Lessons in (over)sharing
The great Rupert debate
● Since Tuesday, I have had to interact with critical comments following the POWER 987 Chairman’s Conversation I conducted with businessman Johann Rupert that evening.
I have taken the constructive aspects of the appraisal to heart and will endeavour to improve on future conversations.
As with some of the criticism advanced after last year’s conversation with former president Thabo Mbeki, Tuesday night pointed to the need to clarify an issue I had assumed did not require much discussion.
Despite apartheid’s futile attempt to stifle discussion, conversation and debate, we were never short of dialogue and the exchange of ideas. To our credit, this has continued since 1994. In conceiving the POWER 987 Chairman’s Conversation, one was aware of this reality and deliberately chose the format of a conversation rather than an interview or a debate.
A conversation is by definition a cordial exchange of information, perspectives and ideas. It aims, so to speak, to download, understand and, in the context of a public conversation, share the interlocutor’s mind with the audience. It is not necessarily adversarial, nor is it its mission invariably to pass judgment on the assumptions and conclusions of the interlocutor.
The audience is more than capable of making up its mind and the debates that followed the Mbeki and Rupert conversations are ample proof of this.
I, however, acknowledge that the novelty of the format of the POWER 987 Chairman’s Conversation circumstantially evokes all sorts of responses, some of which have very little to do with the contents of the conversation.
If anything, the responses to the Rupert conversation illustrated our country’s enduring, deep racial and class divisions and their accompanying raw emotions.
A cursory glance at social media reveals that, to many, Rupert is a symbolic representation of white SA’s and in particular Afrikaners’ racial privilege, through which collective black disadvantage makes meaning. It is often pointed out that his father was a member of the Broederbond. This perspective is also reinforced by the political environment of the past few years, which has given rise to virulent and polarising narratives that render rational discourse and the search for solutions to our country’s problems and challenges that much more difficult.
Inspired by the belief that Rupert is public enemy no 1 who should not even be spoken to, some have sought to nit-pick this or that conversational remark in an attempt to define him and the conversation as unworthy of consideration. And so we are unlikely to hear Rupert and the import of what he says when he tells us that Afrikaners have fears, that African and Afrikaner nationalisms must find a meeting point and that SA requires a national consensus on what and how to respond practically to our common national challenges.
Is a rational political response not one that explores the practical meaning of the meeting of African and Afrikaner nationalisms, inviting Afrikaners to the table to discuss their fears, anxieties and legitimate aspirations together with the fears, anxieties and legitimate aspirations of the other, so that together we can forge a consensus on a new way forward?
Put differently, is Rupert hinting at the need and possibility for some kind of an economic Codesa in which the political leadership could seriously engage him and other captains of industry?
Engaging Rupert and the rest of the business community requires the ability to break ranks with what Afrikaner poet Elleke Boehmer refers to as the “foreclosure of the frozen penultimate”, and an appreciation of Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani’s counsel to imagine a different future since no destination is preordained but is always negotiable.
Interestingly, Mamdani proffered this advice when he drew a comparison between the Rwanda of 1984 and the SA of 1994, when we transitioned from apartheid to democracy just as Rwanda slid into a genocide.
He poignantly asked: “If someone had told us a decade before, in 1984, a time when the struggle against apartheid in SA was at its bloody height, but also a time when [Rwanda’s] President
Juvénal Habyarimana was calling for reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, if someone had told us then that a decade hence there would be a genocide in one of these countries and a reconciliation in another, how many of us would have identified the location of the two developments correctly?”
He concluded: “The difference between 1984 and 1994, not just in SA and Rwanda but elsewhere too, was not just made by history, but by politics. The possibilities offered by politics were in turn defined by the ability of those in the present to imagine a different future. The difference lay in this: whereas in SA, they dared imagine a future beyond apartheid, in Rwanda, they remained locked in the world of Hutu and Tutsi, the world of 1959.”
Some of the responses to the Rupert conversation beg the question: did South Africans truly imagine a different future beyond apartheid, or is Mamdani merely advancing what in effect amounts to an accusation? What are the implications for the future of our country if we have failed or eventually fail to imagine a different future? Or does it not matter?
One’s imperfections notwithstanding, the conversation with Rupert should hopefully point to the vital need to talk to each other and not at each other, to recognise that we sink or swim together.
Our platform aims to facilitate authentic dialogues that are conducted responsibly and sensitively to contribute our part to the progress of the nation. We remain committed to this mission with a full appreciation that leadership is not a popularity contest.
Mkhari is founder and chair of POWER 987