Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

By
Mphuthumi Ntabeni

ABSA stadium in East London, where the African National Congress (ANC) celebrated its 97th anniversary the and launch of its manifesto for the 2009 national elections last week is almost a backyard of my home. I’ll not get into the insufferable noise, the street drunkenness, reckless driving, and dirt such things generate. My mother, a now wavering supporter of the ANC, had serious issues with it though, threatening to tip over her scales against the organisation. “The rowdiness of it all”; her words.

As I went to the ABSA stadium I was listening to Bob Dylans’ song; Desolation Row: ‘They’re selling postcards of the hanging. / They’re painting the passports brown [yellow]. / The beauty palour is filled with sailors [politicians]. / The circus is in town . . .’ I was hoping against experience to hear something fresh, and battling with cynicism, thinking there must be better things to do with one’s holiday than this; ‘[E]verbody is either making love, or else expecting rain. . .’

I had noticed an interesting, even worrying, turn in the ANC campaign; the use of commodity market strategies for the election campaign. [The young lady with flowing braids—mimicking Vodacom—in a consumption pose: My ANC! ]The manufacturing of popular will does not get more narcissist than personalized commercialisation, I thought. The idea, I suppose, is to launch into the subconscious the idea of the ANC as not just a political party but a way of life to be consumed as a cultural statement, hints of suaveness and all. The ANC too now once to be part of modern culture.

The staduim was painted yellow with ANC supporters in jovial mood, ferried for free from all corners of the country. As I sat behind myriads of these t-shirts I was amazed at the irony written at their backs: Better education, health, safety and security, jobs for all, social development. They’re advertising their failures. These are the areas the ANC has proven to be shabby, to say the least. The scandolous audacity of it! I thought. ‘They all play the penny whistle. You can hear them blow; if you lean your head out, far enough from desolation row . . .’ The whole thing looked more like a stock-in-trade of some low comedy whose punch line I didn’t get.

Then came the speeches; the usual recycled self-satisfied fealty bosh and romanticized version of our history, tilting towards revolutionary heroism that lacks proper understanding of the mechanics of our national inherited history. Jacob Zuma (JZ) lacked depth, as usual. Even his leitmotif, umshini wam, seemed to have lost its spark, sounding stale and contrived. Then, in tradition of the organisation, he read the statistics of ANC’s achievements, bringing to mind what Hilaire Belloc wrote; ‘Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.’ Mark Twain put it more succinctly in the sentence (wrongly attributed to Disraeli sometimes) I used as a title of this article.

JZ spoonfeeded the masses with optimism, taking his authority from reading birds intensines; poisoned them, in totured self-confidence, with hopes of rooting out corruption, something he has no moral authority over. The masses got distracted, not paying much attention after the automaton chants. With ill equipped habits of culture, nostalgia for the past, they stood no chance to grasp the glaring truths. Overdetermined into redundancy by rehearsed political habits they’ve yet to unshackle themselves from political manipulations. You could sense their human spirit getting resteless, straining to go beyond emotional attachments of the past.

More than any other time I was convinced that attending ANC rallies is a waste of time, and subjecting oneself to verbal wasteland. Only people with vested interests can endure it, after all, gold has no smell and hungry stomachs no noses. Once again though, I doffed my hat to the ‘ill fed, ill housed and ill clothed masses’ for the resilence of their intoxicated hopes in dubious claims of blatant propaganda. ‘And nobody ever thinks too much, about desolation row . . .’

I felt dizzy and tired with going in circles on the fetish ANC wagon that’s stagnated on nostalgia. I guess that makes me elitist. So be it. Having drained my ungratified faculty of curiosity , and in grips of aggressive cynicism, I left before it became apparent I was counter revolutionary. ‘Praise be to Nero’s Neptune; the Titanic sails at dawn. Everybody is shouting, whose side are you on . . . I got your letters yesterday, about the time the dawn’ broke. When you asked how I was doing; was that somekind of joke? All these people you mention; yes I know them, they’re quite lame . . .’ The folk singer echoed in my ears.

