On hope and the death of nostalgia

Young South Africans don’t look to the past for inspiration — and they are the key to our future

On the day South Africa’s new president is sworn in, fighter pilots take to the air in a show that makes the crowds at Pretoria’s Loftus Versfeld stadium gasp. I listen on the radio as two journalists narrate the proceedings of the inauguration.

They pepper their commentary with words such as “best” and “beautiful” and “pride”. You can hear them beaming over the airwaves. They keep up a light banter, referring to the historic day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became president of a newly democratic South Africa. They talk about how inclusive the ceremony is, about the fact that, for the first time, it has been moved from the Union Buildings to Loftus to allow more people to attend.

I have a sense — unsupported by evidence but persistent nonetheless — that the worst is behind us. It is not quite excitement: it is something else, something that almost feels like optimism because, finally, Jacob Zuma and his irreconcilable bravado are gone.

All of a sudden, one of the parachutists who have dazzled the crowd with air acrobatics comes down too hard. He lands on a railing and the stadium emits a different kind of collective gasp. The journalists on the radio break out of the soft pitterpatter of their conversation. “Ouch!” says one of them involuntarily.

It ends the reverie. The man is not hurt, but he has shattered the illusion that our paratroopers are “the best”. We are just a nation, trying our best, falling short and clinging to the stories we want to believe about ourselves.

Two days later I meet a young journalist for coffee in Rosebank — a busy, chic upmarket area of Johannesburg. He tells me that Saturday was a busy day because he covered the inauguration for his paper. He had woken up early to get to the stadium and had spent the day interviewing people and taking it all in. I ask if it had felt nostalgic.

He looks at me quizzically and laughs. “Ahh, nostalgia is for old people,” he says.

He doesn’t remember the Mandela moment. There is no repository in his memory of a better time, a simpler time, a time when the future wasn’t fraught. Nostalgia has no place in his political lexicon.

There is more. He is not simply playing innocent. He is making a larger point. He wonders aloud about the expense, wonders why President Cyril Ramaphosa didn’t

simply meet the chief justice in an office for a quiet swearing-in ceremony and then get to work.

Put this way — shorn of nostalgia and the sentimentality that nostalgia trains us to accept — it seems a reasonable question.

When I speak or write about South Africa in international settings, I am often asked — in a roundabout way — about hope. Often the questions I do not actually include the word “hope”. Instead, they are anchored by a different word — tragedy.

Outside the country, there is a growing sense that the South African dream is dead, that our country has declined economically and socially to such an extent that it now represents a tragedy. I am quick to point out that a tragedy is defined by its ending, and our story is still being written. We have our problems, but we continue to seek solutions.

My refusal to give in to the narrative of tragedy should not be mistaken for optimism. As American writer Ta-nehisi Coates has written: “I think that a writer wedded to ‘hope’ is ultimately divorced from ‘truth’. Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence that verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself.”

Coates is correct. To assert hopefully that we shall overcome our myriad problems is to succumb to the sort of hagiography of humanity to which he refers. At the moment, there are few objective reasons to be optimistic or hopeful about South Africa’s future, even as there are no reasons to conclude that ours is a failed state, or that our journey to democracy has ended in tragedy.

There are real questions to be raised about what it means to sit in this space between tragedy and hope. If South Africa is neither hopeful nor tragic, which posture should we take in relation to the future?

Having just elected a president who has not yet made it clear whether he will be capable of addressing corruption, poverty and inequality, South Africans must either learn to live with uncertainty or embrace possibility.

I am too cautious to suggest that we might begin to hope but, certainly, as the distance between 1994 and today widens, I see the merit in examining what is possible and looking for places where feats of imagination and acts of hard work might yet produce positive results.

Sadly, these spaces of possibility do not come from the most recent election of the ANC, nor are they created by Ramaphosa’s track record of leadership. The possibilities in South Africa continue to exist where they have always existed — on the margins rather than in enclaves: among those who are not seduced by the language of foolish, sickly sweet hope; among those who have no options but to push for change.

If we must indulge in nostalgia, let it be productive. Let us remember what was most remarkable about the early post-apartheid years, which was the manner in which the leadership of the ANC, as well as people in senior roles in government and civil society, embraced the contradictions inherent in building an equal society on foundations that were deeply unequal. The task of honouring justice in a place where injustice had reigned for so long was not just seen as important, it was understood to be contradictory by its very nature.

South Africa’s early leaders — across party lines, but especially in the ANC — were not fearful of contradictions. Rather, they understood that contradictions lay at the very centre of the project of rebuilding our new society. So much effort was expended on talking through these contradictions.

Over time — as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ended and the report was handed over, as the ANC became more involved

in the business of managing state resources — the work of nationbuilding became less of a priority and the task of thinking through and accepting these contradictions was outsourced. This loss of focus by the state, in terms of the narrative of justice and unity, coincided with a moment in the early 2000s when donor support to the civil society and civic sectors was in decline.

Donors either withdrew or shifted their support to the new government. The nonprofit organisations that survived this period were generally large and based in Cape Town, Johannesburg or Pretoria, and whose work focused on either lobbying the government or supporting the state in the delivery of large infrastructure projects, such as water and sanitation or the training of teachers, nurses and other civil servants. These activities were crucial. Still, there was a cost. The civic sector contracted as the state expanded. At a structural level, this meant the closing of avenues for people to express themselves communally.

The reconfiguration of the sector meant that the legitimate institutions that could hold local councillors to account or had previously taken responsibility for planning events and articulating people’s dreams and desires simply disappeared.

This had devastating consequences for the national conversations about reconciliation and nation-building that had characterised the first decade of a democratic South Africa. Trust began to fray as politicians’ promises began to waver and corruption soared. Suddenly the mechanisms that had been established during apartheid to resolve social conflicts went silent or were hijacked by quasi-government-linked entities such as the South African National Civic Organisation. At the national level, once Mandela and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu had stepped down — regardless of how flawed or partial their approach may have been — there were no longer any grandpatrons of the unity agenda.

There have been fewer and fewer people operating in the public domain who have been able to take up the mantle of unity in a way that feels relevant to the contemporary moment. A notable exception was Thuli Madonsela, who served as the public protector for a decade overlapping almost precisely with the presidency of Zuma. Madonsela used her role to champion the Constitution. Her contribution was important because it opened up possibilities at a time when many South Africans were expressing anger and disillusionment with the impunity and abuse of power that Zuma and his party had come to represent.

Still, Madonsela was not able — nor was it her mandate — to address the structural problems of land and urban poverty and their attendant pathos.

With the election of Ramaphosa, the narrative of hope has resurfaced.