of
impending horror in the air because of the violence and the cruelty with
which crimes are committed, to be tortured and killed for a cell phone
or a few coins—one becomes paranoid. I was getting more scared the
longer we were in the country. I was beginning to calculate the
statistical chances of being the next to be robbed, raped, or blown away.
The circle narrows. The grandmother of a close friend—she’s as old as
you are—pleads with her robbers not to be sexually violated, she even
claims to be infected with a communicable disease; the nephew of a
fellow writer is shot in the face, killed in his own house by a night
intruder whom he mistook for a rat; the son of my eldest brother is
stabbed in a parking lot outside a restaurant, the blade pierces a lung,
the police never turn up, he is saved because his companion calls her
boyfriend all the way in Australia by cell phone and he could summon a
nurse he happens to know in Johannesburg. (The woman is on a first visit
to the country; she leaves the next day and swears never to return.)
Behind the everyday bloody shadow play there are tendencies that I’d
like to talk to you about, for although it would perhaps be
unconscionable to ascribe any part of responsibility to you for the
ambient lawlessness, there are deeper problems related to power and to
the value of human life that must have been evident all along. But as
ever when one visits the country, what sears the mind and chokes the
heart first are the apparently random events that have become emblematic
of a society in profound disarray.
I come across a report on school violence, from Johannesburg, produced
by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). Games such as “hit
me, hit me” and “rape me, rape me,” in which schoolchildren chase each
other and then pretend to hit or rape each other, are being played at
South African schools, it says. The commission heard from Community
Action towards a Safe Environment (CASE) that “this game demonstrates
the extent and level to which brutalization of the youth has reached,
and how endemic sexual
violence has become in South Africa.” The report says school is the
“single most common” site of crimes such as assault of students and the
second most common for robbery against pupils. According to a study
conducted by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP), young
people were twice as likely to become victims of crime than adults.
“Just over two fifths (41.4%) of the young people interviewed had been
victims of some form of crime.”
The CJCP found that toilets were an area of the school feared most by
pupils. More than a fifth of sexual assaults of young people occurred
while they were at school, and according to a study conducted by the
Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme (TVEP) among 1,227 female
students who were victims of sexual violence, 8.6 percent were assaulted
by teachers. The Western Cape Education Department established that
“very often, disciplinary
procedures are not followed through and educators resign upon being
formally charged.” Another study found that “26 percent of students were
of the opinion that forced sexual intercourse did not necessarily
constitute rape.” The Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town told
the commission the most common forms of violence it treated students for
were assault with a fist, knife, or panga, rape and sexual assault, bite
wounds, and firearm related injuries.
I’m talking at such length about this because one of your foundations
intends to help save the children, Madiba—and your love for the little
ones is heralded. Indeed, doesn’t your benevolent smile, known by
billboard all over the world, tell us to be compassionate to the
children? How do we turn the culture of child abuse around?
Johannesburg, again: The mother of a two-year-old boy, who was found in
Kagiso on Friday with his genitals mutilated, has been located. . . .
“Police managed to find the boy’s mother, Meisi Majola, 26, who reported
her son missing from 14:00 yesterday [Thursday],” said Inspector Solomon
Sibiya. “She said her son had disappeared from their home in Roodeport
on the West Rand.”
The little boy, dressed in a maroon track suit, a grey track suit top,
and takkies [sport shoes], was walking around in tears in the
Ebumnandini informal settlement in Kagiso, when he was picked up by two men.
They stopped their car and noticed that his takkies and pants were
stained with blood. Sibiya said the child was taken to a police station
where it was later discovered that he had been mutilated.
To be used as muti would have been the purpose, as you know: human
ingredients for a potion against the despair of living. “Police could
not find out where he lived as he was too traumatized to speak. Now that
his mother has been found, we would be able to conduct a proper
investigation,” Sibiya said.
Do you know what constitutes the nightmare fear of young, middle-class
men in South Africa these days? To be arrested for speeding or being
under the influence and thrown into a cell with hardened criminals—as
often as not now infected with HIV—before being released a few days
later. A young man goes out to celebrate one last time with his male
friends before his wedding. On the way home he is caught for reckless
driving. The police cells are dark. All night long he will be sodomized
repeatedly. His screams of anguish and pain elicit no reaction from the
police. The next morning, at first light, one of the perpetrators sidles
up to him, strokes his forearm, and whispers, “After last night, you are
truly one of us.”
Have we tried hard enough to give another meaning to “brotherhood”? How
did we get to the point where the dead are mutilated, the right eye
gouged out in morgues to be used in concoctions that will make the sight
of the living more acute, and where corpses are unearthed so as to steal
the coffins?
