Country on a charge to nowhere
SA-raised Peter Hain was a leading anti-apartheid campaigner in London in the 1970s. His effectiveness was such that in 1972 he received a letter bomb from the apartheid security forces.
Older readers may recall him leading vehement opposition to tours by SA’s sports teams, photographs showing his fixated expression of protest outside the SA embassy in Trafalgar Square.
His new book, The Rhino Conspiracy , was born partly from a different dismay, that of the usual suspects of post-1994 disappointment: the fading colours of the rainbow nation, the idealistic cadres turned by cronyism, the rising and then rampant corruption, and only a glimpse of possible recovery.
The plot centres on how the global scourge of the illegal $23bn wildlife trade hits a KwaZulu-Natal game reserve. Everything about the
THE RHINO CONSPIRACY, by Peter Hain, destruction of wildlife is obscene, but there is something extraordinarily horrific about the poaching of elephant and rhino.
In parallel with the actions of the ruthless criminal syndicate is the escalating, ruinous robbery of the state itself. The action builds in the months leading up to the ANC’s 2017 elective conference to appoint the president’s successor, when a struggle stalwart, The Veteran, decides enough is enough. He recruits a team of old comrades, ordinary citizens and connected civil servants, and enlists the help of a media network and a British MP to plot against the president and his keepers by exposing the presidency’s involvement in horn trafficking.
Disappointingly, the story is neither breakneck nor furtively intriguing. It meanders like a bush walk through lectures on the history of the anti-apartheid movement and struggle icons, or sermons about where the country has gone wrong, as the dialogue of the champion characters mutates into monologue, such as: “The fight against apartheid was long and bitter though the anti-apartheid struggle was victorious, massive economic crime was normal in the apartheid years, and that persists today.”
The author has written repeated passages as an apologetic remembrance of Nelson Mandela’s greatness, as if to clarify, especially for UK readers, that everything nowadays the tumbling investment ratings, falling-down state institutions, falling-apart infrastructure is nothing like what he fought for.
The cast of characters is transparently derivative. We can recognise the benevolent players, such as Dikgang Moseneke (obviously), and Ronnie Kasrils (fairly clearly). The British MP plays a deus ex machina plot role to tip the scales a proxy cameo for Hain himself.
The president’s men, too, are recognisable, the main miscreant a blend of erstwhile Mpumalanga premier (and current deputy president) David Mabuza and former minister of state security David Mahlobo. In 2018 the New York Times described Mabuza as “a dangerous politician”; Mahlobo was at the centre of a media firestorm in 2016 over his alleged ties to a Chinese rhino horn trafficker.
Because the protagonists are identifiable, and their modus operandi documented and disclosed across so many news cycles, the plot is inadequately clandestine. The book’s supposed conspiratorial narrative is too closely shaped by what we already know.
What drags us along, then, is the same fixation as nonfiction works such as Jacques Pauw’s
The President s Keepers or
’
Enemy of the People by Adriaan Basson and Pieter Du Toit: appalled fascination with the repugnancy humans are capable of and an urge probably forlorn, we realise — to seek some degree of justice.
The story’s political conspiracy resolves fairly hopefully. Can fact follow fiction
does Hain believe the current president can turn the tide of the disastrous effects of state capture and what seems to be economic disintegration? Or is the rhino — endangered, threatened, doomed, perhaps a metaphor for SA’s fate? Hain remains cautiously optimistic: “If anybody can [turn SA around], then Cyril Ramaphosa will. But he needs to be supported by business and civil society groups. If the corrupt forces in the ANC thwart him, then the party is finished and the country is in grave peril.”
But Hain believes the war to protect wildlife is being lost.
“Concerted, co-ordinated pressure by all governments — especially China and Vietnam — to close down and prosecute the global criminal poaching syndicates and the corrupt politicians and civil servants in Africa and East Asia sheltering them … simply isn’t happening.”
News and exposés about SA’s corruption and the desecration of animals make one despondent; it’s easier to safeguard sanity by putting one’s head in the sand. But the assumed fiction of a story suspends reality and leads us on to make connections.
So, despite its flaws, feelings on finishing The Rhino Conspiracy are undoubtedly what the author intended: disgust at the country’s political degeneracy and economic decline, and mortification as to how we are destroying the majestic creatures of the earth.
In that context, and viewed as Hain’s latest form of activism,
is a