And so, we have come to expect disappointment
ON August 6, after a year without load shedding, Eskom produced a radio advert to celebrate that fact. It claims the milestone is indicative of a public utility that delivers. The tone of the deep, rolling voice on the radio resounds with triumph.
Douglas Adams wrote about the long, dark tea-time of the soul. It is a wonderfully evocative expression; apposite too in describing SA’s current condition. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life,” says Adams. “Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”
Eskom might argue otherwise. It has managed to find, in a failure of catastrophic economic impact and significance, a reason to celebrate. Disappointment, then, is capable of bearing a fruit all of its own. Look around and SA has a rich harvest.
The country’s grand expectations are easy enough to map. Most have at their heart a number: 1994. It has become a metonym for dreams and aspirations alike.
Imbued with a thousand related connotations and clichés, it exists now on an ethereal plane. And it has been romanticised, too. Stripped of its many shortcomings, it has become a pure ideal, one against which the contemporary nightmare is juxtaposed.
But it is not just abstractly that the idea of 1994 draws it power. It is by no means detached from the values we use today. It has left in its wake a moral frame of reference that, in hegemonic fashion, continues to define the judgments we make, especially of people.
There were gods that once walked among us, we remind ourselves. We might not agree on who they were exactly, but the parameters of that pantheon are well-defined in general terms: Mandela, Sisulu, Biko, Suzman, Luthuli and many others besides.
Now, we have only their writings to refer to and stories, captured in a never-ending production line of biographies, rarely critical, which map out their divinity.
Because they walked among us only yesterday, the gulf is immense and the subsequent judgment harsher still.
In truth, no one will ever match them. They cannot. With time, their characters have been elevated far beyond the reach of mortal men. They are the angels to which our contemporary demons are compared. And everyone is a demon to someone.
And yet even heaven itself is under attack. The idea of nonracialism is being whittled away as some sort of fantasy. It was, the argument goes, a kind of ignorance that patched over pain and, in doing so, caused underlying anger and resentment to fester. Now it runs like a raging torrent through discourse and behaviour alike.
Equality, the ideal that underpins nonracialism, is likewise decried as a grand deceit. We are not equal. Our experience of life is anything but equal. To suggest that is as much an act of disdain and the gateway through which all the resentment comes pouring out.
What are SA’s expectations, then? We expect disappointment for sure. We have learnt that lesson well enough.
Mediocrity permeates our collective experience of life. As a comparative point of reference, the idea of 1994 only confirms that. It has become a tool to confirm failure. Cynicism is rife. What evidence there is of success is doubted from first principles. B
UT we are not without hope. Optimism does as rich a trade in SA as pessimism and we constantly find a reason to believe, if not in the idea of 1994, then some contemporary manifestation of it.
The DA’s recent electoral success has proven to be something of a tonic. And the general mood, if only temporarily, has been buoyed by it. You get the sense, however, that the feeling does not run very deep. And that, with time and further decay, it will soon enough be replaced by our more regular disposition: despair and disappointment.
And, of course, there is the pseudo success, so brilliantly captured by Eskom. How we revel in it. Of this, there is no shortage.
Indeed, so powerful is mediocrity’s influence, we have no real idea of what real success looks like. It is the lowest common denominator against which we benchmark achievement. And we need only meet it, never mind exceed it, for us to descend into rapturous applause.
There are moments, few and far between, when we set the global standard. In terms of appreciation, they are generally indistinguishable
The country’s grand expectations are easy enough to map. Most have at their heart a number: 1994
from those moments when we barely touch a third-rate standard we have declared outstanding.
Politically, we are trapped in a vicious circle of disappointment. The government, generally incompetent and almost universally mediocre, trapped between history and internal ideological contestation, cannot even define its own expectations.
Even the National Development Plan, widely lauded as an exercise in excellence and its pursuit, serves much like 1994 — as a benchmark to measure failure, not success. It is held up as a means to measure how far we are from it. It is a plan to measure disappointment.
Accountability has suffered the most at the hands of disappointment. Although, it is perhaps the one area in which our expectations have grown, not diminished with time.
Abetted largely by the courts and to a lesser extent the media, we have a clearer idea than before of what best democratic practice entails in public office. And we demand it relentlessly.
But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences have not been forthcoming. For all the demands, real consequences are few and far between and, if it is attitudinal change we are after, the endless pressure seems only to result in a hardened stubbornness on the part of those who wield power. It is infuriating. HOLDING
it all together is the language of explanation. Explanation is the mechanism through which disappointment is regulated and controlled by political power. We are awash in the accompanying jargon.
Commissions, investigations, reports, inquiries, committees — these machines produce an endless number of words on a daily basis designed to placate and manage our disappointment. To assign blame, too, but then, not to assign it. To obscure and obfuscate until we no longer remember what the expectation was in the first place, just that there is a process, a paradoxical universe in which we can immerse ourselves, with its own rules and outcomes entirely detached from reality.
In the end, we have no real expectations for SA other than disappointment.
Patriotism remains a relatively powerful force. That conclusion is nonsense, the loyal citizen will say. We have so much potential.
That we do. You will find, however, that in SA, potential enjoys an inverse relationship with failure — the more we fail, the greater our potential. At least that seems to be the general pattern.
And our potential has never been greater, which tells you everything. It is a measure not of what is possible, but the everincreasing gap between basic, nonnegotiable standards and our inability to meet even those.
We expect failure in SA. All our tools of measurement are designed to gauge it. And there is enough of it to measure besides. That it makes us disappointed is what is surprising. Perhaps it is in that fact that any real hope lies.