The saddest case may be that of the six young “Colored” farm children
aged nine to fifteen, barefoot, thin like praying mantises, clutching
one another as they appear in court for having stoned to death one of
their playmates, a girl of eleven, ostensibly in a fight over a bottle
of cheap sweet wine. Or, as another report had it, because they thought
she had AIDS. When she no longer moved, they ran to fetch an adult. In
court they would rub one dry and scabbed foot over the other, whisper,
look around with big eyes. (“Give me your eyes. And the separate will be
one.”—Edmond Jabès)
During my recent stay, I was invited to participate in the annual
literary festival Time of the Writer, organized by the Centre for
Creative Arts of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. It was good
to be back in the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, which I remembered from the
first events years ago, and it was a pleasure to congratulate Peter
Rorvik, the director of the Centre, and his colleagues for what they had
achieved so powerfully. In that bright and tumultuous early period of
liberation, two friends from the long-ago past of struggle and exile
came to personify Durban for me—Mazisi Kunene, the prophetic poet of
Zulu epics now somewhere among the spirits, his teeth bared
sardonically, and Lewis Nkosi, the sharp and fearless novelist, present
on this night when I had to make the opening remarks. Both had tried to
capture the complex realities of South Africa in words; both attempted
to find the strong words that could hold new dreams of justice. Together
we had emptied countless bottles in repeated brave but futile efforts to
assuage the anguish.
I believe that a venue where readings and discussions take place
regularly will become imbued with the patina, the sacred spirit, of
creativeness. People come over the years to propose and to explore
writing, and to debate the underlying assumptions. What brings them
together is a shared passion for exploring the ways these concepts may
affect the social environment in which we live. And what you have as a
result is this space of many voices where, if you close your eyes, you
may still hear the rustle of arguments and the shaping of imagination to
clarify commitment.
Nietzsche wrote, “Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the
illusion of possessing a ‘truth.’ . . . What, then, is truth? A mobile
army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of
human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which
one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Of course, the
illusionary “truths” I proposed that night were not original; they were
informed by insights of the ancestors and the experiences of
contemporaries such as you, and maybe I twisted them to fit my anger and
my pain. My own contribution, I said, when looking at what is happening
around us, may be pessimistic, brutal, arbitrary, and generalizing. It
was important at the outset, therefore, to put on record that there is
also reason to celebrate. Only too often do I forget that the struggle
for dignity is a complex and never-ending process. Even now, there are
still diligent hands writing and beautiful voices speaking out for
compassion and honesty and clarity: these, too, ought to be amplified
and encouraged.
Madiba, you will be remembered for being naturally curious and
compassionate about the lives of the people you came in contact with and
for the way you put everybody at ease. I know you would have listened to
my story, however personal. Don’t even the most generic and sweeping
statements have their origin in private events?
We, my wife and I, had been in the country for little over a month then,
and it was an unsettling experience. We’d spent much of the preceding
few weeks clearing out the house in the Little Karoo where we used to
live for shorter and longer periods over the years. It was
heartbreaking, in that leaving is the confirmation of a failed
experience and a broken dream—the “dream” was probably my own naive
expectation that a new dispensation ushered in by a liberation movement
would realize at least some of the objectives we fought for: economic
justice, an ethical public life . . . And for me it was the end to the
possibility of belonging—writing and painting in a studio overlooking a
riverbed where wind scythed and swayed the reeds, where yellow and red
birds flitted, where giant mountain tortoises would come to scrape their
shells against the white wall around the house, and from the mountain
slope on the opposite bank baboons and shy-hoofed buck and rock rabbits
would come down in the gray light of dawn. Ah, for the naturalness of
growing as old as you under that sun, bone-white like a bleached thorn
in summer, glinting like snow on the inland mountain peaks in winter! In
the cemetery there were swellings of earth covering the bones of people
with familiar names.
Clearing house was disturbing because I had to sort through files and
manuscripts and throw so much away—and I came across, in notes and
letters and snippets of essays, the recurring references to barbaric
criminality, the plague of raping, theft, and fraud, the indecent
enrichment of the few, manipulation, redeployment as a form of impunity,
public office as an exercise in scavenging, the breakdown of essential
services, entrenched and continuing racism, the lack of public morals or
even common sense.
Why did I not see the picture more clearly? Had I become inured to the
social and economic realities of the country? Could I not read the
pattern? Was my understanding obscured by the dream, the desire for freedom?
I must tell you this terrible thing, my old and revered leader: if a
young South African were to ask me whether he or she should stay or
leave, my bitter advice would be to go. For the foreseeable future now,
if you want to live your life to the full and with some satisfaction and
usefulness, and if you can stand the loss, if you can amputate yourself
– then go.
