A Soirée

My friends and I started what we call, after long deliberation of two months, a soiree. It turned out we could not call it a book club because there was too much beer sousing involved instead of reading and discussing books. So we came up with soirée, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a party with conversations that have intellectual pretensions, depending on the degree of alcohol consumed of course. Naturally we aim at flattering our intellectual pretensions and specious political suave.

The idea was simple. To encourage Bildung, a belief formed by engagement with art, philosophy and learning. To cultivate ourselves into Bildungsbürgertum-the cultivated middle class who regarded culture and learning as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. Before you accuse us of too much pretensions, be advised that this thing is a normal among our coevals in Europe, especially in Germany.

We were each to write every month on small pieces of paper books we would like to see discussed; throw the pieces on a hat. Then we were supposed to go alphabetically, retrieving a single paper at a time. The appointed person buys and hosts the book of discussion, introduce it on the next meeting before passing it to another. At some stage everyone would have read it, then at that meeting the book would be discussed. It is with frank dissatisfaction, and a little glee, to report that we truly made a miserable job of the whole thing. Since we began, in the beginning of the year, we’ve not kept to a single schedule.

We wanted to make the discussions informal, so we chose to accompany them with braai and drinks. That was the first error. People tend to be more enthusiastic about soccer results, gossip and, as I found out when the discussion was on my house, Chris Rock, around braai fire than books. I suggested to one of my friends that perhaps we should do away with alcoholic drinks before discussions. He categorically told me we might as well dissolve the discussions, because ‘the beer drinking is the reason why they tolerate this thing.’

Perhaps we should revisit the ban on women, I suggested, thinking . . . I don’t know what was thinking. ‘That would be a recipe for disaster,' said my friend categorically. 'They come here largely to get away from their women, and be guys for a while, male bonding and all. If you throw that away they'll go with it.’ I threw my hands up. ‘We don’t need ideas, we just to need to make them interested on reading the books they chose, my friend.' My friend told me. 'How do we do that?' I asked. ‘By allowing them to chose the books they really wanna read without making them feel guilty about it, which must include sport heroes and comic books.’

Two weeks ago we held an emergency meeting to discuss the perilous state of our group affair. It turned out my friend was right, the first problem came with the first scheduled books for discussion, Agaat by . . . I can't remember the Afrikaner woman now who wrote that boring book that was taken up by the reading fraternity of SA. People came out with legion reasons for not reading it: ‘It was too expensive.’ ‘The story line is passé.’ ‘The author is culturally callow.’ And so on and so on. I didn’t have the heart to admit I was the one who had chosen the book, and gave thanks to the anonymous process of our hat trick.

The following week the book of choice was OR Tambo: Teacher, Lawyer & Freedom Fighter by Sandi Baai. ‘Personally I’m tired of incwadi zomzabalazo [political struggle books],’ one of my friends summed the mood against it.

JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Micheal K that I was hosting (having bought and read), was dismissed as too Kafkaesque; okay maybe that’s true, but I had spent the whole Friday evening preparing the report dammit. Where will I ever get the chance again to show my acumen for belles-lettres, I thought to myself feeling let down. Suffer me to indulge my ego dear reader, I already have the note anyway. J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Micheal is vaguely based on Kafka’s Joseph K of The Castle, with all the original ingredients included: Traveling into one’s foreign home with radical internal displacement in tightening concentric circles and haphazard, frustrating journeys. Facing up to sterile civil bureaucracy, state sponsored terrorism, and desire for mother’s changeless village, which the Freudians say it’s the desire for returning to the safety of one’s mother’s womb; and fantasy of escape. The book is mimetic; actually most of JM’s books are like that; it's his style, and betrays a certain lack of imagination on the author. I coined a phrase to sum it all up: The book is generally ‘unsatisfying, carefully contrived, and depthlessness.’ Where will I ever use that ersatz learnership now?

