All We Have Left Unsaid (Book Review)

I usually avoid books that win literature accolades for simple reason that I, almost always, end up confused about why. I’m happy to say Maxine Case’s book, All we have left unsaid, proved to be slightly different, a wonderful surprise despite the fact that it was a winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in Africa.

In a nutshell, the book is about two sisterly-motherly loves and growing up in South Africa during the late eighties. It is a personal painful story of discovery, and panting means of trying to stay at ease with the world. Danny (Danika), whose older sister is called Lili (Lilian-Rose), is a protagonist. She begins her narrative over her dying mother’s hospital bed. Naturally, the poignancy of the situation takes her back to their growing up years. The usual kitsch and tat follows, which in this case lacks complexity and depth. The hard truth, as written by Jessa Crispin concerning these kind of memoirs is that; Either your book must be exceptionally written (a trait hard to find in memoirs these days) or you must have done something exceptional. You must have travelled to the underground or the heavens and come back with fire or golden apples or at least a little wisdom. It can’t just be, “Daddy hit me, mommy got cancer” — everyone has a sad story, and it is possible to go through a trauma or experience something significant without gaining any insight.

On other matters; it is strange that in South Africa I should complain of an over edited book (we are known to be sloppy in this department). But Maxine Case’s book is over edited. The style of writing is taught and taut, as is fashion in our times. Such style of writing suites well a short story genre, where the reader is challenged to stay at his / her alert best to the end. In a long work things get to a point where it feels like you’re being pulled by a tight rope, or listening to jarring notes from a tightly pulled guitar strings. That’s where the machinery starts creaking.

All we left unsaid is an easy read; an easy read with habitual use of active voice that, at some stage, makes for forcible writing. It maintains a certain level of, not invention, but performance that makes a reader feels like he’s being dragged by the ear by a headmistress. Our era believes that sentences of description or exposition must always be lively and emphatic; like, for example, in Case’s book, the penultimate passage of page 42:

My father comes home all the time now that my mother is pregnant. He still brings us biltong and still lifts me in the air, but he doesn’t play with me as much as he used to. He also does not fetch me from school.

I know that conjunctions are passé in our era, but we tend to forget that it helps to insert them now and then, just to lift the strain on the reader if nothing else. The paragraph would have been fine even if written as:

Father comes home all the time now that mother is pregnant, bringing us biltong and lifting me in the air though he no longer play with me as much as he used to. He no longer fetches me from school either.

It may be that this style of writing breaks all modern rules of tautness by substituting transitives in created actives, but this creates space for continuous flow in the reader’s mind, rather than all the abrupt ends and immediate beginnings. The point is made better by William Strunk, Jr. in his educative book Elements of Style. “[A] writer may err by making his sentences too uniformly compact and periodic, and an occasional loose sentence prevents the style from becoming too formal and gives the reader a certain relief.”

The tendency of shortening sentences, simplifying diction, and throwing confetti of platitudes (some thing Case’s book suffers from I am afraid) shows patterns of increased pandering to the lowest common intellectual denominator. It is worse when it is combined with mockery of complexity and analysis that is sometimes regarded as wit in out times.

The book All we left unsaid reads like a chic-flick version Shirley Goodness and Mercy. Only it lacks true narrative transport because it has very little natural psychological insightfulness. It is not a work of art but a good read for those who want less introspection (strange thing considering the subject), and more intrigues of contemporary sensationist novelists. It is not in the calibre of Marian Keys (my obsession on the genre), but then again it is Case’s debut book and I for one am looking forward to her second attempt.

Absolutely Gutted

My Umfriend (friend with benefits) told me Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, has lot of sex, which is what got me interested and dispelled my suspicion against icky self-enhancement book I suspected it to be, after it was featured in the Oprah Show. Well, sex, there is, but a topsy-turvy kind of sex; the kind that’s supposed to teach you about yourself towards your spiritual and . . . you get my drift.

If you thought it was only guys who go gallivanting, meeting strange people, some of whom they have free sex with—for spiritual and culinary purposes—you are in for a surprise? Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love will help you collide with your prudishness, and give you the creeps, or even crabs, in the process. If, like me, you’re of an idea that feminism liberated women from undesirable trappings of male chauvinism, think again. Or if you thought women can only have sex where there are pretentious emotional connection, I repeat, think again; you are in for a surprise.

The best-selling American trans-global travel narrative, Eat, Pray, Love feels like something written by rutty Ernest Hemingway on spiritual repentance. It is full of adventure and sex, peppered with confetti of spiritual clichés. We guys like to pretend we believe in free, no commitment sex, but actually what we mean about that is we’re okay with Sartrean communal sex, or JZ (Jacob Zuma) seraglio for ourselves, but wince when we read of Simone Beauvoir's polygamous sexual love—I wonder how JZ would feel if one of his wives was to take on an extra husband, provided they can support him that is as the Zulu custom requires.

Eat, Pray, Love is a catalogue of blissful promiscuity, fluent in the argot of "Sex and the City". I don't know how other guys feel, but Sex and the City made me restless whenever I watched it with a woman, which was very telling. Those damned chicks were just too free and independent about everything for my macho liking. When I was with the guys though it was different; we castigated their loose morals with one eye hoping they'd be free with us. I suspect the unvarnished truth is that we prefer that mama dishes her something-something for daddy alone.

I read most of Eat, Pray, Love on commute train between Khayelisha and Cape Town, with a background of cacophony of voices that’s not very conducive to reading and contemplation. If it’s not someone trying to sell you something, its hedge-preachers—comfortable in their contradictions, and insinuative.

Four stops down from where abode the train, at Mandalay, usually comes a lady I flatter myself into thinking she fences me. She’s okay as far as the ID—looks—is concerned, but boy, can she talk? If it’s not some haute couture topic it is something about her good-for-nothing brother ‘whose gonna send my mother into an early grave.’ The worse part she’s started repetiting her, which means she’s run out things to say, but she won’t shuddup.

I can no longer recall what our spurious intimacy is based on. If it were not for the fact that I get on the train first I would do my level best to avoid a coach she’s on like a contagious disease. But for some reason I always see her at the last minute as she’s homing in straight to me. The sight of her face always kicks in razor blade panic and ventral turmoil within me. The funny thing is that she’s a dainty beautiful thing. I’d go for her at no notice had I not had the misfortune of being gutted by her conversations.