Should we not be engaged in trying to see the world at large and Africa
in particular as clearly as possible? We know that “seeing” is also an
act of imagination and, particularly, that in the present void with its
absence of horizons of expectation, we need to explore and promote a
collective moral space and the fearlessness of creative thinking shot
through with the doubt brought by uncertainty, in order to be of use to
the younger generations. By imagination do we become part of the
surroundings.
This is our world. We know no more than people before us did. You who
come from what seems an unbroken line of ancestors linked by praise
songs—do you agree? What will be the last songs you hear? The chanting
of warriors as they breast the final hill? Every generation lives in the
fullness of its own comprehension, the completeness of its own smiles.
And our minds are as ever bordered by darkness, except that we now live
in an infinitely more dangerous place. But by the same token, I think
you have taught us, we cannot indulge ourselves—for reasons of political
correctness or tribal guilt or cynicism or common greed—in the rainbow
intoxication of knowing and understanding less than those before us did.
What is our horizon? Globally, that, behind the burning fields as
smokescreen of worldwide insecurity, we encounter poverty—endemic and
brutalizing and deepening—and the greed of the insatiable predators: the
arms manufacturers and the oil guzzlers and the smugglers of people.
That, at the core of our barbaric new age, however much dolled up by the
gadgets of modernity, we find fundamentalists exterminating thousands of
innocent people as “collateral damage” from despair for what they
believe to be the cause of their cruel and jealous god. That, in
demagogic chambers of states claiming to be liberated and democratic,
the cynical rule unrestrained in their lust for power and profit. That,
in the whitewashed institutions of our so-called enlightened societies,
we see the same institutionalized discrimination against women. And,
Madiba—yes—that, at the heart of this deep forest of cruelty, we still
lack compassion for the children.
What we experience in Africa may not be worse than in other parts of the
world. Maybe our problems are just more acute and intractable. A new
American president may well close down the penal colony of Guantánamo
and start recognizing and making up for the war crimes committed in Iraq
and in Afghanistan, even if only to secure U.S. access to oil(He wont
but then Breytenbach still has much to learn. Ed.); the rulers of China
may one day be obliged to start looking after the interests of their
peasants and workers and to stop polluting and cheapening the world;
even Israel may conceivably be prevailed upon to desist from
exterminating Palestine as an entity and start giving back what they
have stolen.
Maybe our problems have deeper and more obdurate causes. Who in Africa
is going to put an end to the impunity of the criminals ruling over us?
Who is going to resolve the genocide in Darfur and the mass raping of
women in Congo? Who in Africa is going to face the consequences of
something like 120,000 child soldiers? How are we going to come to terms
with the fact that our nation-states are a fiction for the benefit of
our dictators and their ruling clans? Who is going to get back the money
our politicians stole from the people? Who is going to take
responsibility for condoning the rule and extending the protection of
international legitimacy to a maniac like Robert Mugabe? And how are we
going to stop this seemingly irrevocable “progress” of South Africa to a
totalitarian party-state?
Should Omar Hassan al-Bashir be indicted for attempted genocide in
Darfur by the International Criminal Court? Yes! Should Robert Mugabe
and his blood-besmirched, murdering acolytes be indicted for crimes
against their own population? Yes! Should Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld
and Rice and Wolfowitz likewise be brought before a world court and
charged with international war crimes? Of course! Bush must be entitled
to as fair a trial as Saddam Hussein had. (The only difference between
the two of them is that the effete American has the personal courage and
honor of a barroom peacock.)
More important now for us, old master: Did you, did we, ever seriously
intend to bring about a democratic dispensation in South Africa, with
its checks and balances and accountability? Or was it about settling old
colonial scores? For how long can we continue on the schizophrenic knife
edge between the discourse of equality and justice and the practice of
plundering and arbitrary power? For how much longer can this doubletalk
be sustained, to the population and to the outside world? How come the
individual human life has no value? Is this traditional? Do you know
that “national liberation” is destroying, by debasement and abuse (as it
did in Algeria, Angola, Guinea-Bissau . . .), our dream for an African
modernity nourished from African roots and realities? Why do we call
“national democratic revolution” the process by which the state and all
its institutions—and, by extension, its culture and economy—become the
feeding trough for the party and its cadres? Was it ever conceivable
that a national liberation government could cede power if outvoted? For
how much longer are we going to play the role of “victims of history”?
For how much longer are we going to demean ourselves by living on
handouts from the rest of the world? How do we deal with the humiliation
and the shame? For how much longer are we going to allow for all our
policies and decisions to be dictated by the paralyzing pain of centuries?