Overcoming the grasping self

When our usually jocular Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, puts aside entertaining panache and attention-grabbing hype you know all is not well and rosy. He intimidated as much when delivering the 9th Steve Biko Memorial lecture at University of Cape Town. “This lecture takes place at a time when, as a country, we are going through some trying growth pains; together we are searching for inspiration, seeking guidance and yearning for leadership. Our country is undergoing a complex and sometimes painful examination of its foundations, its values and its institutions. It is at times such as this that a nation has to dig deep within itself, take careful observations and focus on repairing its soul.”

Inspiration, aplenty, he found on the writings and works of Steve Biko. The gist of his lecture was the need to give the poor material support to develop their lives. The minister touched the core of our present predicament when he mentioned need to look at people’s responsiveness to democratic empowerment and freedom. He seemed to have rightly come into conclusion that the most important challenges for our government and public institutions are now internal; involving ethics and “values [that] must have at their core, the principles of people-centred development, of freedom, of conscientisation of mobilisation and of high energy democracy.”

There’s duty to foster intelligence as a moral obligation needed to counteract the leadership dearth in the global politics of our era. We need the infusion of public and personal morality in our democratic and aspirations of freedom. Public morality is interlocking value system, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness, and make social life possible. I trust we all know what is meant by personal morality, which can be summed in one word; virtue. We need also to re-learn principles that bind us together, not only as groups of certain vested interest, but as humans concerned with human dignity. Supporting essential institutions of democracy is well and good, but we have an added responsibility of being our brother’s keeper, especially the familiar faces of indigence and strife in our own backyards (rural and township areas) we’ve grown numb against.

The problem of development cannot readily be remedied alone by finance and educators, judges, soldiers, policemen, and other professionals that necessarily make for the modern idea of successful society. There are other problems that make for inertia against our development, like inherent attitudes and values, which sometimes often even define communities’ very identity. Hence Biko was more concerned with the ‘psychology and consciousness of the oppressed.’

Commitment to self-reliance in what minister Manuel calls ‘social compact’ must be reemphasized. Not only the ‘oppressed’ need a psychological re-consciousness, but the oppressor too. And this was always Nelson Mandela’s concern, which lately has been relegated aside for another important message of his, that of reconciliation. We need to learn that a majority of people in this country were not simply segregated; they were methodically disenfranchised, stripped of their dignity and identity. Until that has been restored nothing will ever be normal in this country.

Minister Manuel concluded; ‘let me repeat the lesson that Biko taught us. Democracy is something to fight for, constantly. Development is not something handed out at the welfare office. It is a conscious process of building capabilities, giving communities power to change their lives, empowering young women and men to make a contribution to our beautiful country. At the root of Biko’s teachings and the thread that runs through the references from Marx and Unger is the concept of consciousness, the deep understanding of the self worth of people and the power of communities. The poor must be given the power to change their lives . . . An energised democracy is one where each element, business, labour, government and communities balance their rights with their responsibilities. This moment could define our collective future. Let us utilise it for a national catharsis. Let us work together as advised by Unger who writes, “Social solidarity must rest (instead) on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within a caring economy – the part of the economy in which people care for one another – as well as within the production system.”’

As Allen Tate put it, "the full language of the human situation can be the vehicle of truth." Our recent situation has brought the truth of who we are glaringly before our eyes without screeds of false nostalgia. Who we become yet is still in our power to choose, but not for long. We have not attained the hallmark of Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed, when he hoped a day would come when men and women were judged not by the colour of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character? There’s still too much baggage in our historical backs to get rid of, but we must take the initiative and reclaim the momentum of the Mandela years, with less superficial notions this time.