I’ve ran out of ideas to avoid here. With petrol still hovering around R10 a litre, looks like I’m going to be stuck with her for a very long time; driving is no longer an option but a luxury. But it has become intolerably exhausting maintaining my permanent smiles as my mind chases after the oblivion over fields of shanty rotting iron and polythene bags of Cape Flats, trying very hard not listening to her. One day she was going on as usual, pattering about this and that. Meantime I wanted to finish the last chapter of Eat, Pray, Love when it hit me. There’s something very similar to both these women. They make for lousy travelling companion. For one they talk too much; are glib and covertly sensationalist. Their personalities turn me off.

Methinks discretion, especially in a lady, is a virtue, which is why, perhaps, I didn’t like Eat, Pray, Love that much. I can see why it would appeal to Oprah fans; it’s one of those two-dimensional books with lots of air and not very much depth. I think T.S. Eliot called such things an art of the surface. It has passionate, hardboiled style of Sex and the city filtered, rather funneled, as clinical aüβerliche kitsch. The book is not really original but has defiant freshness in how it collapses patriarch hypocrisy. Gilbert is an artist of poor discrimination and rude vitality, which, I suppose, explains why her book is successful in our era.

If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me without my stir

I spent last Saturday, like most South Africans, watching the political occurrences of ANC’s recall of the president of the republic with growing forebodings. Whomever asked me for my opinion I pointed to the article I wrote in April here on my blog.
Under normal circumstances I’m averse to quoting my own writings, but these are not normal times:

The lesson Shakespeare wanted to teach in the play Macbeth is the inexorable and inescapable vindictive power of the moral universe [and the folly of revenge]. That whatever means you take to achieve your ends will come back to haunt or vindicate you in the end. Our present [outgoing] president might be a stark reminder of that .
Lady Macbeth, while still convincing her husband to murder the irreprehensible King Duncan, accuses him of wanting to win without dirtying his hands. She says he’s not without ambition, but lacks the “illness should attend it ... that he would not play false, and yet would wrongly win.” Macbeth’s conscience is still healthy then as he replies in a monologue:
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other. . .

Let’s look at this in the light of our country and times, especially since ruling’s party’s last conference. The greenflies have it that a certain gentleman, who is now the vice president of the ANC has been responsible for the bad karma between their out going president and the present. It is also rumoured that at the first meeting of the ruling party’s newly elected NEC the blood was so heated their president had to be assuaged for more than twenty minutes after walking out of the meeting accusing the delegates of planning to get rid of him through his coming trial.

It turns out also that there are people in the higher echelons of the ruling party who want to win without playing false in the public eye. It’s rumoured that Lady Macbeth occupies the Parliamentary Speaker seat, and that she eggs and fire the passion of the present [ANC] deputy president to overcome his repugnance for the end to justify the means: Thou'dst have, great Glamis, / That which cries "Thus thou must do if thou have it; / And that which rather thou dost fear to do / Than wishest should be undone." Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round / Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem / To have thee crowned withal.

Lady Macbeth is here saying Macbeth fears to do what must be done, even though he would not wish it undone, if it were done. I hope our Macbeth has enough sense to quote and stick to the words of sober Macbeth: "If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me without my stir."

It might just seemed like speculation and conjecture then, but now, with what is happening recently in the ANC political circles, that the signs are getting clearer everyday? The deputy president of the ANC, Kgalema Montlanthe, is soon to be the acting president until next year elections. The sublimity of Shakespeare is perennial. The ANC leaders say they’re doing this to recover the unity of the party but you and I know they are ‘breaking bulk’. Remember that term from the English revolution of the seventeen century when the majority in a ship decide to loot and distribute among themselves captured wealth.

The Dream Deferred: Thabo Mbeki (Book Review)

One thing certain about Mark Gevisser biography of the incumbent president of Republic of South Africa, The Dream Deferred: Thabo Mbeki, is that it was well timed. It came out just at the time when the governing party of South Africa, ANC (African National Congress), went to it 52nd National Conference to elect its next president after Mbeki.

After more than a seven year immersion in relevant archives and travels on two continents (Africa and Europe) Gevisser’s biography is thoroughly researched, referencing, amateurish psychoanalytic, and none too innovative. From the beginning Gevissers tells us ‘This book demonstrates that if Mbeki has been driven by one overarching dream, it is that of self-determination—personal, political and psychological.’ Then he let’s that slips for Lanston Hughes’ poem as thesis and, sometimes, forced reference point.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Like a syrup sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explodes?

Mbeki first publicly mentioned the poem in introducing ‘debate on reconciliation and nation-building in 1998.’ All things considered this should have worked well had Gevisser been more of a storyteller than a journalist, all be it a well read and competent one. Indeed the strong point of Gevisser’s book is the broadness by which he tells the story of the ANC, especially in exile, than anything else. The book is also a mine for post apartheid South African politics even if one gets the feeling Gevisser didn’t invest enough attention into South African early history, especially implications of Frontier and Colonial implications. That section sounds more like parachute journalism with dull and glum recycled notions of Xhosa, especially Mfengu, character makings.

Givisser is more into his element when talking about Mbeki’s political experience; in the end, not too shabby for a political biography. But Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred lacks the ruthlessness necessary to streamline Mbeki’s life into a functional narrative. There are vast stretches of prohibitive dryness and repetitive material that could surely been excised to bring down the 801 paged book into, at the least, half that. (I think there should be a law against writing books that are more than 500 hundred pages; no subject is that interesting).

Gevisser’s tone is that of investigative journalism, with literary nuggets there and there. It lacks informal anecdotes and titbits that make for entertaining read in lives of politicians. Though there are instances that beg for the raw venting of feelings and deeper delving into greasy facts (like reports of the president’s womanizing tendencies) the biographer chooses only suggestive implications, giving us too much muscle without fat. In fact Gavisser’s analysis of incidences around Mbeki’s life is most of the time flattering to the president with the notable exception of Aids dissidence case.

