If newly rich lose all, then fear

WHY does South Africa not go up in smoke? Why do the millions of jobless youth in our midst not take to the streets and tear this place apart?

I ask, not to be melodramatic, but because South Africans are consumed by these questions. “We are sitting on a time bomb” – who among our politicians has not uttered that phrase over the last 20 years?

It has become the standard way to draw attention to any problem.

The poor have not rebelled, for all sorts of reasons. One is they, like all of us, live in two parallel worlds, one real and not that nice, the other imaginary and a whole lot better.

Several years ago, while working in a town centre in the old Transkei, I came across a young man living the most horrible life. During the daylight hours he was little more than a human mule.

Spaza shop owners from the surrounding villages would come to buy stock from a large warehouse store. They would employ him to carry their purchases to the taxi rank.

Day after day, I watched him staggering under the weight of mealie meal bags, beer crates and boxes of frozen chicken. He was small, 1.68m at most, with a wiry frame. I felt for him.

I got somebody to introduce us. His name was Nathi and he was 19 years old.

I asked whether he minded if I followed him home.

His evenings, I discovered, were only moderately better than his days. He lived with a friend in a shack at the edge of town.

They would meet in the late afternoon and pool whatever money they had made that day to buy dinner. They would cook, eat and sleep.

One evening, I asked Nathi what he thought about while he carried those boxes. Perhaps because it was late and he was tired, and perhaps also because by that time of night he was stoned, my question was rewarded with the most extraordinary answer.

He slipped into the dreamlike state that possessed him while he worked and described what went through his mind. He imagined that all those boxes were his, that he was a spaza shop owner.

His head was exploding with calculations: the margins on mealie meal were higher this week than last, so he would buy more; his customers were showing a preference for Colgate over Aquafresh and he must adjust his stock accordingly. He went on like this until after midnight and then finally fell asleep.

In essence, Nathi had borrowed the lives of his employers and substituted them for his own. His fantasy had become like a second skin.

He barely noticed it. It was just something he wore.

We are all like Nathi, of

A hundred people jump onto a successful neighbour’s back and go for the ride. These journeys . . . hold us together

course. We live a lot of our lives in our heads, becoming people who are us but not us – us but much more.

I am not sure that enough attention has been paid to the vital social functions that these private fantasies play.

Since the dawn of democracy, the majority of black South Africans have remained poor. But many have become rich.

They are dispersed throughout the land. There isn’t a township street where some kid has not made good, rising through the civil service, for instance, or landing a good job in a corporation.

There isn’t a village, not even in the depths of beyond, where somebody hasn’t made it as a trader or an entrepreneur. Everyone in this country has witnessed somebody else rise.

We worry about these new inequalities. We fear that they create envy and bitterness, and they surely do.

But they also create something else. Those left behind fill their heads with the lives of those who have gotten ahead.

A hundred people jump onto a successful neighbour’s back and go along for the ride. These journeys are private and thus largely invisible.

Even the ones undertaking them are only dimly aware of what they are doing. But they nonetheless hold us together.

Success is dispersed widely enough for everyone to see and this accounts, in part, for why our democracy has been stable and why the ANC has enjoyed so much support for so long.

Rising inequality is not our greatest problem. We have far more to fear from a sudden levelling. The day traders across South Africa go bust, the day the civil service retrenches en masse, the day interest rates rocket and countless borrowers are dispossessed – this is the day we ought to fear. For just as the poor have shared vicariously in rising prosperity, so they will share vicariously in its fall.

When the newly rich lose everything, that is when a country feels it is rolling back into the past.

One hopes that the ANC understands how heavy the burden of economic stewardship has become. The future of countless fantasies rests on its shoulders.