PICTURE: ADRIAN DE KOCK
How on earth does one justify disrupting the launch of a cookery book to protest against rape? This happened at the Woordfees in Stellenbosch last week, and begs the question: did that silly event herald the end of the student uprising?
The logic seems to have been this: members of Afriforum, out to protect a statue on campus, used sexual expletives against anti-Afrikaans protesters, who then accused them of propagating rape. Because Afriforum is an organisation run by Afrikaners, Open Stellenbosch gave itself the mandate to disrupt Woordfees — in which Afriforum played no part — because it is a largely-Afrikaans arts festival.
And so a movement that promised so much to help clear South Africa’s heads of apartheid cobwebs, has degenerated into racial profiling of the crudest sort.
After a science centre that served 10 000 people was burned, a ludicrous purple face debacle and humiliation at the hands of rugby thugs, the only real political change achieved so far by students protesting for transformation has been to allow Afriforum to shed its reputation as a right-wing lobby and emerge as the protectors of universities. The pact it made with its arch-enemies, the African National Congress in Tshwane, is not according to the script at all.
How did Chumani Maxwele’s brave #RhodesMust Fall protest lead to this?
Encapsulated in the Woordfees protest is a clash of three grand narratives. Afrikaners in search of what they might label “libertarianism”, English speakers seeking “liberalisation” and black people demanding “liberation”.
These political strands converged in 1994 to create the rainbow nation ethos, dispersed into their old grooves and converged again during the #RhodesMustFall chapter of the student uprising a year ago when, for a brief few months, consensus reigned and thousands of intellectuals of all stripes were united in one cause, vaguely defined as anti-neocolonialism.
The least understood grand narrative is that of Afrikaner hedonism, mostly because it goes so much against the stereotype of the troglodyte Boer living in the past. But think of Piet Koornhof on his knees professing his love for his coloured lover on a Cape Town street, Charlize Theron half-naked on the cover of Vanity Fair and the special place in Afrikaner hearts for the camp icon Nataniel.
For most Afrikaners 1994 meant deliverance from the suffocating Calvinism that underpinned the moral and religious justifications of apartheid. One of the most underrated factors in the South African miracle remains the Voelvry tour in the late 1980s — the word play in the title said it all, simultaneously referring to anti-apartheid civil disobedience and sexual escape.
The newfound hedonism was centred around Afrikaans arts festivals popping up all over the country. Far from conservative laagering, anything went — on and off the stage. The highlight was probably volksdramaturg Deon Opperman putting former prostitute Pearlie van Schalkwyk naked on the Potchefstroom town hall stage where she invited audience members to inspect her vagina.
For rightwing Afrikaners their narrative arc takes them from rising from the ashes of the Anglo-Boer war, gaining ethnic rights and eventually absolute power, and then marching on towards to what thinker NP van Wyk Louw called “voortbestaan in geregtigheid” — survival in justice.
Realising apartheid compromised this narrative, Afrikaners ditched it en masse in the 1992 referendum called by FW de Klerk in order to watch Allan Donald bowl no-balls in Sydney and to buy McDonald’s burgers in Centurion.
From abolishing the slave trade to fighting apartheid through the press and sanctions, the English speaker’s narrative claims a moral high ground with pragmatic civil liberties as the permanent setting. Their narrative’s crowning accomplishment is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which South Africa’s activist classes were able to deftly smuggle through the window of opportunity opened by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The black liberation narrative is perhaps the one that best illustrates why the stories we tell ourselves about our pasts are one-sided and create bubbles that seal us off from reality.
Most of it is the stuff of heroism, attesting to the doggedness of the human spirit in its pursuit of freedom. It is suffused with the suffering of generations and the crime against humanity that apartheid was in its postcolonial manifestation and in its colonial roots.
Resistance against South Africa’s various colonisers goes back centuries, and along the way there were many grievous defeats leading to virtual enslavement and violent exploitation. Only very late in the story, through the ANC and the United Democratic Front, were black people able to forge the unity that had evaded them in all that time, a failing that had exposed them to divide and rule strategies.
This large timespan gives the narrative a weight that black institutions and organisations cannot carry yet, because the impairments of that history have not yet been fixed. The narrative underlies a civil religion that does not square with the realities of today’s globalised and rapidly digitising world.
It has become the catechisms of this faith, for instance, that black people forgave whites for apartheid, that whites were lucky to escape retributive justice and that no black people benefited from apartheid. Along with it comes a triumphalism which has been telling black children for 20 years that the ANC had vanquished the white minority government.
Such triumphalism has tried to discover stronger foundations in the often spurious claims made under the African Renaissance story. Its fatal weakness was always going to be the metaphor at its heart, which equates it to an epoch in European, not African, history which exists only in unreadable ruins and rudimentary European or Arabic script.
If capitalism bought off black revolutionaries with the Codesa settlement, the democratic government has bought itself off with black economic empowerment. While there are plenty of individual success stories that validate the policy, it has also created a large, unproductive class which has given us that evocative euphemism, “lack of capacity”.
The products of black triumphalism and its sloganistic education is there for all to see and mock: the bum-baring Julius Malema and his red pumpkin-heads with their dumbed-down version of vulgar Marxism for economic polity, a student leader who lionises Hitler and bumbling propagandists like Hlaudi Motsoeneng who fancies himself as born to rule.
Many of the protesting students are articulate, sophisticated theorists, but confronting the black bubble — which also embraced homeland moguls, rich Durban Indian families and racist Chinese people — has been a bridge too far.
The real adversary is 200-million jobless Asians and their Confucian work ethic, but taking their cue from American campuses, they have been attacking a straw target called whiteness, and allowed their protests to be hijacked by anti-Afrikaans and self-serving English academics.
But white privilege is also based on technological advancement which, simply as a fluke of history rather than a lack of innate ability, has not come to Africa in time. While in the 19th century black people lived in societies that were sociologically as sophisticated as any, it was their technological backlogs that underpinned their military and unitary weakness and exposed them to a predatory western modernity.
Black thinkers need to prick the bubble of black triumphalism if South Africa wants to progress. Afrikaners should prick their hedonism bubble and confront their history of violent submission of black people and land grabs, and English speakers need to understand that their jingoist monolingualism, which is as exclusionary as the worst Afrikaner racism, will only deepen the inequality already bedevilling our common future.
But another hard truth for black people is that this is their fight, and almost exclusively so. White power may be the villain, but white people have very little say in it — 1994 allowed them to become globalised and digitised in a force field that will dominate not only an Anglocentric society such as South Africa’s, but the world, for decades, if not generations to come.
This article first appeared in Business Day