You know all of this, even though you will talk of a million points of
light to obliterate the darkness I’m speaking of. How dare I even
suggest you are not aware of what and how we are? Will you not point to
the example of one life, lived with full consciousness and
responsibility and honor, as an irrefutable answer? Yes, but how can
people change the profound cultural apathy.
“This is our world. Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we
didn’t know we knew.” I was quoting this, that night in Durban, from a
literary accomplice in another life and world, because I wanted to draw
the furrow between the open source (some would say a sewer) of our
imagination and the land of reality we try to work. In so doing, I said,
we write into and from the pre-existent underground of images, memories,
thoughts, etc.—“uncovering” what that companion called “the shared
Atlantis of the imagination.”
I will never know what goes on in your mind, or what that shield of a
smile behind which we try to advance should tell us. I have no idea how
the experiences you went through changed your intimate landscapes. Maybe
you only thought of yourself as the instrument of a particular
historical moment? What do you hear when all is quiet—the dancing feet
of your warrior tribesmen on the green hills of Qunu so disfigured by
soil erosion? The acclamation of the world?
Perhaps we know no more than those who preceded us, but it is just as
true that we have to transcend our limitations, that we must cling to
the notion of a utopia (call it “clean and accountable government” or
“common sense”) as justification and motivation to keep on moving and
making a noise. For the mind has to be allowed to dance, even with
death, if we want to stay it reverting to despair and narcissistic
self-love. To survive, we must assume the
responsibility of imagining the world differently.
Imagination gives access to “meaning,” I argued that night in the
theater. Storytelling is a system of knowledge; a swarm of words on the
page aggregate “authority”; the very act of narration carries a
presumption of truth. And I’m only too aware of the fact that I position
myself to you as a writer trying to imagine you, or at least the meaning
of your smile. Is imagination not the first expression of identification
and therefore of generosity? Writing as the production of textured
consciousness is the mediating metaphor between fact and fiction. It is
in the movement of the heartmind and the thinking awareness of physical
and/or cultural displacement that creativity is born—as sequences of
perception bringing about new combinations of past and present,
projecting future shapes and thus helping to shape the future. We are
hardwired to see intention in the world, and thus predisposed to the art
of learning by intervention. We become by making. We realize ourselves
through acts of transformation. And these journeys bring with them
implications of accountability. By imitating the forms of creativity we
apprehend the contents of meaning; in the enactment of ethics we learn
about the prescription and the limitations of the will to have being
emerge: together these constitute the freedom way.
It’s a long walk to freedom. (And, to quote Edmond Jabès again:
“Distance is light, as long as you keep in mind that there are no
limits. We are distance.”) I tried to empty myself before the mirror. I
know I’m getting to resemble my father more every day. When I look at
you I’m reminded of the unbridgeable distance between my father and me,
but also how I can now begin to experience him from within. And in that
way I’m getting closer to you. Age may bring closure, an unclothed
closeness, but also a blind raging against darkness. You will almost
certainly not read this “letter”; others will hold me accountable for
having dared to draw you in my writing.
But I’d like to think (imagine!) you’d agree when I say we must go on,
we need to leave the reassuring and self-caressing domain of the
“possible” to extend the reach of the impossible/unthinkable (such as
respect for the sacredness of the individual human life in a country
like South Africa, whatever the pains of the past and even despite the
brutalization of injustice and of poverty). And these ethics, this
neutrality, demand that one allows emptiness for a certain moral
imagination to come about—that is, spaces for the promotion of doubt and
for the unexpected, even and perhaps especially for what we as writers
did not expect to find but always with compassion for the weakness and
the human dignity of the other.
In an interview the novelist and scholar Njabulo Ndebele gave to City
Press, he says, “The South African of the future will live comfortably
with uncertainty because uncertainty promises opportunity, but you have
to be robust about it, you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to
contemplate it to get the full richness of it, and I think that is the
challenge of being South African: to run away from unidimensional and
definitive characterisations of ourselves. . . . The capacity of the
country to imagine the future depends on nurturing imaginative thinking
from the beginning of a child’s life right up to the end of life. We’ve
somehow given all that up along the way. . . . We need to develop the
ability to embrace uncertainty from a position of intelligence and
imagination. The more of us who admit to our vulnerabilities, the more
trusting the public space.”
