The Brink of Prejudice

I'm often fascinated at how people who write about President Thabo Mbeki always end up putting on a fool's hat with a bell (revealing more about themselves than their subject). Dr. Xolela Mangcu, in his book To The Brink: The State of our Democracy, is no exception. At the beginning he informs us that the book came out of his urgent need to rescue black intellectual tradition from violation (the book does betray urgent composition). By whom? Who else, but the convenient scapegoat of all our failures and mediocrity, Thabo Mbeki.



Dr. Mangcu dedicates about three thirds of the book trying to convince us that President Mbeki is the architect of violation against black intellectuals. He says 'our heritage of racial syncretism is being overwhelmed by racial nativism that has taken hold of our political culture under President Thabo Mbeki's rule.' And explains racial syncretism as 'a dynamic process of identity formation that have always underpinned black people's encounter with European modernity . . .' Not feeling any wiser for reading this definition of racial syncretism I decided to look up the word on the dictionary. Syncretism: an inconsistent attempt to unify or reconcile differing school of thoughts. Inconsistent attempt being the operative word here.



What is 'racial nativism'? Dr. Mangcu explains it as that which 'harkens to purist essential conceptions of identity', and requires one have 'black skin' or must have 'participated in the liberation struggle to overcome apartheid.' He says its qualifications that 'provide one with exclusive license to speak or banish those with opposing views . . . as if those who participated in that struggle have a monopoly on wisdom and morality.' Monopoly on wisdom and morality ? The phrase is very telling. It was used (Dr. Mangcu reworked it a little and neglects to tell us) by Steve Biko to define "the characteristic arrogance of assuming a 'monopoly on intelligence and moral judgement'" [my emphasis ] of white liberals whom he said made themselves 'self-appointed trustees of black interests . . .' Are we to assume in reading this that Dr. Mangcu is revealing that what he despises is the fact that President Mbeki has made himself a self-appointed trustee of black interests?



Often, very often, when I read Dr. Mangcu's newspaper articles I wished he would write a book, to give himself better platform of elucidating his views. I always felt his articles to be superfluous at best, and facile at worst, something I thought was due to space limitations of newspapers columns. Now that his book is out I see it is actually Dr. Mangcu's writing style that's the problem, together with his irritating inability of making a point without throwing confetti of quotations. Dr. Mangcu's thinking is tangential, tedious in telling, and generates more heat than light.



He tells us that the book 'is not a collection of the newspaper columns . . .' Well, what do you call a book littered on every chapter with an average of two long excerpts—sometimes you get as much as four—from past newspaper columns? Such things are telling of the urgency by which the book was composed. Dr. Mangcu bakes and eats his own cake by commenting on his commentary. He's more in dialogue with himself, and gives an impression of being impressed with his own erudite voice.



My favourite Chapter in the book is the first one; titled, Bearing Witness. It is a personal memoir and general summary of Xhosa intellectual heritage. On it Dr. Mangcu manages to be more coherent even if he almost spoils the authentic voice with a self-aggrandising tone. I also do not understand why Dr. Mangcu, being Xhosa speaking, felt the need to follow Noel Mostert's less than discriminating use of the word amakholwa (religious believers) where he means amagqobhoka (assimilators of Western culture that might include or not include belief). I know this is a petty grievance, but precision in meaning is helped in transmission by maximum modality.



After the first chapter Dr. Mangcu dedicates three thirds of the book brandishing his axe to grind against President Mbeki. Very little of it is new from the bells and whistles of what Dr. Mangcu and the rest of Mbeki's detractors in the media have already said ad nauseam: Aids denailism, Zimbabwe, Corruption, Stalinism, Zanufication of the ANC, and so on. Only Dr. Mangcu comes now with an impression of an intellectual Hercules cleansing our Aegean political stables. But each time you follow his argument closer you discover its cloth is hung on a peg of received opinions.



