Long walk to freedom continues with ‘iMadiba’

LAST month, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange installed “what” in their garden – it wasn’t a statue, a building or a pew. Some will assume they had a shed in mind but had a change of mind when it got knee-high.

Actually it’s an artwork, one that the installers mystifyingly proclaim is “the world’s largest museum for reflection and conversation”.

It’s called an iMadiba, the “i” conveying an inanimate thing named after Madiba. It looks like a rectangular concrete bench, the shape and size of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island cell.

It’s the brainchild of Erhardt Thiel who envisages it re-initiating a Mandela “circle of dialogue”, honest debate with no fear of raising truth as you see it.

This iMadiba is sponsored by Satrix, an investment fund championing which has as its quest to create millions of stockholders by providing ultra-cheap, ultra-easy, routes into the JSE.

It is not the first Madiba, though is doubly symbolic, here where the heart of economic freedom beats.

A handful of likely suspects already have an iMadiba – Mthatha, Qunu, St Stithian’s and the Waterfront. One is heading for the UN in New York, another for the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. All 126 universities that gave Madiba doctorates are targeted, and eventually… thousands, why not; more, making up the “largest museum” between them, like the Square Kilometre Array telescope, and generating deep honest respectful debate.

All of which looks pretty fine. Seeing a branch of artworld find its way to Money River is wondrous already. Leveraging Madiba’s stature to fix stuff is dead right.

Just that… just that what, Mr Grouch? You gonna quibble again? Well, there is just this one thing. What bloody liars we are.

Here at this congenial launch – South Africans in fullness together are terrific, when politics stays locked in its cupboard – the emphasis on progress through reasoning wins applause galore. That’s our zeitgeist now, our innest in-thing. Up with truth and honesty! We Seffricans skrik for niks!

Then take in this week’s media, and the engineer who makes some dumb generalisations while querying whether it’s wise for the industry to put resources into seeking female recruits.

Has he hired bodyguards yet? Can his kids hold their heads up at school? What our allegedly robust society unloads on him is not dispute. It’s knee-jerk outrage that he dares to question a holy verity.

Helen Zille on colonialism was the same thing. In one day of snarling scorn, a discussion that had lived since long before any of us were born became taboo. People who had taken it as self-evident that medicine and science and literacy and all weighed one side of the scale, against put-down in the other, slammed their doors against anyone who failed to fanatically forbid the thought.

Some day, when no one worries about their colleagues’ genders or complexions any more than how they part their hair, rueful conversations will be known.

Some rueful talk will be the result of the damage done to professions and industries when society went mad, shuffling the qualifying standards higher or lower according to the candidate’s genitalia or melanin.

Some will rue the talent that was driven to desert our economy and serve other economies in lesser need. Some will wince in the memory of hiding what they knew to be true to uphold what they knew to be untrue.

It’s great that people in Valparaiso or Vladivostok will sit on rectangular benches thinking, “Ah, yes, this was that demigod guy from Africa… so he was big on truth, was he?”

It will be even better when South Africans can think what open debate could mean to them.