SA exceptionalism is going the way of the dodo

AHHH! There’s nothing quite like the occasional aromatic waft of sewage as one sips the day’s first coffee at a Mauritian street café.

That’s one of the disadvantages of soak pits, or French drains as I was taught to call them. On an island with a high water table, any crashing downpour and all is revealed, so to speak.

Sometimes, though, it’s attitudes, not things, which stink. This week I was seated at a restaurant table next to a bunch of rowdy, demanding, and obnoxious South African tourists. Of course, no nation en masse is a pleasant experience. But it’s true that, as a nation, we have never much endeared ourselves to our fellow Africans.

That’s hardly surprising. During the apartheid years, white South Africans largely made themselves known to their neighbours through expeditions of murder and pillage. At the same time, our black exiles in the camps, known for their boorishness and indolence, didn’t exactly charm their reluctant cross-border hosts.

Nothing much has changed. Our mostly-white corporates try to use their size to obliterate their competitors on the rest of the continent, albeit only commercially. And our mostly-black governing class, with its ostentatiousness and condescension, continues to irk. There is not much attempt to be modest. Some years ago, president Jacob Zuma warned at an ANC manifesto launch that “this is not Rwanda” and that we shouldn’t “think like Africans in Africa”.

In similar vein, my suggestion last week that little Mauritius could give SA some lessons on how political pragmatism and modest ambitions can over time deliver astonishing economic results, elicited some interesting reactions. The tenor of the comments ranged from widespread bemusement at such an outlandish idea, to occasional irritation at my stupidity in failing to comprehend that SA is innately different. We lead, we do not follow.

That’s a way of thinking not unlike the belief by many in the US of their country being exceptional and superior. Ian Tyrrell, a historian who has written a definitive account of the phenomenon, notes American exceptionalism is not about differences or the unique aspects of the US. “Exceptionalism requires something more: a belief that the US follows a path of history different to the laws and norms that govern other countries.” Substitute US with SA and that is a fair description of our own hubris. The Afrikaners, who shaped the pre-1994 form of the country, had an unshakeable belief that they were God’s chosen people and that, by definition, anything and everything they did was preordained to be blessed and exceptional.

Now, post-1994, the national ethos is imbued with magical thinking organised around our very own, secular deity, Madiba. It’s the heady but mistaken feeling of invincibility that comes from being fêted around the world for stepping away from the brink, and apparently reconciling the hitherto irreconcilable mix of ethnicities, religions and languages.

American exceptionalism is wearing thin, exposed to winds of global change that most of the US seems unable to conceive, never mind counter. SA exceptionalism is no different – the burnish is turning to tarnish and it’s happening at an accelerating pace.

Bemoaning the paucity of Mauritian birdlife, I remarked that this was probably not surprising, given that this is the island where the dodo was driven extinct. The Mauritian put-down was caustic: “Our Dutch wiped out the dodo, a bird. Your Dutch almost wiped out the Bushmen, a people.”