Coconut by Kupano Motlwa was deemed too Model C by my group. Anything by Chuna Achebe was too quaint. I can’t wait to here what will be the excuse for Xolela Mangcu’s To The Brink, though I’m already, secretly playing with phrases like; ‘I’m suffering from Mbeki bashing fatigue.’ The only book that had any semblance of real discussion was The Capitalist Nigger by Dr Chika Onyeani. I had not read the book so I was at sixes and sevens in the discussion most of the time, but understood the gist of the discussion in the end.

The truth of the matter is that our soirée is bleeding into becoming just another braaing sessions, and personally I’ve ran out of ideas of how to rescue it. What’s worse now is that decent titles are drying up from the hat. We keep coming up with self-help-how-to-books like; The Power of Positive Thinking, or How to Get Rich In less than a Year; and so on. I know I’m prejudiced against that sort of thing, but, to paraphrase Mark Twain; I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.

When I look around our soirée these days, I find people to be reasonably content with these new titles, which begs the question that, perhaps, though the idea was mine, I don’t really own or belong to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days I should develop headache just when I have to attend the soirée. The cure for my headache would, of course, involve relaxing with music of Iron & Wine singing softly, and an enjoyable book at hand. Who knows, that way I just might get to read more.

My Take

All my life I grew up under the shadow of violence. The first girl I ever kissed was, twelve years old, burnt to death by the so called ‘comrades’ through cruel means then called necklace—a tyre filled with petrol and newspapers. Her sin? Being born into a family whose head, her father, decided to run for mayourship, in disregard of the call to make ‘South Africa ungovernable.’

A friend I grew up with turned up dead at a sewer after eight days, bitten into a state of pulped tomato. He was last seen being picked by the South African police Special Branch. His mother could not even recognize him, and lost her will to live afterwards, looking at us with accusing eyes, as if it was our fault we didn’t instead of her son. She died seven years later of a heart related problem. Until 1997 when houses in the area were demolished for RDP houses, her house remained empty and unclaimed. No one wanted to be associated with the house termed ‘death house’.

There was in our township something close to a celebration of death; a weekend without one was strange, even unbelievable. Modes of dying included being robbed, or even dying at the hands of those you loved, what today is termed domestic violence. There was a general anarchical break of law and moral accountability. The Afrikaner poetess and author of the grim book titled Country of my Skull, Antjie Krog, gave our township, Mlungisi in Queenstown, an invidious honour of being the first place where the necklace was used. My memory of what happened in our streets then concurs with this conclusion.

Of course we blamed the apartheid government, more for institutionalized and state violence. The more we struggled against violence the more we seemed vulnerable from the criminal element, state propagated and otherwise. We tried our best to let the immediate and outside world to hear our cry, but none cared enough to come to our rescue. Then a strange thing happened. The country gained its political independence in 1994. State violence subsided while social crime gained confidence to attack suburbs and business area. We started seeing stories of criminal element in public spaces like media, a novel and belated praecipe indeed.

This did not mean criminals gave the township a break; they still harassed us like before and more. But we all agreed then that criminals were enemies of us all, and the development of the country at large. We started seeing more police visibility in our townships that was not only concerned with political activists. It was not enough of course, but it demonstrated a political will to tackle the scourge. It made us feel our lives mattered too, and make us feel we were not treated like schlock. But the scourge continued to rise unabated. Up to this day township denizens are the worse affected by crime, but less vocal, call it fatalism or adjustment to occupational hazard, or whatever you like.

Then another strange thing happened. Nelson Mandela put down the reigns as the president, handing them to Thabo Mbeki. Within no time the criminal element was no longer just an enemy of us all, but a fault of government. Arguments were made that the government was not treating the matter as an emergency. People, white folks mostly, started asking if the solution was not in declaring national state of emergency. Naturally, those of who grew up on the conditions of abuse that comes with state emergency are opposed to this solution.

By Thabo Mbeki’s second tenure crime was no longer just a government’s fault but that of the president. The president was termed a denialist. Again we tried to follow the argument. In the end the real crime of the president was what was called a defiant non-sympathetic mood against the citizenry that was suffering consequences of crime—the hidden one being the fact that he has become the boogey man of imperialist hegemony, and scapegoat of everything that goes wrong in the country.

