Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham is credited with the famous line ‘journalism is the first rough draft of history’. In South Africa the draft is generally rough indeed. For all the emphasis we place on our shared history and the great injustices that define it, we are almost entirely ahistorical when it comes to anything that has happened post-1994, since the dawn of our new democracy. There is our brutal past; then 20 amorphous years; then today. But, when trying to understand today, the comparative reference point is almost always 50 years ago.
That is understandable to some degree. That reference point had an enduring and profound influence. Twenty years might be a blink of the eye in historical terms; nevertheless, it is enough time for a range of new influences to manifest themselves, distinct from our past, even if informed by it. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in them, though. Grander narratives generally subsume them: events, attitudes and patterns of behaviour post-democracy can only ever be understood with reference to South Africa’s pre-democracy.
But what of the wide range of entirely novel social, economic and political forces that are often best understood by reference to more recent events? There simply is no comparative point to them, mainly because they have not yet been well defined, understood or agreed upon.
In some small way, then, one of the purposes of this book is to look at the way these new forces imposed themselves and the situations they created. That is not to discount the impact of our grander historical circumstances on contemporary events but rather to look at these various subjects through a post-democracy lens and to try to understand them as a consequence of contemporary change, alienation, ambiguity and novelty, rather than the inevitable consequence of forces much further back in the mists of South African time. If the reader chooses to see them through the latter lens, that is his prerogative and he cannot be faulted for doing so. Those forces are there to be seen too. But the book is really about a 20-year-old Twilight Zone and those things found inside it.
Another by-product of the clash between modernity and culture is the hybrid phenomenon – those institutions, occasions and even people born of or forced to operate in the contradiction the clash creates and to adapt to it. There are many examples of modernity being forced to adapt in this way to accommodate cultural beliefs. For example, the South African Police Service has what has been termed a ‘ghostbusters squad’ – a unit dedicated specifically to dealing with crimes of the occult. Superstition and mysticism are powerful cultural forces in South Africa, so much so that there still exists on the South African statutes list a piece of legislation that makes it illegal to call someone a witch. South Africa might boast one of the most progressive constitutions in the world on paper, but look hard enough and you will find much evidence of a more regressive reality.
In the essay ‘This is a man’s world’, I touch on how South Africa’s formal health system has had to adapt to accommodate the demands of cultural initiation, which is practised in particular in the Eastern Cape, where poorly executed circumcisions (ostensibly part of the passage to manhood in Xhosa culture) have necessitated the establishment of state-run hospitals and surgeons to cater specifically for the medical consequences of this practice.
This kind of hybrid experience, a cross between First World aspirations and, often, Third World-type realities, is everywhere in South Africa, as the modern state seeks to accommodate those things that struggle to find a comfortable home in the contemporary world.
Both forces – modernity and culture (in all its guises) – have their strengths and weaknesses. The book is critical of aspects of each. ‘The hunger games’, the story of a university inauguration that descended into chaos, has an opening quote from former president Thabo Mbeki, who spoke at the occasion. He warned of a silence among the South African youth ‘broken only by the sound of the toyi-toyi and the sickening chant – give me this! Give me that! Give me the other!’ Mbeki called for a new social contract to counter those ‘who entertain the false notion that the democratic order provides an opportunity for licentious conduct and a collapse of social and individual discipline’. Yet, for many of those in attendance, the occasion itself would provide just such an opportunity. Irony, too, features prominently on these pages.
In the other direction, ‘Quiz shows in the age of transition’ describes how, when faced with the prospect of hosting a game show on national television and managing contestants who were clearly out of their depth, the response of the presenter was to patronise them, as if holding fort behind a high-school lectern. Modernity can breed arrogance just as it is able to foster enlightenment.
Ultimately, modernity is a theatre where South Africa’s many and varied cultures come out to deliver a performance. And, very often, they misread entirely the lines delivered by their counterparts when responding to them.
Two essays in this collection focus on a single person, as opposed to examining a broader pattern or occasion. They do, however, remain true to the overarching purpose of the book – to explore those spaces where ambiguity and contradiction thrive.
To the best of my knowledge, ‘Zille vs Twitter’ is an exercise never attempted, at least not in South Africa. By reading and collating the contents of Zille’s Twitter feed over the past four years, some 40 000 Tweets, I have tried to set out some of the key convictions that define Zille’s world view. It is political biography based on her social-media commentary, so to speak.
Twitter is a remarkable invention and something of a technological Twilight Zone itself, and therefore ambiguity thrives on its virtual pages. It operates like a mini-blog. Each Tweet is just 140 characters and, once you have set up an account, anyone can follow you and see what you are saying. Yet Twitter is inherently counter-intuitive: the very short space available to say something means complexity is often sacrificed for the sake of brevity. Yet the environment – an instantaneous, real-time hurricane of commentary on current affairs – demands both immediacy and definitiveness. Those two competing forces are particularly onerous for political leaders, who do not always have the luxury of silence or selective opinion.
A single Tweet can tell you very little; thousands of tweets over hundreds of days can tell you a great deal. In Zille’s case, they reveal a conflicted personality, desperately trying to be understood in an environment as binary as it is bipolar. Ambiguities inside contradictions, wrapped in an online paradox.
By way of conclusion, there was recently a story that appeared in the South African press. It told of a miraculous transplant that took place at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town. For the first time in human history, a penis was successfully grafted onto a patient. The operation was necessary because the patient had lost his own genitals in an initiation ritual. And there you have a powerful contradiction that is uniquely South African and wonderfully illustrated: a world first, born of barbarism. The country is responsible for both doctors – the fraud who performed the initial brutality and the genius who repaired the injury.
Likewise, you have in that story a reason to be either optimistic or pessimistic, for it speaks both to hope and despair. Malpractice and excellence were both on display. It is telling that the press chose to focus almost exclusively on the triumph, rather than the cultural practice that necessitated it. You can be sure too, unjustifiably perhaps, that the story will be the source of much humour in time, if not in the comments section below the online report itself, then at least on Twitter or the sidebars of international publications.
Is it ‘all dark’ in South Africa today or is it just dark on the far side of the moon? Do we hope or do we despair? The answer to these questions depends on where you stand – and therein lies the great conundrum the country battles with daily. These are the ambiguities that often prompt questions such as these.
One way or the other, life in South Africa has all the elements of the theatre of the absurd. This book is the story of this prevalent incongruity and some of the consequences that flow from it.
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