Disgust at Zuma also pains the innocent
The costs to SA of Jacob Zuma’s presidency have been counted so loudly and so often you’d think we’d left nothing out. But there is, in fact, a cost that has yet to be counted. By its nature silent, painful and very hard to talk about, it is the damage Zuma’s presidency is doing to race relations in SA.
It struck me in December as I sat in the gallery at the High Court in Pretoria listening to the Helen Suzman Foundation’s case against Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko. The foundation’s complaint was that Nhleko had appointed Berning Ntlemeza head of the Hawks without adequately determining whether he was fit and proper for the job.
This was a court, so the language counsel used was ever so proper, but the portrait painted of Ntlemeza made one want to wash the grime from one’s hands. By the time Nhleko considered his appointment, Ntlemeza had disgraced himself in another high court matter. He had withheld evidence and had groundlessly accused the judge in that case, Elias Matojane, of bias. Judge Matojane had called Ntlemeza dishonest and malicious, astonishingly strong language to use in a judgment.
The foundation wanted to know how on earth Nhleko could have found Ntlemeza to be a fit and proper candidate to head the Hawks after this. The legal team representing the foundation was almost entirely white. The police minister’s team was black.
As I sat there, the disreputableness of Zuma’s henchmen becoming more vivid by the hour, the racial geography of the courtroom grew starker and starker. It would take a superhuman black person, I thought, her skin as thick as a tyre, not to feel in her depths a jab of pain, of insult, of racial hurt.
It struck home again a few days later when I addressed a corporate audience in central Sandton. The audience was about three-quarters white and a quarter black. I spoke without a second thought about state capture, systemic corruption and the patronage machine run by provincial politicians. Less than halfway through my talk, I realised that I’d misjudged my audience — I had the tone wrong; I was using language too glibly.
Many of the black faces before me were glazing over; the longer I spoke, the more they seemed troubled, disappointed and a little irritable. And in a flash, it occurred to me that in their white-dominated corporate environments, they got this every day. White people haranguing without pause at the water cooler, in the canteen, in the course of small talk about state capture, the “premier league” and the corrupt man from Nkandla.
It struck me, too, that whether they agreed with what their white colleagues said was not entirely the point. This avalanche of white disgust at a black man’s administration — at the deepest level, in the pit of the stomach, it takes an unusual person not to share in some of the insult.
You see it, too, in the politics of the student movement at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town. For all its avowed disdain for the ANC administration, the movement’s most excited vitriol is reserved for vice-chancellors Adam Habib and Max Price. At a deeply buried, visceral level, they are more comfortable targets for disgust than a black president.
Finally, one sees it in the reservations so many people express about Julius Malema. In the eastern Free State, where I have been working, I have stopped counting the times I have heard someone remark that while they like what Malema says, they hate the way he says it.
Why insult the president like that, I am asked. Malema is rude like a child is to his friend, or like a white baas is to his worker. It is interesting that when Malema insults a black president, he becomes, alternately, a small boy or a white man.
There is a powerful campaign abroad to shame Zuma. It has been immensely successful. He has been prevented from replacing the finance minister with a stooge; he has been stopped from turning the prosecution service into his business partner’s servant. But as successful as it has been, this campaign is not without its costs. They are hard to detect, precisely because they are counted in the currency of deep emotion. But they are accumulating nonetheless.
They are finding expression, for now, in the surprising traction the story of the Ruperts and “white minority capital” is getting. There will be more costs down the line, some even more surprising, I think.
Shame is a difficult weapon to have in one’s armoury. It is hard to aim it straight. It ends up spraying all sorts of bystanders, inflicting wounds that take forever to heal.
LESS THAN HALFWAY THROUGH, I REALISED I’D MISJUDGED MY AUDIENCE — I HAD THE TONE WRONG; I WAS USING LANGUAGE TOO GLIBLY