FLAWED CAPE FANTASY

The idea of Cape independence is a chimera that evades the messy reality of South Africa. To co-opt a Palestinian slogan to the cause is simply the epitome of crass

As we enter the season known as festive, it’s traditional for news organisations to look back at the highlights of the past year, and forward to the delights that await us in the next one. And yes, the words “highlights” and “delights” can be replaced with the words “low points” and “horrors”.

The Guardian is trumpeting that “a record-breaking 40-plus countries, representing more than 40% of the world’s population and an outsize chunk of global GDP, are due to hold national elections in 2024. The outcomes, taken separately and together, will help determine who controls and directs the 21st-century world.”

And in a remarkable moment of flamboyant optimism, it asks the presumably rhetorical question: “Who says democracy is dying?”

A better question would be: who says elections have anything to do with democracy?

The story references the 2023 edition of Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, which has been running for 50 years. The report finds global freedom has declined for the 17th consecutive year due to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s human rights atrocities in Ukraine, coups and “attempts to undermine representative government” that have destabilised Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru and Brazil, and previous ones that continue to “diminish basic liberties in Guinea and constrain those in Turkey, Myanmar and Thailand, among others”.

The report also suggests the struggle for democracy may be approaching a turning point. “The gap between the number of countries that registered overall improvements in political rights and civil liberties and those that registered overall declines for 2022 was the narrowest it has ever been through 17 years of global deterioration. Thirty-four countries made improvements, and the tally of countries with declines, at 35, was the smallest recorded since the negative pattern began.”

There’s also the optimistic conclusion that “while authoritarians remain extremely dangerous, they are not unbeatable”.

This seems a little too buoyant to me, but I guess we all have to live in hope. I don’t see a lot of authoritarians being beaten. Rather, it seems that evil is always and endlessly mutable, and just adapts to exploit changing circumstances.

For Freedom House, a key driver of global economic decline is infringement on freedom of expression.

“Over the last 17 years, the number of countries and territories that received a score of 0 out of 4 on the report’s media freedom indicator has ballooned from 14 to 33, as journalists face persistent attacks from autocrats and their supporters while receiving inadequate protection from intimidation and violence even in some democracies.

“The past year brought more of the same, with media freedom coming under pressure in at least 157 countries and territories during 2022. Scores for a related indicator pertaining to freedom of personal expression have also declined over the years amid greater invasions of privacy, harassment and intimidation, and incentives to self-censor both online and offline.”

As regular readers of this column will know, I view the media as perhaps the most important contributor to the health of open societies, be they democracies or some other form of government. And, of course, recognising that our definitions of open will always be contested, and constantly changing.

So yes, 40 elections in 2024 could be a bellwether for the health of democracies, but equally it’s going to be fertile and febrile ground for an absolute avalanche of propaganda, misinformation and attempts to subvert truth for political and financial ends. Get ready for a year of lies and tendentious stupidity.

The tweet could only have been penned by someone whose sense of entitlement is so huge that he’ll need to book an extra seat for it when he eventually flees the country

Speaking of stupidity, those idiots at the Cape Independence faction are

getting their inanities in early.

Here’s a tweet by one Robert King so breathtakingly tone-deaf, so shamelessly opportunistic and exploitative, so stupid, that it could only have been penned by someone whose sense of entitlement is so huge that he’ll need to book an extra seat for it when he eventually flees the country to seek political asylum in the UK.

Accompanied by a map of South Africa, with the Western Cape differentiated from the dull brown of the rest of the country by the resolutely European red, white and blue of the Cape Independent Party’s flag, the tweet reads: “From the River to the Sea. The Western Cape Will be Free! #cape independence.”

Yes; in the mind of this freedom fighter for Cape liberation, the terrible oppression suffered by the people of the Cape is analogous to that suffered by the people of Palestine.

I cannot even begin to describe how insulting this is to the thousands of people dying in the present conflict in Gaza.

Also, given the contested nature of that slogan with some asserting it is a call for genocide, does he really think it’ sa cute catchphrase he can pluck from the air and turn into a T-shirt?

And even more ridiculously, his tweet implies that the South African government is Israel. Really? You think the ANC is an occupying power that has stripped away your rights, imposed a form of apartheid and is bombing your civilian population? Also — what river, Robert? What river?

King’s X bio claims he is the “Spokesperson for the Economy” for the Referendum Party, which is a “single-issue”, and apparently single brain cell, political party “established to force a referendum on Cape Independence in the Western

Cape”. Tagline: “In the 2024 election, you will be choosing between two futures. An African failed state, or an African first world country.”

King is also a co-founder of the Cape Youth Front, “a new movement standing up for the Cape and building a future filled [with] Good Hope for our youth”, and an executive committee member for the Cape Independence Advocacy Group, whose dream is “Becoming the Cape of Good Hope again ... Our best hope is creating our own first world nation on Africa’s southern tip — the

Cape of Good Hope. Together, let’s build Africa’s newest country.”

Dude’s a joiner, I’ll give him that. And apparently entirely unaware, with the use of the Cape of Good Hope as a rallying cry and an appeal to impose a first-world culture on an African country, that his organisation is calling for the recreation of a pivotal moment in colonialism.

Let’s be clear about this. Those who call for the chimera of Cape independence are calling for a return to the days of apartheid.

I don’t mean they want a country where people are divided on racial lines, and where draconian laws limit the human rights of a large swath of the population. I’m not even suggesting that they are racist, or at least no more than that unhappy South African norm. What I am suggesting is that those who long to be free of the present reality that is South Africa are actually longing to be freed of South Africa’s past. Or rather, of the ramifications of that past. They want a return to the invented certainties of apartheid without its reality.

In Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger (which I wrote about in more detail a few weeks ago), she describes how conspiracy theories are founded on denial of the past. “Denial is so much easier than looking inward, or backward, or forward; so much easier than change. But denial needs narratives, cover stories, and that is what conspiracy culture is providing.”

In much the same way, those who claim to want Cape independence (a ridiculous concept, and we shouldn’t even be using the term) are just constructing a narrative that allows them to escape the hard realities we have inherited from our apartheid past. The insistence on returning to a prelapsarian, “first-world” utopia, couched as a movement forward, is in fact a denial of our collective responsibilities to fix the mess we are in because of the unbelievable incompetence and venality of those we have chosen to govern.

Klein quotes James Baldwin. “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. [However,] to accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

Instead of longing for a place and time that sits outside this sometimes calamitous country, we’re going to have to knuckle down and try to fix it. You can’t run away. I mean, you can, but not by taking one of our provinces with you.

The idea of Cape independence is not about being independent from the rest of South Africa; it’s a fantasy about evading reality. Intrinsically, it’s an attempt to escape from the knowledge of our culpability, and from the awful realisation that all those firstworld luxuries the Cape independence people feel should be theirs by inalienable right can only be built upon a foundation of inequality. And co-opting the slogans of real struggles against colonialism for your own feeble attempts at recolonisation of the

Cape is as unforgivable as it is crass.

It seems that evil is always and endlessly mutable, and just adapts to exploit changing circumstances