Gevisser, who was educated at Yale, concedes that the beginnings of the book were in his profile writings for a Sunday newspapers, coupled with inspiration he got from ‘Hermione Lee’s exceptional life of Virginia Woolf’. After that he immersed himself on intricate turns of Thabo Mbeki’s life, especially sources material instead of just printed material, hence his deep familiarity with his subject. The idea of a biography, he wrote to Mbeki when canvassing the book idea, was ‘a thesis, really, about biography as a tool for transformation.’ Mbeki bitted. Though Gevisser’s biography is competent in other ways, one can’t help judging it by higher standards of books like, Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare, which introduced a far interesting paradigm shift on telling of familiar stories. Instead of telling a cradle to grave story, recent biographies concentrate on a certain episode that almost defines the life of its subject with web-like strands pinned into it like a pin centre. I was hopeful, after reading the book’s insightful introduction about what happened between Mbeki and Zuma, this might be the case with Gevisser’s book. For a moment I thought Gevisser was going to tell the story backward from the dissection of that incidence. Instead he chose Lanston Hughes poems, which to him expresses Thabo Mbeki’s lifetime dream and fears since he came to power.

*

Thabo Mvunyelwa Mbeki was born in 18 June 1942 (try finding that crucial information from the biography) at a little village called Mbewuleni. The village is in a small town of Idutywa in the former Bantustan of Transkie. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a prominent member of SACP and one of Rivonia treason trialist, with the likes of Nelson Mandela. Epainette Mbeki was left to provide for the family when Govan went to jail. Thabo had one elder sister, and two younger brothers, Moketsi and Jama (a lawyer who died under mysterious conditions connected to heat squad in Lesotho). It is obvious that Gevisser tells the story of Thabo through the eyes of Epainette, his mother most of the time, who is an obvious first and constant contact for the biographer.

Thabo was educated at Lovedale College, the first fountains of education for black people in the Southern Africa with missionary origins. He was involved in politics and was expelled from the institution. He went to Johannesburg where, through his father’s contacts he met (white) people who organised a scholarship for him to study economic at Sussex University, England. He graduated with Masters in Economics from Sussex and went for a soft military training in the Lenin Military Institution at Moscow. He married Zanele Dlamini whom he met in England through political connections with the Tambos. He worked as a de facto assistant and understudy of O.R. Tambo, the then president of ANC. Though based in Lusaka, Zambia, travelled the globe a lot doing underground ANC work.

Gevisser credits Thabo for being the voice of reason, against the popular but doomed military voice within Umkhonto Wesizwe (ANC’s military wing). At one time Thabo was suspected of being an informer (something very common among the comrades in those confused times). He was lucky to escape torture like many comrades who were suspected of being informers, thanks, most probably, to his close relation with Tambo. Thabo was also often accused of living a soft life as a de facto ANC foreign minister while the likes of Chris Hani were popular for their valour in the military frontiers. Gevisser intimates that this had a bad psychological effect in Thabo’s psyche before the years the ANC was unbanned in South Africa.

According to Gevisser, Thabo initiated talks with South African delegates, first with business people before the actual apartheid politicians. This was a very unpopular move within the ANC, and Gevisser says Tambo actually used Thabo to take the flack for it while he stood to reap the successes. The most difficult years for Mbeki, according to Gevisser, was when Thabo lost the lead of negotiating status to Cyril Ramaphosa, the upstart lawyer with no ANC pedigree within the ANC (Ramaphosa came through the United Democratic Movement that kept the fire of liberation struggle burning during the years when the ANC was in exile wilderness.) This, for Mbeki, were first sign of ‘a dream deferred’; he felt used and discarded. Gevisser suggests that his not so warm relation with Mandela began at this time. Mandela, who had serious political differences with Thabo’s father, Govan, initially was not keen in regarding Thabo as his successor, but was pressured into the position by the ANC leadership. Thus Thabo became the first deputy president of democratic South Africa, and four years later, its president, serving two terms (ten years) that end next year (2009).

*

In truth thare’s nothing much new in all this to those who have followed Mbeki’s life with a modicum of interest. What Gevisser did is to collect material into one source, which is no mean task on its own; in fact I dare say this is a defining book concerning the political life of Thabo Mbeki. What is regrettable is that the traits of Mbeki the man do not come through very clearly; in fact you’re sometimes at pains to find simple biographical facts like his birthday mentioned on the book. He makes much about Mbeki’s ‘disconnection’ from the general mass and lack of integration. ‘From a very young age, his response to this condition of disconnection had been to sublimate all emotions,’ writes Gevisser, ‘all relationships, all desires, into the struggle for liberation. He had long made a political career—unusual indeed for a freedom fighter—around pragmatism, but at his core he was a revolutionary idealist.’

Gevisser tries to go into depth about the unconscious distrustfulness and fear of white people against Thabo Mbeki but left this reader dissatisfied. In any case the real question about South Africa now is whether the country can go beyond politics of cultural difference or grievance and popular cynicism. The tendency so far has been for everyone to hope for winning anyone into their own point view so as to establish the hegemony of their political values. It stands to be seen which side compromise would come or be subverted. Jacabo Zuma is less rigid with his values, rather lack of, and so has become the favourite of everyone in the manner of a girl who puts out being a favourite of boys in High School.

As I’ve already indicated; Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deffered reads more like an extended newsaper feature than, say, a scholarly analysis. What jars most about it is psycho bubble and lunk of metaphors, well suited for platitudinous theorising, but a little cloying for a 801 paged book. Another thing I noticed about the book is that it kept promising that soone or later a putsh of some sort would happen, that you’d rich its nadir, but for some reason you never get the satisfaction of doing so. More like make love without reaching orgasim, or a thud sneeze. But in this age when memoirs of aggrievement climb into a crowded genre of no literature ability in political writing this is a better book.

Writing As the Culture of Celebrity

I first attended the Cape Town Book Fair at the Convention Centre last year (2007). It gave me a sinking feeling that writers were fast becoming what Susan Sontag called “an aspect of the culture of celebrity”. Artists entering the celebrity cult? Of course artists too are people (people who happen to remember and record in a wonderfully transmuted way what make for our life experiences). They make art by depicting the nuances of our lived experiences, something that is rare and cannot be contrived. But why they should be compelled to behave like jobbing preachers is something worrying.

