would assume the political responsibility that now flowed from the failed event. Mandela’s Christmas party was now the legislature’s business. A plan was made between the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and the provincial departments of education and social development to deliver the presents that could not be distributed on the day to local schools early the following year.
And that, as they say, was that. The 2005 party was cancelled. Mandla Mandela’s father had died and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund said that, instead of there being a party, gifts would be delivered to schools, in an attempt to ‘minimise exposing children to unnecessary difficulties’.
The spirit of Christmas was vanquished. The beautiful monster had eaten is own gift.
Reflecting on Christmas while imprisoned on Robben Island, Mandela wrote in his autobiography: ‘What Sundays were to the rest of the week, Christmas was to the rest of the year. It was the one day when the authorities showed any goodwill toward men. We did not have to go to the quarry on Christmas Day, and we were permitted to purchase a small quantity of sweets. We did not have a traditional Christmas meal, but we were given an extra mug of coffee for supper.’
Robben Island is one of the world’s more beautiful prisons, something of a beautiful monster itself, at least so far as its location goes. From its shores, a blue carpet stretches out towards the African continent and Table Mountain stares back at you. The mountain might well have felt like a prison wall of its own to those on the island, as if nature itself had erected some monumental fail-safe barrier should anyone attempt to cross the divide without permission.
For the children of the Eastern Cape and the prisoners alike, both Mandela’s Christmas party and Christmas Day would come to mirror each other in an eerie way: some small, precious gift, the enjoyment of which would be monitored by guards. All hemmed in by fences and gates. In both those worlds, come Christmas Day, freedom and control would let their mortal enemy take some small step into their domain.
No one better understood the value of that gesture than Mandela. The memory alone, of a fleeting respite from control’s relentless oppression, made an indelible impression upon him. How he must have wished to bestow upon Qunu some equally valuable relief from the tyranny of poverty, even if it was ephemeral. How it must have pained him to watch on as those crowds, desperate and deprived, swelled and crushed not just each other, but the gesture itself.
Few things break the heart more fundamentally than desperation. It can be as self-destructive as it is unjust.
2 Respect
‘We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.’
– Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
As with so many constitutional dispensations, South Africa’s democratic lexicon is largely defined by words that, historically and philosophically, flow from freedom – the greatest ideal of them all. Examples include accountability, transparency, excellence, responsibility, dignity and negotiation, as well as phrases like ‘separation of powers’, ‘office of the president’, ‘rule of law’ and so on.
In practice, though, these words and phrases often take on other, less traditional connotations. As political rhetoric is the centrifugal force around which public discourse revolves, it usually plays a determining role in shaping the meaning associated with those words. In South Africa, the influence of the ANC has been hegemonic in its depth and breadth.
The ANC’s formal political ideology is difficult to define. It is, in the grand sense, a racial nationalistic movement – that is, it places at the heart of its political philosophy group identity and the groups it uses to define these differences are racial in nature. In turn, it sees itself as the one true representative of the black majority.
But the problem with racial identity is that, to advocate its interests one must define it. And therein lies the ANC’s primary problem: it is prone to archetypes and stereotypes in equal measure because, in truth, no two people are alike and while race might influence an individual’s identity, it neither determines it nor does that influence manifest uniformly. It is experienced and interpreted differently by each person.
But there are informal influences on the ANC’s ideology too: patriarchy, collectivism and socialism, for example. And the party’s belief it alone knows and speaks ‘the truth’ can be so rigid as to be disturbing. President Zuma, speaking at a memorial for Moses Kotane in March 2015 said, ‘Moses Kotane had a scientific approach [to Marxism-Leninism] and if you take that approach, you never go wrong. We are dealing with science … knowledge obtained through observation critically tested and brought under one principle. So if you talk about Marxism-Leninism, you are talking about people who never go wrong because you are practising science and do not wake up every day to say here [there’s something wrong] ...’
That is the sentiment of a man who believes his party alone is able to claim ownership over right and wrong, one that is not just ideologically superior but morally too. That sort of fundamentalist thinking represents the gateway through which tyranny will quickly step. It also demonstrates that the ANC’s leadership is not in the business of debate or the contestation of ideas, but rather hegemonic control and the imposition of its will.
Zuma himself is a powerful influence on the ANC when it comes to traditional beliefs. He holds several religious and cultural convictions that often run contrary to the values and principles that define the Bill of Human Rights and the constitution, within which it resides. Examples are his many and varied statements that the ANC is sanctioned by God or that same-sex marriage is ‘a disgrace to the nation and to God’.
All of these things come together in a messy amalgam of political impulses that often act to influence South Africa’s democratic lexicon for the worse, subverting both meaning and consequence. As a result, the meaning of many constitutional principles and values that exist both on paper and in philosophical memory differs both subtly and fundamentally from their practical interpretation.
So, we generally live in an ongoing and profound contradiction, one that is unstated and unexamined. The assumption is that meaning is shared. The reality is that these words are often fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, and therefore much confusion follows.
This essay seeks to look at just one such word in some detail – the word ‘respect’ – and to examine how the different political and cultural influences it is subjected to mean that it holds in the South African mind a number of different and often contradictory meanings, generally resulting in much confusion.
Classically, this relationship between denotation and those other forces with a vested interest in meaning often results in a public contestation, one where words are debated and, over time, their meaning is refined and their fundamentals augmented in the public mind. Over many decades the natural by-product of debate is a generally accepted and common understanding.
South Africa, however, is different. The country has not enjoyed the benefit of this sort of long-standing democratic discussion and those forces at play are still locked in a war of attrition for meaning. Certainly, any discussion about them is rarely situated in a century-long historical debate about freedom and its various attributes. We live in something of a bubble where, if we aren’t discovering what democratic principles and values mean for the very first time, we debate their fundamental tenets as if they had only been discovered yesterday. The implication is that they are more negotiable than they really are.
Do not underestimate the magnitude of
