Disenchantment extends far beyond the ANC and SA

In 2012, I began a research project in the eastern Free State, which is now coming to an end. It turned out to have been the most fortuitous five-year period in which to get to know a region. For during this time, the world views of the people I met were turned upside down.

The sharpest symptom of this change was evident in what people thought of wealth.

Back in 2012, the spectacle of black people driving luxury cars through the streets of Ficksburg might still reasonably have instilled hope. For the wealth on display was a product of upward mobility made possible by the advent of democracy. Ordinary people could still go for a vicarious ride on the coat-tails of the rich ones. They were black, my interlocutors were black; they were similar enough to make identification possible.

That tale is now looking frayed. Though these matters are not cut and dried with grey areas, wealth in a region such as the eastern Free State now signifies corruption. A person in an SUV is somebody who has managed to inveigle himself into an exclusive circle, one that closes the doors on others.

A crucial connection has been broken. The spectacle of rich people once triggered the sense that everyone might move up. Now it triggers the notion that most people are being kept down. This is a sea change and watching it happen in the people I have come to know is something to behold.

The implications cut deep. Five or six years ago, people assumed that the country in which they lived was improving. SA had been liberated in living memory. A process of change was under way, even if it was to take some time.

Now, the very foundations of that story are in question. The promise upon which the ANC has won one election after another seems broken. There is little doubt that Jacob Zuma’s presidency is a major cause of this change. He has enacted a performance so macabre that neither SA nor the ANC will ever be the same.

What does this imply? A naïve interpretation is that SA has finally become a “normal” country. The spell liberation once cast has lost its charm; magic has been evacuated from politics. The electorate is now sober and parties can compete on the content of their policies alone. Voters will gather around a temperate middle ground. I doubt whether this is so. For it is not just the ANC with which people are disenchanted. It is the world as a whole.

Back in 2012, when people spoke of the past and the future, and thus imagined their families moving through time, the story they told was largely South African. They believed that their fate would be determined in national drama.

Now, more and more, I find, when people talk of the past and the future they speak not of SA, but of the world. I am struck by people’s intense interest in Brexit and in the rise of Donald Trump.

They identify so strongly with the anger, the frustration, and indeed the xenophobia, of white working-class people an ocean away. They marvel that their predicament is shared by millions upon millions — the predicament of ordinary folk cast into a world that is not improving, a world run by opaque corporations in their own selfish interest, a world impervious to pain.

It is not just the ANC suffering from a deficit of trust. It is the social order as a whole. I suspect that we are entering a time in which people’s views are becoming wildly unstable, with deep cynicism and blind hope entwined.

I SUSPECT WE ARE ENTERING A TIME IN WHICH PEOPLE’S VIEWS ARE BECOMING WILDLY UNSTABLE, WITH DEEP CYNICISM AND BLIND HOPE ENTWINED