This year I found most people commenting what a good thing the direction of South African writing has taken, with writers ‘telling personal stories more’ as compared to political novels. At first I concurred, but when I read what this entailed in our recent literature I got concerned a little again. When I discovered subjectivism was being made the pinnacle of personal narrative I recalled something Hans Jonas Paton said in criticising existentialist philosophy. “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 complaint here is that of making an individual the measure of all things.

Celebrity is a contrived thing, which is why I’m surprised by this trend of artists entering the glamour culture. It can only mean one or two things; that our art is getting contrived—meaning it’s no longer art—or commodified. The commodification of art is a sad but necessary thing in an imperfect world (artists have to make a living too). But there’s difference between commodifying and commercialising art.

A commercial artist is like a performing seal that must do tricks to satisfy the feeding hand. Have artists been turned (turning themselves) into performers? Some do it because they are searching, not only for commercial gain, but mana—power and prestige. I do not suppose there ever was time when artists were indifferent to ambition and fame, but, unlike our times, they always regarded art first and foremost as a calling, or at least pretended to be disdainful of the hype.

I’m not trying to be pious about distant glories, but the truth of the matter is that hype is usually accompanied by poor writing standards. When I mentioned this to a colleague he accused me of being finicky. He was glad writers were getting what he termed ‘the seriousness they deserve.’

Writing as a celebrity cult is different from the ideal of writers being taken seriously. As much as it is always wonderful to meet good writers it is a rare thing to meet them among the celebrity lot, who are mostly celebrated for one thing or the other, but not necessary good writing. Celebrity authors are treated in these Book Fairs like pop stars, and sadly, they turn to behave like some. Book Fairs are now fast becoming parties where writers are solely judged by how much personality fun they dish to visitors. I’m flabbergasted by the flamboyant superficiality of it all.

Writers are not public utility. Their work might be but not their persons.

In her essay on translation, The World as India, Susan Sontag noted. “A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community—the community of literature—which includes more dead than living writers.”

As writer-reader I’m daily finding that good books are becoming rarer by the day the more the quantity of publication increases. It is still possible to find nuggets of gold among the rabble, but gone are the days when writers percolated what they wanted to say, and the style by which they say it. Books now compete with other stuff of our instant culture. As the result one rarely finds a book that is elegantly written, charming, candid, mordant, and so on. In instead you find yourself glad at the end for having managed to finish a book; rejoicing with Dr. Johnson that it was not longer than it actually was.

It is said of Edmund Wilson that, as his reputation grew, he printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia. Perhaps it is time contemporary writers rediscover the wisdom in this so as to get back to serious stuff of writing books, good books.

As for subjectivism in literature, it has contributed a lot in the protection and enhancement of our common humanity. The psychological brooding yielded many fresh and penetrating insights, and gave us more understanding of individual pathos; but it mastered the Hegelian concept of synthesis between the self and the external world to an extent of cloying hallucinatory tinge.

The problem with individual centred starting-point in 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 personal 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.

Unhealthy intensity of subjectivism promotes anti-socialism, elitism, and escape from necessary collision with history. Every country, every nation, needs means to collide with its past. Escapism promoted by 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; that is an engagement of history through art, philosophy and learning in general. Perhaps the South African ideal for literature too should be of that lot, especially since we too have many skeletons on our closet.

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.

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.]

Generating Shakespeare

On Tuesday evening I watched an episode of Generations, our local sopie at SABC 1 and felt revolted. There’s this rich chick there called Karabo acted by Connie Ferguson. Apparently she had been charting on-line with a web friend. In one episode she had a public, unconvincing, altercation with a journalist character, Paul about journalistic ethics. It later turns out her web friend and day-light enemy are one and the same. Ring a bell? Sleepless In Seattle! That is why I felt revolted.

There’s nothing wrong with copying a storyline—JM Coetzee does it all the time with most of his novel. The crux of the matter is that you have to refresh the storyline and make it relevant to your audience and times—again something JM does so brilliantly. But the dystrophic copy and paste sort of thing happening in our sopies is nauseating to say the least.

Talking about re-inventing the storyline; I also watched, on the same evening, Shakespeare eMzansi in SABC 1. What a brilliant concept. I’m told it is going to be 26 episodes of 5 series. The one currently on play now, Entabeni—and no it has nothing to do with me—is certainly up to standard. It is based on Shakespear’s play Macbeth. The acting could be more professional, but the writers have brilliantly re-invented Shakespeare storyline, made it relevant for the time without loosing much of Shakespeare’s plot. They’ve also made it relevant to our situation and times.

I have heard it said that the idea was to make people revisit the dramas of Shakespeare. Well, I suspect it is working; in my home my siblings have been asking more questions about Macbeth, lately. I’ve not yet seen them read the plays, but at this rate it is only a matter of time. The other day I had my four year old nephew intimating on his bath the act we played together; Foul is fair, and fair is foul! Perhaps not an ideal first line to learn from Shakespeare, but we’ve to start somewhere, innit?

The lesson Shakespeare wanted to teach in the play Macbeth is the inexorable and inescapable vindictive power of the moral universe. That whatever means you take to achieve your ends will come back to haunt or vindicate you in the end. Our present president might be a stark reminder of that.

Lady Macbeth, while still convincing her husband to murder the irreprehensible King Duncan, accuses him of wanting to win without dirtying his hands. She says he’s not without ambition, but lacks the “illness should attend it ... that he would not play false, and yet would wrongly win.” Macbeth’s conscience is still healthy then as he replies in a monologue:
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other. . .

Let’s look at this in the light of our country and times, especially since ruling’s party’s last conference? The greenflies have it that a certain gentleman, who is now the vice president of the ANC has been responsible for the bad karma between their out going president and the present. It is also rumoured that at the first meeting of the ruling party’s newly elected NEC the blood was so heated their president had to be assuaged for more than twenty minutes after walking out of the meeting accusing the delegates of planning to get rid of him through his coming trial.

It turns out also that there are people in the higher echelons of the ruling party who want to win without playing false in the public eye. It’s been rumoured that Lady Macbeth occupies the parliamentary Speaker seat, and that she eggs and fire the passion of the present deputy president to overcome his repugnance for the end to justify the means:
Thou'dst have, great Glamis, / That which cries "Thus thou must do if thou have it; / And that which rather thou dost fear to do / Than wishest should be undone." Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round / Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem / To have thee crowned withal.

