Another chance to renew, restart and reimagine the country’s future

NONE of us can predict how our lives might turn out, whether by conscious election or serendipity. We choose actions every minute that might have immediate implications while sinking into circadian rhythms of chores and obligations, benefits even.

At any moment our mortality might be brought into sharp relief. Or never, pushed into the furthest recesses of our body, mind, soul.

Often we’re brought – by circumstance or free will – to stocktaking our life. Blame it on being a slow learner but I seem to have had a lifetime of stocktaking moments, sometimes long introspective seasons of ridiculous sorting out.

Almost two years ago, I suddenly found my life winding down, rapidly and inexorably, to what could soon be a silent, breathless, full stop. A weak heart muscle, which I had lived with for most of my life, was failing quickly, too bloated and stretched to support me, pumping at only 10% of capacity. I was admitted to hospital. Waiting, to die, or for a donor heart to give me another chance at life.

With the help of medical professionals, I had to radically review my life. To the extent that my illness was a result of poor lifestyle choices, I had to adopt better, life-affirming options.

Which religious nutter was it again who said “if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off ?” Well, my diseased heart had to be cut out. I was blessed to receive a donor heart – someone died that I might live. My body, restored, re-started.

In his book The God of Second Chances, psychotherapist and Presbyterian minister Erik Kolbell uses the Latin prefix “re” as in rebuild or reconnect or reiterate, to show how Christian faith often emphasises “going back”. This is not only true of Christianity, nor for people of faith. Even scientists have a need to cast their minds back.

Restoration of humans – to

God (if they believe in Her), or just simply to one another, to their physical environment, to themselves – are at once acts of going back and commitments to moving forward, returning to a former state to envision a new one.

What holds for personal, private selves is also true for our social, economic and political beings.

I’ve increasingly come to appreciate the human body as a prism through which to view the body politic.

Restoration of South Africa in a post-Jacob Zuma era, therefore, cannot simply be about booting out Zuma and his rotten state capture cabal, as important as that excision was. Rebooting our political system requires returning to a former state (pun intended) in order to envisage a wholly different order.

But how far back do we need to go and how much do we need to retrieve to enable us to reimagine the future?

The manner in which we’ve reached this opportunity is significant. It involved many, individuals who and organisations which had abdicated their progressive activist roles because a democratic government was installed. We retrieved our best selves from the 1980s, as liberation movements in exile and disparate groupings of people on the streets of South Africa.

We had lost that – after the ANC and PAC were unbanned, with Robben Islanders being released, when exiles started returning and even Nelson Mandela was finally and wholly free – and simply gave up our rights and duties to be active citizens from below for what we wanted. We simply accepted what was handed down to us from above by “the leaders”.

That was stupefying.

Up to 1996, we wrongly assumed an elite assembly of leaders drawing up one of the best theoretical expositions of rights in the world was sufficient to bring about a shared set of values that reflects South African-ness in a post-apartheid era. We need to have renewed conversations about what binds us at the southernmost part of Africa.

Until then, activism was defined by non-racism, non-sexism, nonsectarianism, an openness to shared objectives despite class divides. We need to re-discover a humanity which does not embody crass identity slurs.

Shortly after South Africa’s turn to democracy, a friend suggested it would take our country at least 30 years, equivalent to one generation, to re-create itself properly out of the social disaster of apartheid.

At the time, I told her she was being unnecessarily pessimistic. I said it was quite simple, we knew what we had to do and we would turn things around in no time at all. I argued for South Africa’s exceptionalism, that we could even skip a few of the torturous steps that other countries had perforce traversed in overcoming the effects of their own dark age.

She was certainly no Afropessimist, simply a realist.

And, having endured unimaginable horrors during the racist pogrom unleashed by the Nazis when the Germans overran Poland at the start of World

War II, carried infinitely more understanding of brokenness and restoration in her pinky finger than I had in my whole being.

Four-fifths of a generation along democratic South Africa’s journey, it turns out my friend was partly right. We now know it will take much longer than 30 years.

Very few of us in 1994 may have foreseen the wrong turns South Africa’s body politic would take.

But our paltry 24-year journey through democracy presents critically important, albeit painfully expensive lessons, if we really are committed to restoring our country.

I hope that our country looks back and grasps this second chance to reimagine our future.

@raytomhart