Irony has ousted language of sincerity

IN AUGUST 1966, at a meeting of the plenum of the central committee of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong announced the start of what would later become known as the Cultural Revolution.

He closed down schools in cities across the country and called on the youth to round on their elders. In the weeks that followed, students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards, their task to seek out and humiliate communist party members sufficiently educated to be considered intellectuals. Many ended up torturing their own parents.

The official purpose of the campaign was to purge the communist party of bourgeois and revisionist elements, but what happened over the next decade is much too long a story even to begin to tell here. Suffice it to say that about 1.5-million people were killed; millions more were tortured and pilloried and their property confiscated.

Almost half-a-century after the Cultural Revolution began, African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Gwede Mantashe invoked the wisdom of Mao in these pages. Chiding his predecessor, Kgalema Motlanthe, for publicly criticising the ANC, he wrote of “two types of social contradictions” that “Chairman Mao” identified: “those between ourselves and the enemy, and those among the people themselves. The two are totally different in their nature. Because they are different, the methods to resolve these contradictions are also different.”

When it comes to disputes among the people, Mao’s way was “to settle controversial issues … by the democratic method, the method of discussion, of criticism, of persuasion and education and certainly not by grandstanding and coercion”.

Mantashe leaves silent how Mao goes about dealing with enemies, and in his silence lies the crux of his message.

Mantashe is no fool. When he associates Mao with gentle persuasion, he is acutely aware of the irony; indeed, he is taking the piss. Above the heads of those Business Day readers unschooled in revolutionary history, he is warning Motlanthe that he risks being treated as an enemy rather than as one of the people.

“If you are thinking of setting up an ‘alternative machinery’,” Mantashe appears to be saying, “you must beware.”

And even then, Mantashe’s threat is delivered in a thick coat of irony. The ANC is hardly going to take children out of school and turn their rage on whatever “alternative machinery” Motlanthe may or may not be considering. Mantashe’s coded reference to revolutionary terror is so overdrawn one could almost accuse him of being camp.

And that is the point. When the ruling party uses the pages of an esteemed financial daily to talk of Mao Zedong’s advocacy for persuasion, seriousness has left the scene. Ruling party politics has become a series of self-conscious jokes — a theatre of pastiche in which the actors play out their roles either with sarcasm or with dark humour.

The ANC can hardly do otherwise. The situation in which it finds itself does not leave room for sincerity.

A movement that came to power promising a better life for all presides over a country almost as unequal as it was two decades ago. A party promising jobs wards off mass hunger by giving cash transfers to nearly 17-million people every month. A movement whose flagship idea was reconciliation has watched friendship between black and white all but disappear.

The ANC could continue speaking with sincerity for as long as it could claim that the revolution it had promised was merely deferred. But that time is now gone, certainly in urban SA.

The alliance’s trade union movement has split. In the universities and the professions, people have begun to speak a language that self-consciously draws on traditions foreign to the ANC. The broad consensus built around the ANC’s deferred promise is over.

The governing party has thus been robbed of the capacity to describe either itself or SA with sincerity. Its senior officials talk largely in the codes of irony. Both they and their audience are quite aware that they do not mean what they say.

While the president prepares to buy a multibillion-rand aircraft, the secretarygeneral talks of the revolutionary ethics of Mao Zedong.

While the president complains that South Africans are lazy, more platinum, gold and steel workers are retrenched.

The threads that bind leaders’ words to the real world have snapped. Everything, now, is just darkly funny.