Civil disobedience beside the pond is getting attractive

It is a blessing to have a companion on a fishing trip, if only to have someone against whom to rebel when she tries to drag you away from the water and into the car and back onto the road the way one does a toddler howling, “I don’t want go home.”

It is not that home is a bad place. It is just not here in the cliché-rich undulations of the Steenkampsberg whose rivers are where the trout are. And home is not necessarily back in Joburg, but in the hunger for the know-not-what in the manner of tourists packing up to leave Dullstroom town.

The road home is an Escher nightmare along which verdant fields morph into a coal-smut patchwork, and along which good humour evaporates into sniping about money and molar grinding about the radio news. The road home is too soon a place to reminisce about how great a vacation it has been, and too late to change the world.

Fantasise instead about two years, two months and two days at a cabin such as Henry Thoreau’s on Walden Pond, there to contemplate civil disobedience as a contribution to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s efforts to apply the boot to the collective backside of his public service. But that’s just fantasy. The reality is a leaky intercooler under the car bonnet and the steady growth of a debt overhang, mine, yours, the country’s.

The reality is that civil disobedience is a fiction as much as the law is a fiction. For either to work, their practitioners must suspend their belief in the evidence and put their faith in Ramaphosa’s banalities. It won’t happen. The evidence is that South Africans fail to co-operate in the way successful large groups cooperate flexibly and with the imagination to create a fiction such as the law in which they generally believe, to paraphrase the historian Yuval Noah Harari.

Still, the idea of civil disobedience is attractive. Casting to trout rising to a termite hatch long after dark and against reason and domestic obligation is gratifying as a small rebellion, if largely as ineffectual as trying to overthrow the government by not paying e-tolls. Paying fines online for refusing to renew a driver’s licence is infinitely more fun than queuing for hours to face a morose public servant in the employ of a criminal enterprise. Speeding is also disobedient fun, but stupid.

Worse than a dilettantish indulgence in petty disobedience is the idea of cooperating with the ANC’s government. You must be daft to buy into Ramaphosa’s hoary fictions and the hollow undertakings he rattled off at the launch of his party’s election manifesto on Saturday. Who in their right mind will believe the president that the ANC has “transformed the future of millions of young people by massively expanding enrolment in schools, universities, colleges and early childhood development” so soon after the obfuscation of the matric results?

To claim credit for “expanding access to health care” amounts to lying. What sick people get at public hospitals is not health care, it is failure. I challenge the president to spend five minutes in a public toilet at Helen Joseph Hospital without vomiting. If he doesn’t, he is a better man than I am.

And to claim credit for SA’s robust media is risible. Ask any reporter who, in the public interest, has done battle with gatekeepers and spin doctors.

I can go on, and, as a kind of columnist’s manifesto, it is my intention for the year ahead to continue elaborating on the obscenity that is co-operation with the ANC government.

It is a passive undertaking and probably next to useless, but it feels good. Mass action would be better, of course, and it did get rid of the apartheid regime. But that struggle did not change racism. It entrenched it. It is evidence that a new fiction of co-operation is beyond South Africans, that we are set up to fail, that it is too late for hope and too soon for despair.

This, then, is the road home, even if you don’t want to go. The cabin on the pond is best forgotten. Happy 2019 citizens.