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.
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