Lady Macbeth is here saying Macbeth fears to do what must be done, even though he would not wish it undone, if it were done. I hope our Macbeth has enough sense to quote and stick to the words of sober Macbeth: "If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me without my stir."

Another question is, when the did is done, will we, as the general public, be better of it. As the Greek proverb goes, ‘Rule shows the man.’ No one ever knows with certainty how virtuous—or vicious—a man might be until he holds office and has power.

I cannot wait to see how the team of Shakespeare eMzansi treats, probably the most beautiful, if dry words, ever came out of any writer of all time. That passage is towards the end of the play Macbeth, and worth quoting in full:
Seyton: The Queen, my lord, is dead.
Macbeth: She should have died hereafter,
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Do you still think Shakespeare is passé and irrelevant? Think again. And that, I believe, is the idea behind Shakespeare eMzansi. Now; “Weary with toil I haste me to my bed...” (Sonnet 27)

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.

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.

Tired of Brinkmanship

It has not happened something that does not happen in Thabo Mbeki’s government. Democratic governments that overstay their welcome tend to haemorrhage from loss of moral authority caused, inter alia, by scandal, sleaze, arrogance, incompetence. As the late Xhosa poet S.K. E. Mqhayi would say; ‘Lento kaloku yinto yalonto, thina nto zaziyo asothukanga nto. . .’ [‘These things happen as thus, we who know are not surprised at all . . .’]

During the national strike of civil workers last we wrote in these pages that Thabo Mbeki’s administration has grow ‘too big for their boots’ when the minister of Public Works, Geraldine Fraser-Moketsi, demonstrated reckless conceit in addressing the worker’s grievances—obviously taking her cue from his master. We wrote that if the ANC (African National Congress) knew what’s good for it they should fire the whole of Mbeki’s administration. That is exactly what happened on the ANC 52nd national conference late last year at Polokwane—by changing its NEC (National Executive Council) the ANC effectively got rid of Mbeki’s administration for the next government. And I was the first one to be dumbfounded.

I was dumbfounded by how swift and effective the democratic system inside the ruling party is. The move to get rid of Mbeki’s administration was orchestrated from the ground roots (regional offices of the party).

It is almost an unwritten law of democracy that governments should never last for more than 10 years. Politicians who take this long in office tend to be infected with the virus of arrogance and insensitivity. Most of Mbeki’s ministers are typical rusted long serving servants, had taken an attitude of talking patronisingly to their audiences. They had become slipshod in their briefs and all. With the exception of few, many never took off, in any case, never up to their jobs from the start.

Most of us were shocked at the naivety of Mbeki in deciding to contest the third term as the ANC president. Nothing except that he’s been too sheltered from reality for far too by surrounding himself with a cocoon of sycophancy and careerists. He collided with Ortega y Gasset's “revolt of the masses”, and learned reality against the stone in Polokwane. It looks like it did him a lot of good too, for it fostered a spirit of humility on him, even inspired him to come out of his cocoon and emotional insularity.

Mbeki’s speech of apology for failures of government during his opening of the parliamentary section for 2008 was too little too late. We elect governments to foresee ‘problems and lead events rather than merely react to their own failures’. Reacting to their own failures is exactly what the government of Mbeki has been doing for the past six years or so. It is enough, they must hand the baton over to others who might have better ideas.

But the manner by which the opposition parties grandstanded by calling for early elections, due to what they called loss of confidence in Mbeki’s government, was ridiculous and self-defeating. Naturally they have their vested interests, wanting to harvest people’s disillusionments for their political gain.

Tabling a vote of no confidence in Mbeki’s government was a stupid opportunistic move of wanting to get on stage lights for the opposition parties, and feast on the carcass of lame duck president. Mbeki must be allowed to finish his term, if anything to set right the mess he has put the country through; otherwise we’re going to be in a situation where the next leader will excuse his incompetence to his predecessor’s failures. Mbeki must find a way getting us out of this reversal of values and general confusion.

Be that as it may, the ANC needs a way to avoid the present fiasco of Parliamentarians being reduced into plotters and mutineers in the festering boil of underground tug in the clout between the president of the ruling party (Jacob Zuma) and that of the Republic (Thabo Mbeki). Things have already gotten out of hand, with MPs wandering into rebellious factional plots instead of reflecting and doing their proper jobs.

There probably is no way Mbeki can redeem his name now with the fiasco of dissolving the crime busting unit, The Scorpios; and firing the head of National Prosecuting unit under suspicious circumstances. Hostility on him and his government from all direction has prevailed, fanned by his nemesis, the media, which influences public opinion. Now is not the time to pick media scabs, well-known failings and prejudices. Mbeki has himself to blame anyway, for developing a bunker mentality towards the media, which usually spells the first falling step for a public figure.

Mbeki is/was the ultimate spinner, a habit he learnt in England during the struggling years. The wages of spin are always political death, why should he be any different? The only way left for Mbeki is graceful exit by lowering his neck to raise the stature of his successor, Jacob Zuma, for the stability of the country if nothing else. So the country maybe rid of political brinkmanship, démarche and all. He had more than ten years for siloviki self-gratification, now its time to be saintly.

By the looks of things, in the respect he paid to Jacob Zuma during the opening of Paliamentary session for 2008, the lesson is beginning to sink on him. Besides that, the only interesting thing left for him to do is to sit down and write frank and honest memoirs so the rest of us could have an idea of what the fuck actually happened within the echelons of the ANC.

Xhosaland

Most of us are born and live in places without ever really discovering their treasures because we take them for granted. It usually takes the coming of fresh eyes for us to see our homes with born-again eyes. It took my need to showcase my home to my girlfriend, who’s from Botswana, for me to discover home.
We started from the township of PE where I am closely associated with the founding of an NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) called Ubuntu Education Fund, “an international organization dedicated to developing grassroots health and education programs in South Africa and promoting ubuntu—the South African belief in a universal bond of sharing that unites all of humanity”.

