BEWARE THE BANALITY OF SEAGULLS

The thugs of the EFF and its ilk want xenophobes to believe they’re a force of civil society. They’re not — they’re simply populist bullies engaged in a shakedown

One of the consequences of being caught up in the rush of the breaking news cycle is that we often move on too quickly to the next big story. This happens to both consumers and producers of news, and for a number of reasons.

One, I guess, might be that it’s a side effect of how the digital world has conditioned us to always be clicking, endlessly in search of the next novelty, be it a new story or just a new data point. For journalism, another is the need to fill space, that white empty space that frames advertising inventory, a tabula rasa of cost-perclick waiting for journalists to graffiti it.

It’s a rush in two senses of the word, both headlong and heady.

One of the big stories of two weeks ago was how the EFF was trying to bully restaurant owners into firing foreign staff, a sort of ethnic cleansing amuse-bouche for the main course of deep-fried xenophobia it clearly intends to serve up in future.

The members of the EFF — those masters of unearned and inappropriate military nomenclature — actually refer to these shakedowns as “guerrilla visits”.

Watching footage of the EFF’s bullies harassing restaurant owners in Gauteng, I was reminded of a 2019 New Yorker cartoon by Will McPhail. You’ll probably know the cartoon I mean or, if you’re more digitally inclined, you’ll have chuckled at one of the many memes related to its theme.

In the first of four frames, a man eating chips out of a packet is walking up to a seagull sitting on a wall. “Nice jacket,” says the seagull. “Thanks,” says the man, walking past. “Be a shame if something were to happen to it,” says the seagull meaningfully, not looking at the man. The man stops, frozen, with a chip halfway to his mouth. “Leave the chips,” says the seagull, still looking away.

The EFF is that seagull, threatening to crap all over our democracy if we don’t give it our chips.

The seagull metaphor doesn’t end there, of course. Like seagulls, the EFF flies squawking around the trawlers of capitalism, attracted by the guts and offal dumped over the stern, fighting over access to a catch it hasn’t earned.

When the EFF arrives at an Ocean Basket (or Ocean Basketball, as the party refers to it in a tweet — possibly a Freudian slip about how the things it pretends to care about are just political footballs in a cynical political game), its members are nothing but extortionists. And another word for an extortionist is a crook.

When they tell a restaurant owner they will be back in two weeks to check if they have adhered to their demands, this is just racketeering.

There’s even a fancy linguistic term for what the party is doing here. A “Gricean implicature” is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed.

In the case of the seagull, the implication is that he’ll be crapping on your nice jacket if you don’t give him your chips. In the case of the EFF, the message is equally self-evident: if you don’t fire your workers, we’ll be back to wreak havoc in the same way we did with H&M and Clicks.

Let’s not forget that, since 2018, three judgments have found against the EFF for interfering in workplaces, determining that these actions are illegal.

But much like the seagull, the EFF just don’t care.

The thing about these BYOB parties, and their populist invitation to bring your own bullying, is that they proliferate like hungry seagulls mobbing a dead fish. One week we have the EFF threatening business owners, the next we have ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba saying: “It has just been brought to my attention about the employment of foreign nationals in senior positions in the department of basic

What it means:

The campaign against the employment of foreign nationals will escalate into something far worse if left unchecked

education. Will take this matter up with the minister and [teachers’ union] Sadtu if they have knowledge of this when South Africans are unemployed.”

The Wikipedia definition of racketeering includes this bit: “Racketeering may refer to an organised criminal act in which the perpetrators offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket … Traditional racketeering may also involve perpetrators offering an ostensibly effectual service (such as protection from other criminals) that may in fact solve an actual existing problem; however, these racketeers will themselves coerce or threaten the business into accepting this service, often with the threat (implicit or otherwise) that failure to acquire the offered services will lead to the racketeers themselves contributing to the existing problem.”

Bearing all that in mind, you’ll be amused by this EFF attempt to justify its thuggish xenophobic protection racket. “Another thing we want to end is this exploitation of our African brothers and sisters who often find themselves being used because they have no say and some are illegal immigrants who cannot be protected by the constitution.”

Ah yes, Saint Julius and the Church of the Opportunistically Pan-African.

Like seagulls, the EFF flies squawking around the trawlers of capitalism, attracted by the guts and offal dumped over the stern, fighting over access to a catch it hasn’t earned

Some of the new xenophobic racketeering and extortion is even more crass, and the mafia homage even more apparent, if the following tale is true.

A post on the SA Long-Distance Truckers Facebook group says a documented Zimbabwean

driving an SA-registered truck on the N3 was abducted by members of an antiforeigner “mafia” when he stopped to change a tyre. “They showed him some sort of cards and asked him to call his boss, they demanded R10,000 from the boss to release the truck which they disagree of. They then put him in a car and blindfolded him and drove away to a nearest bush. They hold him hostage for almost three hours until the boss sent that money then they let him go.”

The game of xenophobia-fuelled extortion is obviously taking hold in the popular imagination.

Consider the All Truck Drivers Foundation (ATDF), a group of SA truck drivers that has been implicated in xenophobic violence. It advocates for 100% employment of local drivers. Or, as the group puts it: “We need all SA citizen truck drivers to join and unite to save our jobs from being taken away from us to [sic] the foreign nationals.”

When you try to join the ATDF Facebook group, you’re presented with 10 group rules.

No 1 is the deeply ironic “No hate speech or bullying. Make sure everyone feels safe. Bullying of any kind isn’t allowed, and degrading comments about things such as race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender or identity will not be tolerated.”

No 4 is: “You are free to raise your opinion as an SA citizen [my italics].”

No 8 specifies that the group “is only for South Africans”. And No 10, almost triumphant in its elision of the welfare of our country with the oppression of foreigners, tells us “we all must put the country first”.

You couldn’t ask for a better playbook for populist parties, could you?

One of the unspoken rules of the columnists’ code is that you can write about incidents and subjects that everyone is talking about, that are part of the A-Zeitgeist of the information landscape, but you must at least try to say something original.

Well, that’s for columnists who have a code, of course. There are many in the world who thrive on telling readers things that people already think they know, and hold to be self-evident, for example that foreigners are taking our jobs.

I’m going to break that rule, because all I want to say here is something very simple and unoriginal: don’t allow yourself to forget what the peddlers of xenophobic hatred are doing.

The reason the Mashabas, Malemas and Patriotic Arsehole alliances of the world are constantly pushing antiforeigner sentiment is that they want us to wake up one day, in a sea of blood, and think it was preordained that the seagull citizens should be picking at the bodies of foreign nationals tossed over the stern of our democracy. And, worse, they want the xenophobes themselves to believe that they are a force of civil society, rather than an accident of power-grubbing history.

We can’t let them normalise evil like this, and enforce what noted ornithologist Hannah Arendt called “the banality of seagulls”.