Dr. Mangcu says, for instance, that he has 'frequently suggested that Mbeki's behaviour gives a sense of someone who feels betrayed—betrayed by the white liberal and business community who fêted him lavish reception when he came back from exile and black intellectuals who failed to come to his defence during the troubled relations with the media and white society more broadly.' How he fails to correlate this sense of betrayal with his late doyen, Steve Biko, who wrote, in his seminal paper, White Racism and Black Consciousness (delivered at inter-racial conference in Cape Town in 1971) beats me. Biko felt 'the myth of integration as propounded under the banner of liberal ideology must be cracked and killed because it makes people believe that something is being done when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporific to the blacks, while salving the conscience of the guilt-stricken white.' [I Write What I Like: pp 70]



What is the value of racial syncretism ? Dr. Mangcu does not say in clear terms; he's more concerned with racial nativism. Biko, anticipated Mangcu's concern in answering advocate Soggot, on his last trial; '. . . it is not our intention to generate a feeling of anti-whitism amongst our members. We're merely forced by historic considerations to recognise the fact that we cannot plan side by side with people who participate in their exclusive pool of privileges, to make share that both privileges are shared. We don't believe—we don't have faith in them anymore, that they are willing to share with us without any form of . . .' So, would Biko be more of Mbeki gestalt or Mangcu today if he were alive? It does not matter.



What is obviously clear, which Dr. Mangcu sees but refuses to follow to its logical conclusion, is that Mbeki started his struggle against apartheid in high hopes of multiracialism and became disillusioned along the way, which probably is what has made him seem more radically black-conscious as the years of our democratic freedom pass. Dr. Mangcu on the other hand started on radical black conscious thought and grew more malleable towards racial pragmatism with post apartheid South Africa. Which position between them is better justified by our history and status quo is matter of interpretation, and, frankly, sometimes I suspect, individual privilege. But it cannot be one's multiracialism must be measured by how many white / black friends one keeps, otherwise many of us would fail the test in this country.



It is too convenient for the likes of Dr. Mangcu to make one person a scapegoat for almost everything that has gone wrong in our country in the last decade or so. Surely the ANC government made some mistakes under the leadership of Mbeki, some even deserving our strongest condemnation, like the Aids controversial dilly-dallying. Mbeki's overly 'Orwellian' sensitivity to political criticism is also founded; as is his impotent arrogance about Zimbabwe, trying to charm a tyrant's heart, which is tragic when it is clearly not working. But to blame the unease with the rot of our national psyche, what Mangcu terms 'paranoid's nativism' to Mbeki is falling for temptation of vilification is simplifying matters. Dr. Mangcu on the later chapters of his book concedes that there's nothing pluralistic about South African denialist society that clot our deferential path towards a multiracial pluralistic society. But why is it 'racial nativism' when Mbeki says similar things it beats me.



There is, in Thabo Mbeki, a punctilious rationality that verges on Nietzschean brilliant insanity, which his detractors fail to tackle masterly. Not that one ever expects to get qualitative analysis from our media, but, for Christ sake, one would expect better than this combing asses' tails from people who write books, especially if they position themselves to be public intellectuals. Unfortunately, all you get in analyses of Mbeki's regime, are spurious geniality mingling with benevolence, distrusting tendencies denigrating to downright vilification; or excessive wheedling.



Dr. Mangcu's predictions about post-Polkwane directives mostly follow the direction of the birch, and sail a wrong tack; so I won't dwell on them. All the same, To The Brink: The State of our Democracy, is good gift for someone who has not been following what's happened in the country in the past few years. Those looking for better depth of our political analyses will not find a cygnet in its duckling. Its analysis lacks penetration, is mostly worn to buff with borrowed thought, and even lacks artistic vitality. At times it ranks of conjectural conspiracies. But its major short-coming is that it lacks coherent distinctive philosophical sensibility of well-thought-out views on the significant questions.

Happy birthday my dear angel daughter.

08/06/2008 is Loza's 9th birthday. I can't beleive how quickly time passes. It is almost a decade since she's come into my life. Feels only like yesterday I watched her tiny body at hospital in Port Elizabeth. Love has happened since.

Happy birthday my dear angel daughter. May you find the fulfilment you seek in life!

Back to the Basics

The Kafkaesque strain, running through Beckett to post-modern popular writers, like Coetzee, has ran its course. The idea of wrestling ‘fiction free from 19th-century constraints like plot and character, and to wrest objects free from imposed meaning’ [RACHEL DONADIO] has itself now become tired, gaping for fresh air. Reading the fast aging masters of post-everything style of literature with their dreamlike fragment of narrative characterization and existential doubt of navel gazing you see they’ve reached a certain degree of stagnation. Where then is the novel going from here?