My homeland is the land we may, for convenience sake, call Xhosaland. It is situated in the province of the Eastern Cape (South Africa), roughly extending from Lady Frere through the Winterberg Mountains; incorporates the former Ciskei and Transkie, sweeping to the coast along East London to PE (Port Elizabeth), eBhayi. So it was ideal for us to start at PE.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of SA (South Africa) knows that British settlers established PE around 1820. It was called Algoa Bay until the then acting governor of the Cape Colony, Rufin Donkin, named it after his recently died wife Elizabeth. But the history of South African coast encountering the distant people goes much further than that if the ancient Greek historian Herodotus is to be believed.
According to Herodotus the first ships to sail along the coast of Southern Africa were those of an expedition dispatched from the Red Sea by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho, which were manned by Phoenician sailors six centuries before Christ. The ships found their way to the east coast of Africa, rounded the southernmost point of the continent, proceeded up the west coast, passed through the Pillars of Hercules, and arrived back in Egypt at the Rosetta mouth of the Nile after an adventurous journey that lasted three years. Herodotus tells us the ships anchored each autumn at some convenient spot on the coast and the crew planted grain and rested while it ripened, and after harvesting the plants their sea journey was resumed. Historians suppose that one of the autumnal sojourns was made on the part of the coast that now constitutes the sea boundary of the republic of South Africa, most probably the east coast where Xhosaland is situated.
There are other apocryphal later versions of the Phoenicians rounding Africa from the likes of Strabo, the Greek geographer. But we know for sure that Batholomue Diaz’s expedition sailed into Algoa Bay, passed to St Croix and Bird Island, eventually anchoring near the mouth of Bushman’s River. There they erected a stone column or prado on the rocky promontory on the mainland we now know as Kwaihoek. The date was 3rd of February 1488. They sailed for three days passing the mouths of Kariega and Kowie Rivers until they arrived at the Great Fish River where they reluctantly turned back. On their return journey to Europe their two ships passed within sight ‘of magnificent promontory’ past which they had been unwittingly driven by storm on the outward journey. They named the imposing landmark Cape of Storms which was changed by his King John II to Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama completed Diaz’s work by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, up the coast of Africa to cross to India. The British settlers of 1820 sailed to Algoa Bay exactly three and one third century after Diaz, and all hell broke loose in Xhosaland.

In the words of C.L. Stretch, the beloved Xhosas Resident Agent with the Ngqikas during the middle ninetieth century: the Xhosaland “presents a fine background to the finest pasturage interspersed with fine clumps of bush, beautifully [dispersed] and extending along an extensive tract of country east and west.” The Governor of the Cape Colony from April from 1814 to March of 1826, Lord Charles Somerset, though not partial with his love towards the natives, especially the Xhosas— whom he saw as restless savages adverse to the advantages of Western civilisation— described the land to the then Secretary for the Colonies in Britain, Earl Bathurst, in his usual grandiloquent manner and false delicacy of his era, as resembling a “succession of parks from Bushman’s River to Great Fish River in which, upon the most verdant carpet, Nature has planted in endless variety, the soil well adapted to cultivation is peculiarly fitted for cattle and pasturage.” Needless to say he coveted this Eden for white settlement, if only it could be rid of the serpent, the Xhosas, whom he regarded as ‘barbarous savages, whose lives are ruled by ignorance, cruelty and superstition, the stock-in-trade of clever witch-doctors.’
To the white colonists the Xhosas were known as kaffirs, a Moslem word for unbelievers. Some say they were called so because of the texture of Xhosa hair that resemble sorghum, which the colonists called kaffir-corn. To me it is highly likely that sorghum was called thus after kaffir hair than the other way round since most colonists regarded Xhosas as ‘incorrigible unbelievers earmarked for eternal hellfire without the assistance of the master race.’ I am, according to a Sheridanean quote, indebted to my imagination for that fact. Xhosaland rises from the sea in Port Elizabeth in gentle varied contours. On uplands the air is so clear the eye can rise to the sky indefinitely and peep at the gods. The earth, once it leaves the caramel sands of dazzling dunes of sensitive vegetation on the seashore, is copper coloured. Verdure of trees grows on it. It is not rare to see semi-tropical birds flashing their bright coloured plumage, sucking nectar from the scarlet flowers of prickly-pear cactus that grow in the scrub bush that is very nutritious to herds of bushbucks, kudus, gazelles, elands and other variations of antelopes like the elastic springbucks. Various other wild animals habituates the area to the extent that the region boasts of numerous game reserve where you can still watch the big five without worrying about diseases like malaria. The Addo Elephant National Park is one of them and plans to be the first game reserve in the world to offer sites for the “Big 7” (elephants, lions, leopards, buffaloes, rhinos, whales and great white sharks) in their natural habitant. It is a great park comprising a 240 000 hectare terrestrial zone and a 120 000 hectare marine zone. Only lions still have to be reintroduced to the "Greater Addo" area. It also includes islands that are home to the world’s largest African penguins and gannets, unrivalled natural diversity, with five of South Africa’s seven major vegetation zones (biomes), and rich heritage of archaeological and historical sites. Accommodation and activity options are for all
tastes as wild life meets the marine wild life to create one of the most endearing sights in the world. It was in this area that the "Big 5" (elephant, black rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard) were first documented before vast numbers of wild animals were greatly reduced, some even to the verge of extinction, due to irresponsible hunting practices. Places like the private Shamwari Game Reserve are succeeding in reversing that. Shamwari is probably, I kid you not, the most successful effort at nature conservation and responsible tourism in the world. A visit to it though comes at price, but you’re guaranteed to rub shoulders with the likes of the Prince Charles of Whales and the John Travolta’s of this world. A way to sneak in for the not so rich and famous is by a gap year or something. They’ve various conservation programmes of wildlife reserves for those who wish to learn more about nature conservation called Eco Africa Experience program.

Between Sundays, which the Xhosas call iNqweba, and the Great Fish, iNxuba, Rivers was the bone of most contention between the natives and early white settlers of the eighteenth century. The Cape-Dutch farmers, commonly referred to as Boers, met up with the Xhosas, the Khoi, and the San people. The Cape-Dutch farmers, on account of the sourness of the grass, called the area Zuurveld. These groups mingled in the area in ill-fated relationship of their first encounters as compact racial groups towards the end of the Eighteenth century. Mutual plundering that lead to skirmishes between the groups was common. The white farmers, who got away with mischief with more impunity, because the called upon the assistance of British forces, when the region fell under Cape Colony, or Batavian Republic when it was once under it, whenever things got too hot, got the better benefit from the skirmishes. The colonial forces identified the Xhosas as the nuisance of the area and drove them further beyond iNxuba to minimise the risk of reiving. The river was eventually declared the border between the Colony and Xhosaland, which was then called Kaffirland. This made the Xhosas very resentful, returning like birds that have been disturbed by violence to a tree whenever the danger passes. The danger being ‘The Red Devils’ (the scarlet-coated British ‘Red-Coats’) as the Xhosas called them.