In no time it became clear the country didn’t have the best police force in the world; but there is evidence also that most policemen are of average courage and integrity, under appreciated and poorly paid. But the evidence of corruption against some of them prevails and feeds the pessimistic mood against the police force in general. This prompted the president to call us, with some justification, “. . . spokespersons of doom or cheerleaders of bad news.”

The truth of the matter is that the scourge of crime affects us all. It has been a rude wakening for those who spent their lives in this country in comfortable cocoons into the realization that this country was founded, and still subsists, on abnormality. It also gives those made impotent by their prejudices and political dispossession, together with the rest of opportunist doomsayer footlickers, to spew invective in attempt to catch the coattails of liberal specious enlightenment, a handle to beat the government by. Crime has been used, especially by white South Africans, as means to discredit the present South African, and cry wolf for a failing state in the offing.

Loosing the Moorings

A friend of mine from New York City recently visited me. He was in his Kiddushin [a period of sanctification, a year after marriage when a Jewish man is excused from all obligations to cheer up his wife]. He was in good spirits, a drastic change from the last time I saw him, immediately after G.W. Bush won his second tenure.

“The American people are rediscovering sense, as South Africans seem to be regressing.” He said as we sat in a coffee shop at Gardens Centre. He was, of course, talking about the seeming certain comeback of Democratic Party in the US; and the shenanigans within the South African governing circles. We went on to discuss how things have changed since the bright hope that came with ANC (African National Congress) coming to power. He had then travelled to South Africa to find, with my contribution, an NGO called, Ubuntu Education Fund.

“I hear all sort of bad things now about SA political brinkmanship, and think, that’s not the SA I know.” I was thinking about an sms my mother had sent me the previous day my mother had sms(ed) me from England. She said she was watching a documentary titled No More Mandelas on BBC programme called Panorama. It is not complementary of Jacob Zuma, and paints Thabo Mbeki as an isolated figure who was ditched as the president of ANC on its 52nd conference. Mother had written.

“Politics happened, and lack of reasonable demarche from opposition parties.” I said trying to answer my friend.
“It is almost an unwritten law of democracy that governments should never last for more than 10 years. Politicians who take that long in office tend to be infected with the virus of arrogance, insensitivity and complacency.” We talked about the ANC conference in Polokwane last December, which we associated with Ortega y Gasset's ‘revolt of the masses’.
“And now mob psychology has taken over the higher echelons of ANC since,” he said and continued by quoting from J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron;“Now, in South Africa, I see eyes clouding over again, scales thickening on them, as the land-explorers, the colonists, prepare to return to the deep.” Backward evolution, or nervousness of majority rule?

“Mbeki’s government has been on the back foot for the last six years or so, reacting to its failures than innovating. Unfortunately for them, people elect governments to foresee problems and lead events rather than merely react to failures. Mbeki’s major failure started with his selective dissemination of public posts to his loyalists. Looks like nothing will change with the incoming management of Zuma who seem bent on trading in nepotism, gate-keeping and moral distortions of all kinds.”

We talked about how when democracy enables a culture of impunity for those who govern it breeds cynicism that nurtures extremism on citizens. “There’s always danger in extremism when irrational radicals enjoy the protections of the mob.” My friend said.
“In South Africa extremism thrives because democracy has failed to provide the mass of citizens with basic endowments that enables them to participate in the activities of the country, especially economic, with dignity and material security. We cannot run away from that fact, despite all else. I admit that Mbeki’s patronage-based elite-class democracy too was a breeding ground for mass upheaval. But . . .”
“So you think he was given an axe for what Bakunin described as la pédantocratie when he attacked Marx—the government by professors, which he regarded as the most oppressive form of despotism?” Asked my friend.
“Exactly, and now it is the turn of the elites to be concerned. The democratic tsunami in Polokwane has brought fears for the rule by the mob, which, inter alia, is always inclined to demagogy, an enemy of economic liberty.”
“This is an age of globalism and supercapitalsim, South Africa cannot afford to be different.”
I answered him in a hurry. “That is just the thing. People have seen through the wool that supercapitalism is killing democracy instead of leading to free societies. It trumps all means deployed to protect citizen rights by constraining the power of people to achieve their civic and personal goals. European citizens too are waking up to this realisation, while America is still caught up in overwhelming consumerists desires on which supercapitalism thrives on.”
“They hate supercapitalism but like its products and conveniences?”
“That’s the conundrum.”
“What next then for SA?”
“We can only wait and see. Frankly I don’t see this duckling hatching a swan. Looks like the boat has lost its moorings.” My friend I then agreed to put the candle on the window, hoping for the best. The aptness of that syllogism caught me by surprise considering we were suffering power cuts in the country.