We need to face our history square on, albeit in a manner more conversant with the language of human values and respect for the dignity and expressive capacity of the human ¬spirit. We need to understand more fully what it means to be human, and to permit that knowledge to shape and nourish the way we ¬live. To respect each other’s rights; be concerned and work for each other’s welfare. We need to make our democracy and freedom a little more than triumph of commerce and the victory of materialism, which would make us nothing more than what is usually referred to as ‘a nation of shoppers’. In the end what is important as foundation to social institutions are internal values that overcome the lower, grasping, carnal self; i.e. self-control over greed, duty over rights, and loyalty to values of humanity over concerns for outgroups. That’s the message I took from Minister Manuel’s lecture.

Charity Begins at Home

One of the criticism that was directed against president T. Mbeki was that he concentrated power in the office of the presidency and orientated everything to his personality. We were told there was urgent need to strengthen local-government if our democracy had any hope of success. The ANC (African National Congress) conference in December 2007 at Polokwane took the initiative by voting T.Mbeki out as ANC president through the concerted efforts of party branch structures. Most of us were hopeful coming from that conference that things were turning for the best. Perhaps we should have been more circumspect where we saw the manner of the so called democratic process in Polokwane, which was more manipulations by organised factions within branch level of the ANC than anything else. Collectivism is not always democracy.

After Polokwane the ANC Members of Parliament seemed to breathe fresh air, voicing their views vigorously, pushing the margins of their party towards a more consultative and democratic process to guard against the erosion of our constitutional values. After the hearing process for the dissolution of the Scorpios it seems as though Parliament has gone back to its past habits of being a karaoke club for Luthili House (ANC headquarters). What the South African Parliament lacks, it seems glaringly clear now, is what Kerry Kennedy called, in a recent lecture at University of Cape Town recently, ‘moral courage’ to dissent towards the maintenance of constitutional law even against party caucus when necessary.

Caucusing in Parliament is nothing unique to the ANC, even if those in the minority do it, and tend to cry foul whenever they loose. If anything, the past few years of our democracy should have convinced us by now that “party-parliamentarism” does not really give power to mobile vulgus, but to vested interest of party leadership. This, indeed, is a false substitute for people's representatives. For check and balances we should, at the least, consider changing the system to include individual candidates for local-governance and Members of Parliament. Isn’t a ground vote the whole point behind popular representation? Our democratic system has to be organic, live up to our local challenges as they arise. This might also give us reprise from the nascent nauseating group politics within and out of the ruling party.


I do understand, nor respect, the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional, industrial principles, or even political values for that matter. I respect formation based on moral values, which is why Kerry Kennedy’s lecture touched me so much. After Polokwane, there was lot of talk about strengthening Local Government, which was taken as the nadir of good governance. Of course there are no guarantees that a strong Local Government means good governance, if the Republic of China is anything to go by. In China the central government is almost hapless against local government that is often very corrupt and unruly in following the passed laws of the republic, especially Environmental laws that are flaunted at will by local governments when bribed by businessman. On the same breath, good local governance is possible, as exemplified in countries like Switzerland and other federal working states.

Of course, the cause for moral courage is a double edged sword. For instance, it cannot be that it is needed only in Africa, despite Ms Kennedy’s emphasis, even if Africa is the continent most fraught with problems associated with limited civil justice. As long as, for instance, trading tendencies tend to be bias against the developing world, moral courage will be needed also by those in Western countries to “Speak Truth To Power.” When people are imprisoned on secluded islands indefinitely just for suspicion of being terrorists, moral courage is also needed to speak out. There’s also a clear danger, beyond the obvious, in narrowing the borders of moral courage to include only instance one agrees with. In thinking civil justice is only concomitant with only liberal democracy, for instance.

Another cause, blatant in our country, is how the majority of our people live with hunger and permanent refugee status in different informal places around the country. But you hardly here any moral courage coming out of private people and business against it. When the first fires blazed, in the form of xenophobic attacks, there was more moralising and condemnation than moral courage. The only moral courage we saw was in the form of philanthropic help for the displaced people, which was a good thing. But the whole thing reminded me of something René Girard once said; that “The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same.” The thing about moral courage is that it requires the ever widening of borders of empathy and dissent without neglecting what’s under your nose. As the idiom goes, charity begins at home.