The end of slave trade, Napoleonic wars, the flood of wondering migrants fleeing the wars of Shaka (eventually known as Wonderers (Mfengu)), exacerbated the conflicting situation between these racial groups. It did not help matters that the white settlers saw the natives as the inferior labouring race. It was easier for the white farmers to hire and apply, mostly severe, control over the despondent Mfengus; to attract the covetous Khoi with the jangle of harnesses; but the Xhosas and the San people were another matter. The San were incorrigible hunters and gatherers who were mostly not interested any other form of life. The Xhosas saw themselves as self-sufficient custodians of the land. Whoever wanted to settle on the land, in the eyes of the Xhosas, had to assimilate and abide by the, sometimes, despotic authority of their chiefs. This caused discontent and was the beginnings that eventually caused the liaison between the two racial groups to be a crushing burden of suspicion and animosity, which embroiled the Frontier for the greater part of the nineteenth century, easing only with the weakening of the Xhosa nation towards the end of that century.

When you extend the borders from iNqweba all the way to iVuba (Zuurbergen) Mountains near Uitenhage, you get what today is referred to as the Nelson Mandela Bay. From those mountains, along the banks of pellucid Nqweba River, in the midst of thick Addo Bush, are prosperous citric farms that offer bush camping experience. We stayed a weekend on one of them called Umlambo, meaning the river. The owner was an easy going fourth generation Afrikaner on the farm. When we were checking in he jokingly wanted to verify if “you’re not terrorists”. That an Afrikaner farm can joke with a black dude like that, to me, shows how far the country has come. He told of wonderful things happening to the farms post 1994; how the partnership with his workers has improved the production capacity of the farm and all. He also told us about things his grandfather experienced in his youth on the region, like the trekbokken. “They say when the trekbokken comes you’re awakened one morning by a sound like the strong winds before the thunderstorm. This is then followed by the trampling of thousands of all kind of game—wilderbeest, bleskop, springboks, quaggas, elands, antelopes of all sorts and kinds. This covers the area and fills the streets and gardens as far as eyes can see. They graze off everything edible before them, drinking up waters in the furrows, fountains, dams and wherever they could get it. Fagged and impoverish people would kill them in numbers in their gardens and streets. It takes about three days before the whole trekbokken passes living behind a country looking as though destructive heat had passed over it. But it’s indeed a wonderful sight.”
The camping facilities are basic, self-catering wooden cabins, with donkey geysers for ‘warm washing water,’ one luxury yours’ truly, like Napoleon, can’t do without. The air is fresh, sounds recreationally natural, and the river, with minimum intrusion of paddling boats, even the bilibili kind, is quiet, slithering through the bush like a shinning green mamba. In most places the banks are precipitous, covered with rank bush and tall indigenous trees.
Drinking whisky and braaing steaks and green peppers stuffed with bacon around a bonfire felt natural. The silence and the vastness of the sky was divine. In the morning we couldn’t help, though we had promised no gadgets, connecting the Ipod, to the car radio. Leonard Cohen completed the picture for us:
Suzanne takes you down When he walked upon the water
To her place near the river And he spent a long time watching
You can hear the boats go by From his lonely wooden tower
You can spend the night besides her And when he knew for certain
………. Only drowning men could see him
And Jesus was a sailor He said, “All men will be sailors then . Until the sea shall free them.”

When you leave PE by the N2 route after about twenty kilometres you meet up with construction works. They’re building a deep-water port near the mouth of iNqurha (Coega) mouth to host the first Industrial Development Zone in South Africa. From time in memorial native people came there to collect salt from the natural salt plates. When the white settlers came the area became more industrious with sometimes fierce battering. There are concerns now that the industrial development will come at the expense of nature conservation and tourist attraction. As a person who lives among the grinding poverty of township I’m inclined to say, as much as I love the beauty of the area, the trade-offs for job creation outweighs the negative consequences. All modern means of development, to gain credence, must reconcile themselves, in a healthy balance, with the dignity and life needs of man of all classes.




Governor Somerset was aware the importance the Xhosas assigned to their land, yet his careless and provocative vacillating policies eventually led to the annexation of the land by the British. This was the watershed of Frontier politics. The Xhosa, in desperate attempt to reclaim their land, went to war with the Cape Colony. Subsequent Frontier Wars were, one way or the other, an attempt by the Xhosa to reclaim this land. The land issue was never far from most active war chiefs of amaNgqika like Maqoma and Tyhali. They’re perhaps the fathers of Pan Africanism in the Xhosa nation. Ngqika, their father, fell foul in the eyes of other Xhosa chief, and eventually that of his sons, because his friendship with the colonial government was perceived as the major cause for loss of Xhosaland to white settlers.
If ever a land was haunted by it’s past, it is Xhosaland. If you cannot find something to satisfy your yearn for an African adventure there, the chances are you’ll never find it anywhere else.

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• Ubuntu Education Fund can visited at www.ubuntueducationfund.org
• Map of the Eastern Cape by compliment of Coega development.
• Pictures taken at Addo National Elephants Park, which can be contacted at www.addoelephantpark.co.za and Shamwari Game Reserve www.shamwari.co.za
• Nelson Mandela Bay can be contacted at www.nelsonmandelabay.com
• Eastern Cape is home to some famous sons and daughters of South Africa like Nonjoli (Ngqika’s mother), Nongqawuse, Nxele alias Makana, Ntsikane, Nelson Mandela, O.R. Tambo, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Steve Biko, Thabo Mbeki, etc.

Buying Flowers in Cape Town

January 2007: I’m holidaying in Cape Town. I’ve just eaten lunch at Nando’s restaurant. I’m standing at a shaded corridor called Trafalgar Place. Costermongers are selling flowers. I stand dazed, spellbound, as if struck by lighting.


