Orwell’s novel has become a guidebook for a new dystopia
The man said to be the most sued in English legal history, one Ian Hislop, writes in an essay ostensibly about language that he gets a sense of déjà vu from history’s cycle of farce and tragedy.
This, for those who have read the book, Hislop gets from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, that fount-inreserve for commentating hacks. Of course, Hislop’s editorship of the satirical Private Eye makes his grasping for analogy in a world in perpetual war a bit more palatable.
But Nineteen Eighty-Four, too, is as much about language as it is a cautionary tale. It has given the world universally recognised concepts such as Newspeak (political correctness), Big Brother (panopticon) and the Thought Police (Facebook, perhaps), and the Ministry of Love’s torture chamber, Room 101.
SA has similarly enriched the political lexicon. Consider how the word “apartheid” has become a byword for white supremacist racism so potently that any discussion about racebased prejudice is incomplete without it. Recall also the cynical irony in the profoundly misnamed Department of Cooperation and Development through which apartheid’s grand designs were executed.
And now, as SA basks in a breath of Cyril and The New Brooms in their brave new dystopia, we have terms such as “tenderpreneur” with which cronyism is sanitised. This is convenient for those consumers of political commentary whose attention span is limited to the space between mouse clicks.
Still, spare a thought for the hacks who, like Orwell’s Winston Smith, are made to rewrite history in the name of gainful employment. Pascale Lamche’s documentary film Winnie comes to mind, but there are other more insidious morphologies. “Gupta”, for instance, was the byword for common corruption, but it morphed into “Zupta”, a portmanteau meaning of state capture for the purposes of enrichment and selfaggrandisement when former president Jacob Zuma’s involvement with the Gupta family became apparent.
But as the nation’s memory of power blackouts begins to fade and some of the Guptas’ loot trickles back into the Treasury, “Gupta” is again changing shape. The new form takes on the hyphen with a slightly dissociative function: “Gupta-linked” puts greater distance between malfeasance and the Gupta family than the phrase “ties with the Guptas”. The writer (or radio commentator) using the term “Guptas” in reference to other people’s money could mean several different things, ranging from simple theft to outright bribery and corruption, but the journalistic obligation to substantiate and verify the influence of a flesh-and-blood Gupta is not required.
This kind of Ministry of Truth (Newspeak: Minitrue) revisionism was liberally deployed in a radio interview last week with Transport Minister Blade Nzimande in which the minister said he was told that “people are working for the Guptas on that board”, thus categorising dissenters as anything from light pilferers to state capturers.
Although the dissenters in this instance appear to be less than dissenting, they will be vilified nonetheless. They don’t want much, just to see the board implement its own resolution to institute disciplinary action against Acsa CEO Bongani Maseko as recommended by a forensic report adopted by the board. If proven, some of the charges may warrant dismissal, but they are not necessarily calling for anyone’s removal, as Nzimande suggests in the interview.
That is just disingenuous, but perhaps proving an allegation is not important in Nzimande’s brave new dystopia, or for the Winston Smiths of latter-day South African journalism who are mostly indistinguishable from the expectorations of the trolls in the comments section.
What the nation should know though is that dystopia in a post-truth SA is likely to be worse than the nightmares of Room 101. If Orwell’s insights extended to the depravities of 21st century journalism he might not have written Nineteen Eighty-Four. What he has done is to provide tyrants and their acolytes with a splendid guidebook. If Nzimande has his way, we’ll have farce and tragedy rolled into one.