in his speech a laundry list of policy initiatives that make broad generalists such as myself yawn and, like some members of parliament, drop off to sleep. Here too Mbeki demonstrated a level of comfort with policy that most heads of state do not have. The only other president I can think of with such a grasp of public policy is America’s Bill Clinton.
Mbeki also did what he does best. He is perhaps one of the finest practitioners of the art of co-option – ask the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) how he co-opted their language of pan-Africanism and turned them into ineffective opposition parties in the black community. He deprived the opposition parties of anything to fault him on. After all, who could be against added efforts to combat crime, or enhanced services for the disabled? Tony Leon, leader of the official opposition, had to battle to find something negative to say about the speech. By the way, our opposition leaders should know that it is okay to applaud during a state-of-the-nation address. Afterwards, they can go to the media and give their responses. This is about the nation and not just party politics, and Mbeki is the country’s president, not just the ANC’s.
What Mbeki has done brilliantly is to take his broad vision of faranani, or partnership, and extend it beyond the policy arena. For far too long we have been talking about service delivery outside a broader philosophical vision of ourselves as a society, such as the caring or people-centred society he spoke about. I have argued before that service delivery is a potentially dangerous concept if separated from issues of self-reliance and long-term capacity-building. The philosophical concept of faranani should be used to call on communities to assume greater responsibility for their own development. What we need is a mind-shift at the level of the community – from a democracy based on claim-making to one based on carrying out our responsibilities as citizens. This can be done through the co-operative movements which Mbeki spoke about.
Those who wish him well, and I include myself among them, find Mbeki frustrating. On the one hand, he has the potential to be one of the greatest African leaders, and a true visionary for South Africa. On the other, he seems guarded, held back by who knows what. Paradoxically, Mbeki should realise that his success lies in letting others take ownership of his agenda. Otherwise, we will continue to get flashes of brilliance only – like we did this time around.
The potential for Thabo’s ‘renaissance’
Mail & Guardian, 2–8 July 1999
‘Where are the black intellectuals?’, Thabo Mbeki has often asked. I would urge him to consider an even larger and prior question: where is the intellectual environment required for the emergence of those intellectuals?
It is a known fact that black people have historically been excluded from what I have previously called the ‘knowledge–ideas complex’. It consists of interlocking, mutually supportive and impenetrable relationships among white intellectuals, in fields ranging from literary criticism to urban planning. Because of their strategic position at the cusp of intellectual and cultural production, white intellectuals have been able to disproportionately project their values on to our public morality and public policies. Our constitution, bill of rights, and the rules and rituals of political decision-making have a liberal western outlook. Happily, the values of justice and fairness enshrined in the constitution coincide with the values of most South Africans.
But why should black people continue to be coincidental in shaping the national political culture? Are there ways of increasing black participation in its making? Moving from a procedural democracy comprising western-type institutions to a more substantive democracy might create new spaces for black intellectuals. Creating a proper intellectual environment is therefore inextricably tied to a larger question: where is the social vision that challenges intellectuals to bring out the best in them? How might we then begin to facilitate greater black intellectual participation in the endeavour of nation-building?
Let’s start with the question of a social vision, and end with some ideas on what we can do about the intellectual environment. The absence of a social vision has undermined black intellectual participation in public life in many ways. For example, during our recent elections, I noticed a racial division of labour in the public discourse. White political parties and intellectuals dominated the discussion of broader democratic values and principles. In the words of my fellow columnist Steven Friedman, the right issues were being raised by the wrong people. However dubious their motivations were for opposing an ANC two-thirds majority, their language was framed in terms of democratic principles. Black parties and intellectuals, on the other hand, seemed stuck in the discourse of delivery, as if they had become more knowledgeable about building houses than building nations.
This is not to say that there isn’t a tiny minority of black scholars working on issues of democracy, but rather to ask whether we have anything resembling the substantive society-wide discussions that took place among the French philosophes in the 18th century; in the 13 states of pre-independence United States; in India in the 1950s; and in South Africa itself during the struggle against apartheid.
All of that energy has dissipated under the weight of post-apartheid technocracy and materialism. Winning government contracts has become more important than reading and writing – the essence of the intellectual function.
Getting to the intellectual environment, I am struck by the absence of institutions in which people of ideas can get together to engage each other and the public on the democratic experience. We talk to each other only through newspapers, radio, television and, for the lucky few, the Internet. The ideas that float in the public domain are never followed up and interrogated in any in-depth manner with members of the public. If South Africa is ever going to be the winning nation that Mbeki talks about, we have to know how to become a learning society first – in the manner that organisational gurus talk about learning organisations.
One practical suggestion would be to introduce topics such as nation-building and pluralism in the agendas of existing community forums. Members of parliament could also use their constituency meetings to talk about issues that pertain to our identity as a nation. Something drastic should also be done about the state of university salaries; as long as universities remain underfunded, the perception will continue that the intellectual function is not a priority in our national development. Young people will continue to shun academic careers for as long as they see them as not prestigious or lucrative enough.
Perhaps Mbeki and the minister of education, Kader Asmal, should have a tête-à-tête about how the state of the universities prevents the emergence of a black intellectual class – most of whose members do not have inheritances like their white counterparts. But being black is not a sufficient condition in and of itself for playing a progressive role in the articulation of a new national identity. Black intellectuals should learn some lessons from the negative example of black economic empowerment; we should avoid a situation where a group of self-anointed elites become the high priests of black intellectual life. Nor should we allow envy and petty jealousies – that great affliction of formerly oppressed people everywhere – to interfere with intellectual collaboration.
One of the weirdest things I have heard is that there is a growing divide in our intellectual community between those who have attended American and European universities and those who remained behind, or attended African universities. Seemingly, the latter are the true intellectual arbiters of the African experience, while the former are pawns in a grand white scheme to deny Africa its true intellectuals. Rubbish; let’s just get on with it.
We should also be careful that black self-determination does not turn into a blind black jingoism. The challenge is to make sure that a healthy black nationalism is not turned into a degenerate anti-whiteism. People like Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe were able to avoid that fate through their relationships with whites. We should challenge the dictionary-based, and therefore static, definitions of who Africans are