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).

The Dye is cast

Lately, since he received overwhelming majority nomination on regional ANC (African National Congress) branches, JZ (Jacob Zuma) has been gallivanting on the globe acting like a an incumbent president, selling the skin of bear he has not even shot—the actual elections are only happening at the ANC conference from 15-20 December 2007 in Polokwane.
There’s no doubt that JZ sees his presidential mission as fait accompli. But what is the word from the ANC delegates who’d be voting in Polokwane? From the few I’ve talked with the general attitude is that ‘I’ve nothing personal against JZ, but my take is that, with all the baggage he’s been burden with it’d reflect badly on us as the country if he were to be our next president. You must not worry; the ANC in the end will come to its senses.’ I’ll doff my hat off if they manage to pull that one off, that is, preventing JZ from being the next president of the ANC.
Personally I prefer what I see as the lesser evil of Mbeki’s click (President: Thabo Mbeki; Vice president: Nkosazana Dlamani-Zuma; and so on) to continue for another five years. My concern is that; the voice of the majority on the ground is clearly for Zuma. What message would be the delegates passing if they ignore that voice? The ANC motto is that ‘The People Shall Govern.’
Having said that; the dye is now cast. The two elephants are about to clash in Polokwane next weekend. As those who grew on the struggle the only thing to say about this kind of confrontation is: Ayihlab’ ihlome!
I’ve in the past weeks, in agony of diplomacy, been trying to join the debate about the election of the next ANC president. Now that the direction of things is clear I think I shall close to this topic with a very frank talk. I imagine listening to a fresh leader—something the ANC is clearly adverse to—speaking in the opening ceremony of the ANC 52nd Conference (Polokwane). This is what he would say:
My pity collects and is roused when I look at you. I think of the glorious manner by which you conducted yourself in fighting the scourge of apartheid over years. It is up to you now to continue on that path, or to divert from it for strange sayings and principles. You have in the past elected leaders that were blameless as flowers, others not so blameless, but you’ve always managed to wade through because you allowed the principles of democracy and human rights to guide you.
Now you’ve come to your 52nd National Conference to elect your next president. Leading to this conference has been disappointing signs of your neglect, even shunning, the founding principles of your organisation. Others among you want to be in power in perpetuity, against your traditions and principles. Others behave immorally against the principles of human rights you purport to support, yet they still want to be elected leaders of your party.
There is nothing wrong with ambition but one wishes its objectives were more edifying. I see now that your fantasies have generated realities. Is there been a dearth of leadership material in your party that you should allow yourselves to be manoeuvred to this unattainable self-defeating position. You stupid, stupid people! Wake up! This is your last chance or soon you shall be fondling your dust and weep over your own ruins.
I face your idiocy with stunned astonishment. Go ahead and elect your paranoid kings and false prophets. Build tyrants who’ll enslave you through your greediness. You’ve shown that in this matter you’ll not accept the command of reason, you shall then be degraded by your bellies. You stupid, stupid people walking plagues of foolishness. Looks like now you’ve decided to ‘cast shadows that are contrary to the sun.’ All good and well then; ‘we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told, . . . Now, gods, stand up for bastards!,’

South African Presidential Race

It is goes to the natural arrogance of every age to feel its era is the most important in history, but the 52nd ANC (African National Congress) from 15 to 20 December 2007 will probably go down in the history books of South Africa as a much anticipated political conference of all time. The next ANC (African National Congress) president, ipso facto, of the republic, will be elected there by the structures of the party.

By the time Nelson Mandela stepped down as the president of the republic Thabo Mbeki and his supporters had manoeuvred the internal structures of the ANC into making him the only candidate at the national conference that elected him. Constitutionally Mbeki now cannot stand for a third term as a South African president though he has recently been giving Caesar like indications that should ‘the party’ structures elect him to stand as the next president of the ANC he would accept the nominations as his duty. Most people fear the untenable situation of two seats of power should the president of the ANC be different to that of the republic. Or wourse a situation where Mbeki, as the president of the ANC, would become a puppet master of the next president of the republic.

