Harness the power of moral fury for the change you want
The ANC won’t govern forever. Zuma will not always be president. But the struggle for social justice cannot rely solely on their eventual demise, writes Jacob Dlamini
IN the 1940s, a British journalist named George Harold Calpin declared that South Africans did not exist. Calpin said you could travel to the US to meet an American, go to France to meet a Frenchman, or to Fiji to meet a Fijian. But you could not visit South Africa and hope to meet a South African. They simply did not exist, Calpin said. Yet here we are, 105 years after the founding of the Union of South Africa and 21 years after the formal end of apartheid: a heaving mass of 50 million South Africans. We exist, alright. But how?
By having one of the biggest income gaps between rich and poor in the world, one of the worst rates of gender violence, levels of interpersonal and official violence that make South Africa a virtual war zone, social and institutional racism that makes black life in South Africa a constant and bitter struggle for dignity, and unemployment figures and forms of poverty that many of us in the Englishspeaking middle classes cannot even begin to imagine.
Add to that a business and political class that can justifiably be called criminal for its indecent addiction to all things conspicuous, and for its singular lack of imagination. Not to mention the environmental degradation whose unpayable costs are borne disproportionately by the country’s poor.
That is how South Africans exist. We are, to paraphrase philosopher Hannah Arendt, a paradise full of parasites sucking the country dry. But it does not have to be this way. It did not have to be this way.
Antjie Krog asked on these pages two weeks ago if, during the transition to democracy, South Africans had “thought that the country materially had to stay as it was with all the resources remaining in specific areas and with specific classes?”
We could answer Krog’s question any number of ways. I would respond to it with the following questions: was the fight against apartheid a civil rights struggle in which we sought to extend the rights and privileges of citizenship enjoyed by whites to the rest of the population? Or was it a revolution intended to usher in a new form of politics, a new way of organising our way of life, our economy, and our relationship with our planet?
If ours was a civil rights struggle, we can pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. Millions of South Africans today enjoy the vote and about 15 million have access to a social welfare system that does not discriminate on any basis other than that of need. But if ours was a struggle for social justice and for a radical overhaul of the country’s systems of life and government, we have failed miserably.
We have failed to bring about a new world in which the personal worth of individuals is measured not by whether they have access to RISE UP: Schoolchildren take to the streets of Soweto in June 1976. The writer asks whether the fight against apartheid was a civil rights struggle or a revolution intended to usher in a new form of politics flush toilets and running water, but by whether every individual’s right to dignity is asserted in our whole way of doing things (organising life, our politics and our economy).
Krog said it was time for anger. She said anger was “often where important change begins. Not the anger of blind destruction, but the anger that brings clarity of direction, lucidity of purpose.”
I agree. But I wonder if the time for anger is not long past. I wonder if we do not need something stronger than anger. Something, perhaps, like indignation. In other words, anger laced with moral fury. I wonder if we do not need a movement similar to Los Indignados, the Spanish movement of “The Indignant” founded by ordinary Spaniards fed up with the status quo. The Spanish movement is by no means perfect. But it at least shows what can be done with a people’s indignation.
However, for that righteous anger to work here, the English- speaking elite (black and white) must make one important concession: it must take seriously the fact that indignation will only work politically if it is let free to speak its rage in all the country’s languages.
The elite must acknowledge its historic inability to communicate its power and disillusionment in languages other than English as the serious handicap it really is. Unless that acknowledgment is offered and until the elite comes to terms with the shame that comes with its failure to speak more than two of the country’s languages, President Jacob Zuma will continue to mock the elite’s pronunciation of Nkandla — and do so to great personal and political profit.
Speaking of Zuma, the elite must also move beyond its obsession with the man — the political spawn, dare we forget, of one Thabo Mbeki. Zuma was a provincial mediocrity when Mbeki plucked him from KwaZulu-Natal and made him South Africa’s No 2. Mbeki figured that the docile Zuma would be harmless as his deputy.
Zuma will not always be president of South Africa; the ANC will not always be in power. That is the eventuality for which South Africans must prepare. But this eventuality is not written in the stars. It will not happen simply because Zuma will, like all of us, die some day and the ANC will wither away. That eventuality must be worked for in communities around the country. It must be worked for by millions of South Africans indignant enough to say no to the rampant corruption and lack of imagination.
If South Africa’s indignados decide that ours should have been a revolution instead of a civil rights struggle against apartheid, they must realise that the very idea of revolution needs to be rethought. Long gone are the days when the notion of a revolution was nothing more than secular code for the coming of a messiah.
There is no messiah to rescue us from the environmental, economic and political rot in which we live. There is just us, that seemingly impossible nation of 50 million people, and our indignation. Let us use it.
Journalist, historian and author, Dlamini is the winner of the 2015 Alan Paton Award for “Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle”
There is no messiah to rescue us from the environmental, economic and political rot. There is just us
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