Sartre’s desire, towards the end of his life, was to free us from our morbid internal lives. The glazed inward looking hero with mannerist poses of alienation and ‘nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory.’ Despite Sartre’s wishes, the last century in literature has been of ‘master of aridity, cultivated cactuses.’ But without any doubt the age of 'psychological man,' the herd of loners in modern things, especially literature, is, in our era, on its way out. It has tiresomely proved the truth of ‘Tocqueville's observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.’

The rallying call in every literature convocation I attend these days is the return to the classics, hunger for universal inspiration and simplicity. As the result writers like Pushkin, with their staggering simplicity are back in vogue. Attractive stories now are those that deviate from linguistic juggling for preference that is uniquely spare, laconic, and all that traditional aesthetic once dubbed “minimalism”. As a fan of Classical Realism I must confess, I’m thrilled about this turn of events.

Classical Realism, down from the Greeks to the Latinists, rediscovered by the Renaissance, promulgated by the Beaux-Arts academies, nearly exterminated by the modernists is resurgent again. What is Classical Realism? It is the narrative style that puts high premium on observed reality, which sublimates emotion away from the sensational while admitting the tragic. It is a pressure point of experiences towards the renegotiation and re-examination of pact with tradition, the collective way things have always been done.

In the first half of the 20th century, for instance, English literature especially, was very narcissistic, focused mostly on itself, its language, its literary structures; hence was almost cut off from actual reality. Addressing true reality, asking political, social, economic questions, became taboo, unless one was blatantly of say, Marxist political school.
The turn into Classical Realism is present obvious with French literature, where scholarship is happily united with clear thinking and witty writing. I can think of recent books by Jonathan Littell, “Les Bienviellantes” [“The Kindly Ones”], and other works of contemporary French writers such as Annie Erneaux and Pascal Quignard. Here the novel is structured on traditional strictures of strong characters, melodramatic narrative that is not self-indulgent, is not be fictionalized reportage, whose large-scale story development has a central idea that holds it together. As the result you might find in them dramatized the same sort of dilemma, like life with narrowing options. But there are subtle differences of plot, tone, location, nuance and effect. Something you get from Virgil tackling the fall Troy, which though based on Homer’s Illiad, is obviously a complete different book.

Last year I attended, for the first time, Cape Town Book Fair. I found most commentators commenting that the good thing about the direction of South African writing is that people are “telling personal stories more” as compared to our past that was awashed with more political novels. I don’t dispute the merit of this, but get concerned when subjectivism becomes the pinnacle of personal stories.
Subjective literature has contributed a lot in the protection and enhancement of our common humanity. It’s psychological individual brooding yielded many fresh and penetrating insights, and gave us more understanding of individual pathos. But this individual centeredness is itself is starting to pall. It has mastered the Hegelian concept of synthesis between the self and the external world to an extent of cloying hallucinatory tinge.
Rushdie, who has suffered a lot in the hands of politics encroaching in literature, had this to say in his lecture recently at Stanford University; “At a time when politics invades so much the boundaries of ordinary life, going to the frontiers and pushing back is the . . . There is a thing in the novel that wants to be provincial and wants to be small, to be intimate, . . . wants to never lose sight of the human scale, but novelists in our time have been forced to do that.” All good. Rushdie ended the lecture by saying; “Great art tries to open the universe a little more, . . . increases, by some small amount, what it’s possible to know, do, say and, therefore, to be. And we can’t do that sitting in the middle.”
The complaint here is that of making an individual the measure of all things, as Hans Jonas Paton put it when criticising some existentialist philosophers. “We should be particularly on our guard when the guide makes no pretence at objective thinking, which stands or falls by the argument independently of the personality of the thinker, but rests his case on the inwardness of his own personal experience. . .”
The problem with individual centred starting-point for literature and philosophy is that it tends to show less appreciation for other things, like history. It tends to run riot with morbid forms of subjectivism and individualism; looking only at the night side of life with unduly anthropomorphic understanding of reality. When a man is isolated as a centre of interests he tends to see himself, and those who share his point of view, as the highest and authentic forms of existence. That’s dangerous narcissism that often leads to fascism.
Unhealthy subjectivism promotes anti-socialism, elitism, and escapist tendencies from necessary collision with reality. Every country, every nation, every individual needs means to collide with its own reality. Escapist subjectivism avoids this to the detriment of discursive art. [Present day German art is good example of a nation trying to grapple with it’s demons through what they call Bildung; an engagement of history through art, philosophy and learning in general.]