Bankruptcy of anti-Indian stance
THE great strength of the Economic Freedom Fighters as a political force is that, while numerically stronger parties often give the impression of being overtaken by events, the EFF’s leaders possess an uncanny ability to set the news agenda.
Have South Africa’s journalists been too valorising of the EFF, too willing to overlook its contradictions, too forgiving of its bigotry and demagogic tendencies?
Probably.
But the tide appears to be turning – and not just because Floyd Shivambu bullies reporters. Media coverage of Julius Malema’s comments about Indian South Africans and racism confirms that, postZuma, the EFF is being given less leeway.
Nonetheless, Malema must have taken delight in a couple of recent news items that might be twisted into a superficial vindication of his claims.
First there was Alochna Moodley, the unpleasant nobody who got herself kicked off a Kulula flight for using racist slurs.
Then model and TV personality Shashi Naidoo waded idiotically into a “debate” about Gaza; given that Israel-Palestine readily becomes a proxy for race, her comments also carried racial connotations.
Should editors, in choosing whether and how much to cover these events, take into account the climate created by the EFF’s co-ordinated attack on Indian South Africans?
Such is the nature of news consumption that many readers would consciously or unconsciously join the dots – however falsely – simply because the names of the two women involved “sound Indian”.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of explicitly connecting a national news story and an isolated incident?
The Sowetan, which carried an editorial last Monday damning Malema’s remarks as “reckless” and warning of the “slippery slope” of “ethnic politics”, the next day day ran a follow-up article about Moodley’s in-flight racism that also quoted Malema’s Youth Day rally speech: “The majority of Indians are racist and we must never be scared to say that they are racist.”
Is this necessary context, or is it leading content?
I was intrigued to discover that the Twitter biography of Neo Goba, the Sowetan journalist who wrote the story, cites Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi: “Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph … a beginning, a struggle and a victory.”
For most people around the world Gandhi serves more or less the same function as Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr: a historical figure who is above reproach, whose courage and dignity in the face of oppression is an example for all.
One consequence of this is the circulation of overworn “inspirational quotes”.
In this country, however, Gandhi’s role is a vexed one.
The two decades he spent in South Africa converted him from an ambitious young lawyer into a political campaigner who would go on to become the pacifist hero leading India’s independence movement.
But for most of his sojourn in this country, Gandhi effectively promoted the idea of special treatment for Indians by the British colonial administration through the racist denigration of black Africans.
Gandhi’s legacy was exploited by the apartheid state to create further conflict between black and Indian South Africans; it could be argued that the EFF is doing something similar.
But what Malema and his colleagues are deliberately neglecting, beyond the obviously interracial nature of the struggle for freedom, is a substantial body of artistic and literary works, many of them autobiographical, in which Indian and black artists and writers reflect honestly on the complex dynamics of race and class in this country.
There are hundreds of examples, but a few must suffice here.
One thinks of playwrights and cultural activists such as Ronnie Govender, Fatima Meer, Muthal Naidoo and Kessie Govender; or writers Achmat Dangor, Ahmed Essop, Farida Karodia and Imraan Coovadia.
From Cato Manor to the tricameral parliament and contemporary Durban, they have not shied away from addressing their communities’ complicity in antiblack racism, but have also attested to the persecution and not the privilege experienced by Indian South Africans.
One also thinks of a writer such as Es’kia Mphahlele, whose engagement with black consciousness as an older man had to account for the anti-Indian sentiments he had taken for granted growing up in Marabastad; or the poet Makhosazana Xaba, who has grappled with the crass effects of former president Jacob Zuma’s manipulation of Indian stereotypes and Zulu nationalism.
The leaders of the EFF can rack up as many postgraduate qualifications as they like – something that I, for one, have previously lauded. But as long as they reject the nuance and intricacy represented even by the potted summary I have given above, they betray an anti-intellectual (and anti-arts) position.