On camera, the lies continue, off camera, the nightmare
was in ’the s flagship audience interview last week for a recording of Al Jazeera programme, Head To Head, that is scheduled for broadcast on Friday evening. The guest was former deputy president and parliamentary speaker Baleka Mbete.
It was a dismal experience, leaving me and many others depressed, listless and badtempered. It is not just that Mbete’s performance was shockingly bad. Something more epic than mere incompetence was on display. It was as if the sheer rottenness of what happened under Jacob
IZuma spilled from the stage.
Asked why she didn’t do anything to stop the wholesale corruption that happened on her watch, Mbete said she had not known about it. Asked why she didn’t know, she said it takes time for facts to be discovered, reports to be written. She was only now learning the extent of the corruption, she said, 18 months after Zuma left office. In any event, she continued, she was only an individual. What can individuals do on their own? History is moved by what collectives do.
Asked whether a single policeman had been tried for the Marikana massacre she replied she did not know. “I will have to update my facts,” she said, impassively sitting there, waiting for the next question.
Mbete’s interviewer, Mehdi Hasan, turned to the Thabo Mbeki era and the HIV/Aids treatment disaster. Did she ever speak out, Hasan asked? For instance: when Nelson Mandela was roundly attacked in an ANC national executive committee meeting for criticising Mbeki’s stance, did she stand up to defend him? She was not in the party’s health committee, she replied, HIV/Aids was the responsibility of others. And in any event, she did not understand the science. What could she have possibly done?
Watching Mbete, one could be forgiven for thinking that she did not care what anyone thought. She was happy to paint her career as that of a useless blob, idling away time in the ANC and in parliament as history unfolded around her. But during the break between segments something happened. Mbete looked up and examined the people in the audience; and in those few seconds she communicated something of immense importance, not in words but in a visceral silence.
She stared into people’s eyes, one after the other. And you could see by the terrible expression on her face that she was searching for signs of scorn. She was in real pain. Her discomfort was palpable; indeed, it was excruciating. She seemed to want to be anywhere else in the world. And I did too. I did not enjoy sharing that moment with her; it was hollow beyond the telling of it.
And then the next segment began and she put on her mask once more. She was just an individual, she said; there was nothing she could have done. But the look that had come over her when the camera was off, stayed with me. You could tell she was seeing the whole arc of the catastrophe. This is a woman who went into exile in 1976 at just 27 years old; who threw her heart and soul at the fight against apartheid; a woman who finally came home, having suffered much, to build her country anew.
She knows that when the ANC returned from exile it was handed a gift: the goodwill of millions who absolutely knew in their hearts that this was the organisation to cut a path to the future. And now, these many years later, here she was, sitting before an audience that mocked and derided her; telling them she didn’t know about corruption because she hadn’t yet received the report; that the swimming pool at Nkandla was built to fight fires, and so much else that she and everyone else knew to be a pile of crap.
On display that evening, in all its nakedness, was a collective failure of epic proportions embodied in the miserable performance of a single individual. It was hard to fall asleep that night. I’ll bet Mbete didn’t sleep much either, or if she did that her dreams did not let her rest.
To have one’s life’s work reduced to this: an audience that pillories you for an hour and goes home. It is a nightmare not even bad sleep could dream up.
● Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.