Times Are a Changing

Something new is happening in the new age politics of the world, from Europe’s biggest economies (Germany and France) to populist local movements of Latin America. The Zeitgeist is towards more left-leaning corrective measures to the glut of capitalist greed. Political leaders of our age are discovering the hard way that people’s Weltanschauug has turned against insatiable pursuit of profits, and tired of business as usual mentality. They are demanding real change which the politicians ignore at their own peril. The casualties range from the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder whose welfare reforms cost him job in 2005 to our own out going president Thabo Mbeki.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, to offset internal criticism in his country, opted to take the route of industrial protectionism as measure for reviving France’s economy, instead of following the US model. He calls it “Economic Patriotism.” What these leaders are discovering is that to ignore one’s constituency on excuses of imperatives of globalism is detrimental in democratic dispensation.

Germany’s new leftist party is growing fast on the anti-supercapitalist ticket, finding support even among mainstream circles of civil society and parliamentarians. It gains support largely from the resentment of globalization and the country’s reaction against right-wing demagoguery and xenophobia.

Venezuela is the typical example of the present Latinist popular politics. Before it was dominated by two official parties who represented the interests of the wealthiest Venezuelans, but ignored the needs of the 80% who were living in poverty until the firebrand Hugo Chavez was elected as a president. Chavez was elected by a due coalition of popular forces that rejected “business as usual”. Subsequently, Corporate influence, in secret coalition with corrupt union leaders, tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002. Masses of Venezuelan people took to the streets to defend their democracy. Since then Venezuelans have time and again re-elected Chavez with growing majority on every election.

Chavez derives his popularity from the fact that he has given Venezuelan communities direct power to administer their own social programs. His government supports community cooperative enterprises—from worker-run factories, to thousands of other community driven cooperatives. He uses profits from the country’s natural wealth to support these cooperatives. Oil money to diversify the economy, improve agrarian participation for ordinary citizens, and to provide them with efficient public health system.

Chavez’s success comes from his espousing of participatory democracy, i.e. maximizing the direct involvement of communities, rather than minimizing it as bureaucracy of government officials of representative democracy tend to do. Of course Chavez has his short-comings, like a tendency to suppress voices of dissent, and his bunker mentality towards the media. He could also show better concern for environmental issues. But to say he’s an enemy of democracy is disingenuous.

A lot of hypocritical democrats, who though not having any problem with 85% wealth of the nations being controlled by only 8 % elite hands, see what Chavez does as chauvinistic and curtailment of freedom of free market system. We all know by now the fallacy of the invisible hand of the markets having a corrective effect. In effect we’ve been waiting for it since the inception of capitalist system.

The major attraction of free markets is that they create wealth that underwrites democratic political participation. The success China’s economy and India has broken down even this correlation between free markets and plural politics from both ends. Wealth also is supposed to create and sustain organizations and groups independent of the government: business, trade unions and professional associations. Globalisation, at its present form, clearly violates this notion. In short, free market is fast loosing its endearing traits.

What is becoming clear is that Global markets have unleashed economic forces that are becoming too powerful for democratic institutions to control. The free markets have created “supercapitalism” that is suppressing democracy. Instead of leading to free societies, supercapitalism is constraining the power of people to achieve their civic and personal goals. This is the growing opinion even amongst leading economics, and the likes of Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor and now professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley.

