What do we make of 2016?

IN the coming days and weeks there will be a lot of reflection on just what a dismal year 2016 has been. There is no getting away from it – the events of the past 12 months were astounding and collectively they may turn out to be epoch-making.

Time, alone, will tell. Right now, we have the dubious privileges of outrage, horror, fear or displays of schadenfreude.

In some ways, however, we have seen periods like this before.

What we will, eventually, make of these days, sometime in the distant future, is much more interesting. Of even greater interest, at least to me, is whether we can convey, simultaneously, the details of this year’s daily noises and the large historical structural change that is under way in the world.

When viewed this way, several years from now, our memories of this past year will be vague – or we will simply make up stories, as we are wont.

Nonetheless, a year that started with the events of December last year, when South Africa entered into a type of purgatory with the appointment of a new finance minister, ended with last week’s danse macabre in parliament, that charnel house where the country’s hopes and dreams are buried. Raising our gaze above our own horizon, the carnage in Syria, the slaughter of Rohingya in Myanmar, fears of fascism in the world’s stable democracies, the flight of displaced people around the world and the fractures in ecosystems all make for depressing reading.

My sense is that those of us who have lived through these events, especially those of us who, unlike infant children, carry the burdens of memory, are still too close to the period to make definitive claims or statements about the past year. Memories will come, as they inevitably do, but some time in the distant future we will make of these horripilating times as we wish.

One passage, by Astrid Erll, of the Goethe University in Germany, stands out from some of the reading I did on photographs as mnemonic devices a few years ago.

“A war which is orally presented, in an anecdote by an old neighbour, seems to become part of lived contemporary history; but as an object of Wagnerian opera, the same war can be transformed into an apparently timeless, mythical event . . . different modes of representation may elicit different modes of cultural remembering.”

Not always deliberately so, we tend to make of our pasts what is most convenient.

Of course, the events most prominent in our minds have their origins in the past and they will, in turn, shape our future.

This is the liminality of where we find ourselves over and again. In some ways it is how we will remember these times that will make the difference.

Here is a little quiz, dear reader. What would be the immediate response to the following passage?

“It is as if a villainous character had every day, over the years, gone to the Union Buildings, the seat of government in the capital, Pretoria, and methodologically and systematically undone every single screw, bolt, nut and nail of government. Every day, now, for months on end, a section of government in South Africa is coming apart.

“It is difficult, now, after a spate of scandalous exposes in recent months to say exactly when the disintegration first started, or when the first door, window or desk in the Union Buildings collapsed. What has become evident, however, is that the state is collapsing bit by bit, in slow motion, while its powers of rehabilitation [are] dissipating with its political might.”

Let that passage sit for a moment. Getting back, then, to the events of the past year and, of course, the events around the world over the past decade, what gets me out of bed every day (other than Lucy) is the body of ideas and the fresh thinking that has emerged from the crisis in the global economy.

Some of the finest minds in the world are discussing the destruction of the global financial and economic architecture of capitalism, and what might happen next. This, as part of the long view of history, is what I find infinitely more interesting.

This is not to say the events of the past year are not significant, but how we place and recall these events that currently hold our attention, within larger, more silent historical shifts from capitalism to whatever comes next has a greater hold on my attention than the daily dramas and frippery of our acquisitive society.

About the passage, above, dear reader: I wrote that in 1993, when I was the political correspondent for what was South Africa’s largest newspaper. I should hastily add our iniquitous past is no justification for pillage and rapine today.

In the meantime, we can take comfort from the Igbo saying that no condition is permanent.