its composition, non-racial, and its policy and methodology, non-violent resistance. Leaders of the ANC were well-educated mission school graduates who emulated western gentlemen and, later, ladies prided themselves in western political morality without abandoning their proud African ethos of probity and respect. None would have pinched a penny from the public purse.
Since the ANC operated equally in urban and rural areas, it developed a cohesive operational and moral ethos. The good relationship between political elites in the liberation movement and traditional elites in the countryside facilitated the development of a uniform set of values and moral precepts. That the ANC espoused non-racialism and in practice operated as a non racial organisation was an added factor in blending traditional African with western Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman values which shaped the relationship between public officials and the general public. The persecution of the liberation movements by the South African state added a new concept of sacrifice to the liberation movements. The leadership and its identified supporters either went into exile or were sent to jail by the South African authorities. Political activism became the cleanser and activists became martyrs.
During the latter half of the 1960s, Black Consciousness took over as the new internal political ideology. It drew much of its texts from Pan Africanism but emphasised that blackness was an ideological rather than a colour conception. It sought to liberate black people from the disease of inferiority, so it accentuated and glorified black culture and its attendant values. This, in a sense, was a radical departure from the ANC, which, although conscious of its African traditions, looked to the west for moral recognition and acceptance. Service and sacrifice remained central to the ethos of Black Consciousness, firstly, as ideological creeds, but, secondly, because the state persecuted Black Consciousness, just as it had persecuted the ANC. Political activism accorded de facto and legitimate leadership to the activist among the oppressed who looked up to the activist to articulate their existential experiences. The 1980s were to demonstrate how existential hopelessness can compromise the leadership and in the process destroy the moral foundations of a society.
The role of the ‘lost generation’
The year 1976 was the turning point not only in South African politics, but in public morality. It was the year that saw the concept of gradual evolution completely abandoned in favour of instant revolution. The youth took over in politics and this has had a profound impact on public morality. By the mid 1980s, social analysts had introduced a new concept into the South African lexicon – the lost generation. But how did this impact on public morality? The answer is not hard to find. In a revolution, ethics are abandoned in favour of the expedient, but it is the cultural residue that post-revolutionary societies have to live with. And there is the rub.
The revolution of the 1980s collapsed not only structures of local government but the concept of accountability as well. Above all, it compromised moral leadership. From ‘making the country ungovernable’ to ‘liberation first and education later’ the youth were on the ascendant. In general, in areas that experienced intense turmoil, parents completely lost control over their children. Sacred occasions such as funerals, which marked the union between the here and now and the hereafter in both traditional and Christian observances, became platforms of political rhetoric dominated by the youth. While adults might have disapproved, as in many instances they did, silently, they had to acknowledge the dawn of a new era. Rejecting the new era meant accepting apartheid and its consequences; accepting it entailed a compromise between the tumultuous transition and liberation at the end of the tunnel. And the compromise prevailed.
There were other factors inherent in the revolution of the 1980s that compounded the public morality of liberation. Liberation movements are by nature broad churches that accept diverse characters into their congregations. There are no rigid entry criteria to the fold, although the ANC in exile tried to develop control mechanisms in an effort to prevent if not limit infiltration by agents of apartheid. The absence of selection criteria did much damage to the discipline in the internal resistance movement as ‘comtsotsis’ and agents of apartheid infiltrated internal organisations. It is not clear even to this day who the inventors of the horrible ‘death by necklace’ were. However, both ‘comtsotsis’ and apartheid’s secret operators were generally very powerful actors, who quickly ascended to local leadership positions in the cells and shaped both the tempo and direction of activity. It was the hegemony of the ‘lost generation’.
A new political culture, therefore, developed from the 1980s onwards, which minimised if not trivialised important attributes in the old system. Various factors contributed to shaping the new revolutionary morality. First, the glaring material inequalities between those in and those out of power, predicated on exploitation and emasculation of the oppressed, encouraged a diffuse myth of repossession. Whereas the old tradition had emphasised reclaiming the land, which by definition would have entailed negotiation and legalities, the nascent culture was triumphalist and demanded immediate transfers not only of the land but of material possessions. As a result, protest marches often culminated in the looting of shops, businesses and other material goods that the revolutionaries could get their hands on.
Revolutions and wars do admittedly carry a looting element but in this instance the enemy was diffuse and at times included the very people to be liberated. Since security forces were regarded as agents of apartheid, the first victim in this vicious cycle was the rule of law. In the townships, street committees replaced the state security apparatus and at first were generally effective but, in a number of cases ,they were soon infiltrated by comtsotsis and by agents of the state. A number of them soon turned upon the very communities that had created them in trust.
While the lost generation reigned in organised chaos and near anarchy, a parallel development in the labour movement gravitated into organised normlessness. If liberation movements were a broad church, the labour movement was a miscellaneous congregation. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) was and still is an amalgam of shop floor workers and other employees who, in conventional Marxist conception, could not be regarded as producing surplus value. These include professionals, such as teachers, nurses and other allied workers in the education and health sectors, united only by the common rubric of employee. Such surface solidarity was bound to bring in both contradictions and moral problems. This could not be demonstrated more fully than in the strikes by the public sector unions in 2007 and 2010, where “groups of strikers evacuated pupils from schools including pupils writing examinations, wrenched oxygen tents including intravenous drips from very sick patients and managed to close down schools and health institutions.”16 And these were children of working class parents, and working class patients since the elite patronise private institutions where workers were not on strike. The problem with all formations starting from professional organisations down to worker and civic organisation is that mere lip service is paid to the concept of democracy.
Protest marches have always entailed a measure of coercion on those not willing to participate and often have been accompanied by violence, looting and other forms of undemocratic behaviour. Once out of control, the organisers put the blame either on unruly elements or on the third force, thus avoiding moral accountability.
During the 2007 strike by public servants, columnist Christine Qunta wrote an article entitled “How quickly they turn violent”, questioning the trade union movement leadership’s apparent condoning of violence, including the use of abusive language by strikers. In the final analysis, just as the lost generation has contributed to the general state of moral decline in South Africa, the organised trade union movement has played its part in displacing the moral authority and accountability of individuals and locating it in an amorphous movement. The result is that no one takes the blame for the wrongs committed yet the organisation takes the glory for victories won.
Earlier in this chapter my thesis was that democracy is the best system of governance to ensure an equitable allocation and distribution of finite and scarce resources. Over the past few years, the media has published a number of articles describing apparent transgressions by public officials, in which they have gone beyond the norm in apportioning the public goods to themselves