What’s the matter?



I’m not the one who usually cares much for pressure points of guide books, but I had read in one of them that the shaded area was once where they sold human slaves in the eighteenth century. It just sort of came to me all of a sudden. I stand there imagining how they must have sat there in rows, bruised and harried, damp and fever fogged, waiting to be auctioned while the buccaneering hardiness of their blackbirding sellers auctioned and documented their misery.



I buy two bunches from a coloured lady whose eyes dance with joviality. She looks at me strangely as I lay them down not far from where she is seating. On second thoughts I bruise them. “Arnica and eyebright; to treat bruises and for pained eyes.” I say as I move away. The panhandling car park guide, used to tourists and never shy of audience, poses for me to take a picture; but I decline, not wanting to be part of the pasquinade. He smuggles his way into my affection anyway.




I had been wondering how best to explore the Mother City; through buying flowers the motif came to me. I immediately took to quick research on the internet. In the end I discovered that it’d take a lifetime to explore everything associated with slavery in the Cape—since seemingly the region was built on slave labour—so I decide (for sanity) to limit myself to the city centre, the Company Gardens in particular.


Knowledge is burden.


With the acquired knowledge the city changes in my eyes, utterly. Everywhere I go I see tragic undertones of human slavery; old buildings, and gardens. The studied ebullience of statues, especially, look more like a kowtowing exercises to the narratory of Western colonialism and imperialism.


Cape Town, of course, as a city was established when Dutch East India Company (DOC) formed a half-way station, a toehold on the African continent, at the Cape in 1652. The idea was not to colonise, but to maximise profits of spice trades to India. Jan van Riebeeck became the first commander at the Cape and the founder of the city; mandated to plant fresh vegetables for the Company, which is how the Company’s Gardens were established at the top of Heerengracht, now Adderly, Street.


The problem is that there was not enough labour, so in 1654 the ship Roode Vos went on a slaving expedition to Mauritius and Antongil Bay in Madagascar but returned empty. The first slaves in the Cape arrived on 28 March 1658 brought by the ship Amersfoot after being captured from a Portuguese slaver that was on its way from Angola to Brazil.


About 63 000 slaves were imported into the Cape between 1658 and 1808, the year slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire. Most of them were brought from India {Bengal, Malabar and Coromandel (36.4%)}, East Indies (31.47%), Ceylon (now Sir Lanka, 3.1%), Mozambique, Madagascar and East African coast (26.65%), and the rest came from Malaya and Mauritius.


I seat on a public bench to read the edifying correspondence between Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson during the foundations of the American Republic: ‘I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.’ Says Jefferson.


The voorlopers (drum majors) are drumming Dutch liedjies (songs) to keep the dead on their wake. It’s 2nd January, the time of Minstrel Festival in the Mother City. At this time denizens of the city get a modicum of care-free camaraderie between each other, especially those of different races. I am obstructed by a frozen disgust at the violence that lies at the foundations of the city. The caravan moves on, sowing bustle. I go up Wale Street, take some few photographs of the Slave Lodge before entering the Company Gardens.


‘The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,’ Thomas Jefferson insists in another letter exchange with James Madison in the fall of 1789. Madison wrote back intimating that; ‘the social world, unlike the natural, genuinely has been inherited. It is the manufactured.’ The gist of his argument is that the social order was built, maintained, and left to us not just by a vague and nameless antiquity, but by particular people, within living memory and link to the past.


The Company Gardens is now a botanical. It gives a relaxed ambience for lovers, families, and all those who want to escape the metropolis compelling distresses for a while. It hedges Parliament buildings and the South African presidential palace called Tynhys [Summer House]. Tynhys was built on slave labour by Simon van Da Stel, the first governor of the Cape and brother-in-law of Riebeek.


Madison, of course, was of the opinion that we receive the buildings from those who came before us. We speak the languages they spoke, read the books they wrote, and are basically the avatars of their biological and moral choices; just as others will receive ours. Just as others will receive ours. That thought strikes a chord. What will others receive from us? Crimes of complicity, of evasion, of silence, of going with the comfortable flow because we don’t want to disturb the status quo; or prejudice a superficial reconciliation?



The American fathers, and those who use these kind of arguments, wanted the new Republic to find stability by accepting public debt and the consequent role of prior generations. Fine! Why then there’s a minimum of two statues of Smuts in the Company Gardens while you don’t find a single one dedicated to slaves? Didn’t their blood and toil erect those gardens? Is the silent hidden Bell enough?

There are heated debates about changes of street names and all in our country all most in every municipality building you go to. Up to this present day the U.S.A still vacillates between two points of view; wanting to acknowledge or forget the past. South Africa has just set in on that course. One says; ‘Let us forget the past.’ The other answers; ‘Because you want to rob me of its strength.’ Then another says; ‘Let’s live in the past.’ Another answers; ‘Because you have not prepared yourself for the future.’

I seek not apologies, nor reparations; just awareness of what has been with a promise to be better than we are. Just to take a moment from living in the dizzy heights of the moment without descending to presentism. History is enough Gorgon’s head as it is. Human manufacture settles nothing. We may buy flowers to ward off the stench where human beings were auctioned like animals, but pray we don’t trample on their graves.

Ernest Renan insisted that the nation is constituted in large measure by the shared memories of sufferings and sacrifices of the past that make the present generation willing to endure sufferings and sacrifices of its own. To keep faith with those who have come before the role of memory is crucial. Is it any wonder that Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address invoked the “mystic chords of memory”. People are usually ready to sacrifice for a greater future when they see that the sacrifices of those who came before them have been honoured.

I seat at another park bench watching the birds career the air in matinal excitement. The pulchritudinous tranquillity feels insulting to my mood. Table Mountain, bandaged in mist, is scowling at my neck. Grief is the beginning of the healing process. I had come to Cape Town intending to be merry, instead I found a home. Home is often where the heartache is, especially for those of us caught up on TS Eliot’s communication of the dead with their tongues of fire.

It was another American, Edmund Bruke, who said; ‘If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feeling will be drawn that way . . .’ I can’t wait change to come and my country be normal. Though the scars run too deep, there’s a clamp of hope on the aching mist (Philip Lark).