When some years ago a few writers visited Mahmoud Darwish, the
Palestinian poet who died this past August, in the besieged ghetto of
the West Bank, he spoke to us of the role of poetry. He ended by saying:
“It is true that all poetry stripped of another life in another time is
threatened by a quick dissolution in the present. True that poetry
carries its own future and is always being reborn. . . . But it is as
true that no poet can put off for later, in some other place, the here
and the now. In our time of storms it is a matter of the existence, the
vital energy of poetry. . . . To give life to words, to give them back
the water of life, can only be by way of bringing back the sense of
living. And all search for sense is a search for the essence which
confounds itself with our questioning of the intimate and the universal,
that interrogation which makes poetry possible and indispensable, that
questioning which has as consequence that the search for sense is also a
search for freedom.”
Dear Madiba, I’m aware of how unfair it is to lay all of the above at
your feet, like some birthday bouquet of thorns. You deserve to have
your knees warmed by a young virgin, like old King David in the
Bible—not pummeled by the likes of me. Already that opening night in the
theater in Durban, I tried to assume my pessimistic approach by saying
that I’d come neither to praise Caesar nor to bury him but to ask what
he has done with the trust of the people! By “Caesar” I meant the
African National Congress or “liberation,” not you. Can the two be
separated? Is it ever thinkable that you would denounce the ANC? Would
you consider the thought that your organization has lost the way—or did
we try to look away from its innate Stalinism and greed because of the
heady struggle for release? It is a harsh question; it may even suggest
that we have only the ashes of spent dreams to poke around in.
But of course I believe that with accountable leadership and the full
and recognized participation of what used to be known as the “live
forces” among the population, this continent can be turned around, and
with it South Africa. Our dreams can be realized—and when I say this I
very much have in mind the examples of Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe.
I dream as I want to believe you have dreamed, and I will continue to
strive, for an integrated continent of generosity, economic justice,
creativity, civil and civic responsibility. A continent that will
develop its own sustainable modernity far away from Western
“universalist” models of globalization serving only the masters. A
continent that knows its primary wealth is its diversity of cultures. A
continent whose citizens will stop blackmailing and whitemailing one
another and the world with politically correct subservience and the
“blame-us-on-history” syndrome. A continent that will understand the
sense and the importance of the public good. A continent that will stop
begging and stealing, and where the totalitarian conflation of nation
and state and party in power will be abolished, where dictators will
stop killing their people and where prancing will be confined to the
catwalks of fashion shows. A continent where the ancestors are alive,
certainly, to dance with—the way you used to dance on the stage, even in
your old age, hoping to catch the fancy of the ladies! A continent that
will never again accept second-class citizenship and will be neither the
playground for Western phobia or self-interested charity nor the dumping
ground for Chinese junk. A continent that will respect and celebrate
life—the life of the planet. A continent that will plant crops and feed
itself. A continent that will eradicate small arms and have no purpose
for acquiring submarines and where the criminal and corrupting sleaze
brought about by fabricating or buying arms will be stopped. A continent
that will be the guardian of the past, all the pasts, and the custodian
of our future—and where we will know that the future lies with the
women. A continent of profound métissage and thus of reciprocal
enrichment. A continent where no racism will be tolerated—and by that I
also mean the racism and the humiliation of poverty.
Perhaps I will then, too, accede to a wider wisdom—of the kind that I
sometimes heard or surmised in your words. I remember seeing a distant
echo reproduced on a large photo of a scene in Africa, in the bar of the
Hôtel Nord-Pinus in Arles, where I went recently to meet up with Mahmoud
Darwish again. Outside the streets were blindingly white with sheets of
heat, nearly as if under an African sun, but inside the bar it was cool
and dark. The writing on the photo, giving it the veracity of nervous
movement, was by the hand of Karen Blixen and came from her book Out of
Africa. She talked of the natural fearlessness and grace of her guides:
“this assurance, this art of swimming, they had, I thought, because they
had preserved a knowledge that was lost to us by our first parents;
Africa, amongst the continents will teach it to you: that God and the
Devil are one.
I know there’s no need to justify my lèse-majesté. However much you may
disagree with my analyses, you would have heard me out. Besides, I
believe we writers, word-makers rooted in civil society, need not be the
clowns and the fools of those in power—not even the “whites” among us
who suffer from being excluded from the “black” world. In fact, I
believe we should think of freedom of the mind as a conscious and
constant attempt to unthink order and authority. To think against
hegemony of any variety, including the liberationist and the nativist
and the iconic—particularly the insidious, moralistic mawkishness of
political correctness expressed as a sightless idolization of our
“leaders.” To think against the dictates, the values, and the property
of consumerist societies. To think against the laziness of narcissism.
We need to remember that we are bastards and forget that we’re obedient
citizens. Indeed, that our absolute loyalty lies in the disobedience to
power and in our identification with the poor.
With abiding respect, and because I believe that smile was also
sometimes a mocking one,
Your mongrel son,
Mshana
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