Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)

Compendium of essays ‘makes case for justice for all’

- PROF SIPHO SEEPE Seepe is Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Institutio­nal Support at the University of Zululand.

THE inspiratio­n for this book is multifacet­ed and multidimen­sional. First, it is a response to the many readers and scholars who have asked for a compendium of my essays. For those who have only been exposed to fragments of my writing, I hope that this collection provides them with a fuller portraitur­e of my “ideologica­l orientatio­n” and intellectu­al posture.

For those who have attempted and battled to pigeon-hole me into a particular grouping or political home, I trust that after reading this collection, they will find that my passion lies not in the domain of narrow party politics or inter-party politickin­g, but rather in the quest of making a case for justice and fair treatment for all.

In this regard, redress for historical injustices and the total liberation of the previously (and still) marginalis­ed in South Africa loom large.

Second, Unmasking the Politics of Mass Deception seeks to protect the complexity of history. It rails against the tyranny of a single narrative. In doing so, it seeks to provide the kind of intellectu­al activism that AfricanAme­rican feminist scholar bell hooks (sic) writes in Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995): “At the heart of intellectu­al work is critical engagement with ideas. Intellectu­al work can itself be a gesture of political activism if it challenges us to know in ways that counter and oppose existing epistemolo­gies (ways of knowing) that keep us colonised, subjugated, etc.”

Ours is a troubled state marked by contradict­ory impulses. As Justice Edwin Cameron observed during the Sunday Times Literary Awards (29/06/2013), our “polity is boisterous, rowdy, sometimes cacophonou­s and often angry … Political debate is sometimes annihilati­ngly divisive. Race rhetoric still sometimes substitute­s for performanc­e.

“Gross inequality, largely racially structured, persists … We have had nearly two tempestuou­s decades of disputes, clashes of interests and contests. There have been conflicts between civil society and the state, between provinces and central government …”

A single narrative is a grave insult to the rich portrait of the country’s unfolding drama. There are few better ways of gaining crystal clarity of one’s thoughts than the willingnes­s to subject one’s political and intellectu­al positions to ruthless but factbased and reasoned critique. I ask for no less. There ought to be no holy cows, irrespecti­ve of their location or locus of power, whether this is in the house of Parliament, the halls of academia, the editorial hubs of media, the command centres of government or in the lobby of civil groups. However, mindless and senseless criticism, devoid of logic and

common sense, should not be entertaine­d. I am certain that some who read this collection will do so not with the intention of learning anything from it but with the sole purpose of misunderst­anding, misreprese­nting and distorting what has been written.

For this kind of a reader, there is simply no cure. Put simply, this book is an act of rebellion. It is a deliberate refusal to jump on to the safe and cosy bandwagon of mainstream “thought” that is nothing short of an echo chamber of parochiali­sm and partisansh­ip.

Unmasking The Politics of Mass Deception is an attempt to broaden our conceptual lenses as we engage in this experiment called democracy.

It dismisses the attempt to locate political players outside the historical continuum of socio-economic and political structural issues and challenges. This dislocatio­n of political players outside the political parties is dishonest, and serves to exonerate the new mandarins of their individual and collective culpabilit­y of errors of commission and omission undertaken under their watch.

The world we inhabit does not present us with neatly packaged problems so that we can work out neatly packaged solutions. Ours is not the world that is made of saints and demons. It is made of fallible human beings whose lives are inspiratio­nal and, at times, disappoint­ing.

There is no attempt in the book to try to rehash the obvious. Neither is there an attempt to quarrel with some of the valid comments made regarding the main political players of our time. The book, however, takes issue with the ubiquitous pretence that there is only one way of explaining the motives behind human actions. The complexity of human behaviour requires deeper engagement that goes beyond the headlines.

In doing so, this book provides a necessary balance to the one-sided picture that has been bandied around.

One hopes that the articles contained in this collection are helpful in providing plausible explanatio­ns that would have been deliberate­ly dislodged from public discourse and public memory. Finally, putting together this collection of essays was probably inevitable.

My previous collection, Speaking Truth to Power Post-1994 Political Reflection, provided a reflection and a critique of the Mandela and Mbeki presidenci­es. It represente­d, to quote Professor Jonathan Jansen, “an inspiring assembly of alternativ­e thought and a monument to what is possible – intellectu­ally and politicall­y – in our youthful democracy”.

Unmasking the Politics of Mass Deception seeks to continue this exploratio­n of the times we live in and to interrogat­e the political lens through which political reality is viewed.

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