Have a beer with that shot of redemption

You wouldn’t think Castle Milk Stout and the African Christian Democratic Party could combine to produce useful insights into the future of our democracy. But beer and those who claim to know the will of the almighty often work in mysterious ways, and truly, they have revealed to us a vision.

To behold it fully we must first go back to last Saturday, which, it may surprise you to learn, was Ancestors Day in SA. Certainly, it was news to me. Well, it pretended to be news to me: the advertorial announcing the special day was published on at least one legitimate news website, with quotes and paragraphs and everything. Its gist, however, was that “Castle Milk Stout is partnering with renowned cultural activist and poet laureate Zolani Mkiva and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of SA [Contralesa] to officially launch Ancestors Day on May 8.”

To be clear, I have no problem with people inventing new holidays, especially ones honouring ancient and beloved traditions. I also understand that these sorts of days cost money, and if Castle is sidling up to Contralesa to see if there’s an appetite for a potential Castle Milk Stout Day, it will merely be following in the gilded footsteps of Jan Braai, who has made a fortune by basting Heritage Day in apolitical banality, cutting off those gristly bits of history and politics, and serving it up with a dollop of potato salad as Braai Day.

Celebrated by those who wanted to celebrate it, ignored by those who didn’t, the day might have passed, like my more stoic ancestors, without much fuss. But then the ACDP burst in, exorcist-style (“The power of Kenneth Meshoe compels you!”) to save South Africans from their beloved forebears.

In a tweet reeking of brimstone, it demanded that Ancestors Day be rejected by “Bible believing Christian’s” (sic), who should rather pray and, presumably, continue their crusade to hunt down and burn every copy of Rose & Purkis’ English Grammar lest any believer learn to use apostrophes correctly.

A similar Facebook post explained that “committed evangelical Christians know that God’s Word denounces such practices”, which is impressive because my Word only puts little red lines under typos.

Well, you can guess how that all went down. Within minutes believers and nonbelievers united to accuse the ACDP of being, well, the ACDP.

I dislike Meshoe’s party. Protected by the leeway given to people who claim their bigotry is divine, the ACDP has distinguished itself as a strident supporter of homophobia and the morally unconscionable death penalty.

It has, however, never lied about what it is. What you see is what you get. And what you get is a conventional single-issue party, that issue being that the Christian god needs more representation in government but apparently won’t use its omnipotence to magic itself into parliament, choosing instead to respect the will of the voting public.

I understand why people were upset, but to get angry with a product for doing what it says on the box is, with respect, to misunderstand what singleissue parties are and, by implication, to reveal that we might not be quite as ready for a genuine multiparty democracy as we might believe.

I suspect the blame for this rather rigid view — that all parties should offer most things to most people — can be placed at the doorstep of the broad church that is the ANC.

That party has become more sectarian in recent years (see the gospel according to Bell Pottinger) but the bones of the old cathedral still loom over our ideas about democracy, no matter how frantically the new, sordid clergy sells indulgences in the shadows.

Twenty-seven years of rule by a single party founded on broad inclusivity has, I think, encouraged us to believe democracy is a process of trying to find a forever-home in which we can go to sleep, and that single-issue parties and the people they represent are so irrelevant that they might as well not exist.

Last week the ACDP again showed us what it is. But it also showed us what we might still become, reminding us that once the familiar monoliths start crumbling and our old political gods are cast down we will have to learn new ways of understanding and living in the fragmented, noisy world that follows.

Should that day come, how will we argue with emboldened secessionists, or a powerful coalition of small parties demanding the return of the death penalty? How will we respond as democrats and supporters of free speech to parties that have won the right to sit at a crowded table even though they don’t know which way up to hold a spoon?

Only the ancestors know.

How will we argue with emboldened secessionists, or a powerful coalition of small parties demanding the return of the death penalty?