Reich argues that social responsibility by global cooperation is not enough to offset the corrosive effect of supercapitalism on individual freedom and national sovereignty of the countries. But the blame does not only lie with supercapitalism. In Zimbabwe, for instance, democracy has enabled a culture of impunity on long time serving leaders. In South Asia democracy has been derailed by dynastic politics, where political trust depends on patronage based on personalities and elite class rather than institutions of civil liberty. So local culture and habits are not always good for democracy either when not informed by forces of enlightenment.

In theory, global ‘trade should drive down corruption, nepotism, gate-keeping and market distortions of all kinds.’ But in fact it is otherwise. The irony is that, with all the rhetoric of free market competition, often you find its just a masks for private monopolies. It does not take a genius to see that behind the façade of boastful competition of free market often lies a world of inequality and domination by few elite groups or families. While praising the competitive market, those who actually work the marketplace specialize in mergers and acquisitions, takeovers and cartels, liquidations and ¬sell¬offs that are designed to curtail free competition.

Real democrats, as now emerging in European countries like Germany and France, see through all this farce. Wealth is hardly produced these days, but reshuffled and expropriated. Real competition is avoided, and the risk in whose name profit is supposedly earned, is socialized. Taxpayers are now and again compelled to bail out corporate failures, while profits, though no longer earned by taking real risks, are kept private, reserved for shareholders and overpaid corporate managers. Deregulation, said to enhance competition, in reality has entrenched price fixing, like recently in bread industry in our country. And deregulation facilitates cartels and the kinds of monopoly we see on Microsoft “bundling” for instance.

In developing countries, especially, many of the public goods that citizens require for their freedom to thrive, such as public education, environmental protection and social insurance, are in scarce supply. Developing states lack revenue to offer citizens assurances of equity or security, thus the logic of the free market, which endows global brands with tools that poorly organized and diffuse citizens or civic society lack, sets the economic policies. These countries are overwhelmed by the enormous lobbying power of global companies into towing the line of free market system designed for the vested interests of the companies.

The solution then does not lie only on free markets that are speciously supposed to create pathways into liberalization of political expression, or local culture, but on a working mixture of these. Local culture must feed on global democracy and freedom without necessarily shedding its local responsibilities. The idea here is to maintain the level of democracy and national freedom that trade openness tends to violate by careless pursuit of profits. To introduce corrective measures for democratic stability against increased inequality that global big companies disrupt.

That is what is happening in counties like Germany, France; to a radical effect in Venezuela, and gradually South Africa. Whether you call this left-leaning or developmental state is just semantics. In the end countries are forced to offset bad elements of the enormous lobbying power of global big business, not only to protect their citizenry, but for the sake of saving the wonderful production system capitalism, and better wealth distribution.

What is certain is that, as President Thabo Mbeki declared, it can no longer be business as usual for any country. Times are a changing. The world majority is waking up, and shedding the ransoming chains by the elite few who happen to have shares they expect ridiculous profits on.

In our country, for instance, there’s a constant blackmail by business class of threatening to take their business elsewhere whenever the government does not comply with their demands. My take is that in democratic dispensations everyone has right to go and take their business wherever they like. It probably, in the long run, is better when we rid ourselves of parasites who operates in the name of business. Sure a loss of business is painful for any economy, but we are better off allowing the storm to shake off few bad apples from the tree so that their decomposition may facilitate more trees to fill the orchard.

To their surprise they might discover that the world over is changing. Young people of the world, especially, seek, not necessary a new world order, but to purify the best of what we already have. Some tend to call themselves environmentalists, others new socialists, but what’s common with them is dissatisfaction with the status quo of business as usual. The candidate for US presidency, senate Barack Obama is riding on the same wave.

There is no question about it, the growing preoccupation with consumption, economic growth, and meaningless pursuit of wealth has subverted our search for authenticity and self-realisation. But people are slowly waking up to reality, and realisation that you need to give a little to take a little. The new world demands sacrifice, responsibility, respect for the dignity of the other, education to make better choices, and, of course a patriotic sense of pride for one’s identity and country. Are we up to the challenge?