I was glad when the ANC branch of Gaby Shapiro in Rondebosch, Cape Town (where I stay) elected Cyril Ramaphosa as its preferred candidate to be the next president of the ANC. The election was by an overwhelming vote against the likes of Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Tokyo Sexwale. It’s a pity that our province, Western Cape—termed the Cape of political storms—seems not privy to the advantages of endorsing Ramaphosa’s nomination (the candidacy of Mbeki is ahead overall in the province).

It seems to me Cyril Rhamaphosa is the only non compromised candidate among the choices we presently have. He competently represented the ANC in the CODESA negotiations in Kempton Park that saw the establishment of a government of national unity, a precursor to a fully fledged South African non racial democratic government. He had the blessing of Nelson Mandela to be his successor until the ANC party stalwarts convinced Mandela otherwise. Ramaphosa has a long history with the trade union organizations, and just might be the one candidate to restore COSATU’s (Congress of South African Trade Unions) confidence on the Tripartite Alliance without alienating the so called Mbeki and Zuma factions. The majority of those, sometimes termed ‘inxiles’, who made for the general movement that fought apartheid from within the country known then as the UDF (United Democratic Front), would have their ayes behind Ramaphosa who also has deep roots in that movement.

With the credentials of a trade unionist, businessman and lawyer Ramaphosa would enjoy the confidence of business, the erudite class, and the lumpenproletariat (underclass). He just might be the only leader who can achieve the mammoth task of repulsing the reciprocity of suspicion between South Africans concerning the remerging beast of race and worrying class divide. He’s such an obvious candidate that only those with other vested interests object to his candidacy as the next president.

What’s the alternative?

The later-day overnight magnate, Tokyo Sexwale, is too much spin, pose, samizdat fanzines and feigning of cultivated taste with false humility. He has a worrying tendency of manufacturing and manipulating facts for show, plugging inculpating twigs as goes walk along; involving himself in this and all that as only characterless individuals would do. He’s too much of a drama queen; and of course the white liberal press love him. He’s married to a white woman, and his millionaire status assuages the upper middle-class fears and flatters their aspirations.


Sexwale shot to fame with his Mark Anthony grace after the then most popular politician after Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, was murdered by Right wing hired guns for his communist beliefs. Sexwale was the first politicians to be caught on camera on the scene his track-suit dripping the blood of his comrade and all. He was then appointed to be the premier of South Africa richest and economic engine province, Gauteng. He refused to take the second term, opting to shedding his communists pelt by going to full time to business where he acquired enormous wealth at a lightning speed through some Black Economic Empowerment mining deals. Sexwale’s major error was trying to mint his own coins by independently declaring his availability for candidacy, through foreign press (BBC) nogal. The usual ANC practise is allowing the organic process of the ANC’s structures to nominate one starting at branch level. He has since been tangling and hanging himself by his own words and ambitions.

Jacob Zuma, the current ANC deputy president, blends balderdash with shoddiness; unites vacuousness to suspicious morality, and tends to accommodate his passions to historical prejudices. His recent loosing a High Court case against the National Prosecuting means he’s liable to be charged for corruption soon, which might make a terrible PR job for the country. But he is without a doubt the most popular candidate among the vox populi. His stalwarts, amongst whom is the ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League) and COSATU are unfazed in their support for his candidacy. The majority of Zuma’s supporters are the disgruntled lot who feel South African economic growth and fiscal has been largely at their expense for the benefit of the business class alone.

The ANC electoral process has a history of shunning popular candidates; but the dark cloud of the corruption case might make Jacob Zuma desperate enough to adopt Caesar Borgia’s motto: Aut Caesar aut nihil [Caesar or nothing] at which state all hell might break loose. He has the support of the people behind him even if scoffed by the general middle-class aspired and usually conservative with subtle right wing tendencies.

Jacob Zuma has laid hold of the popular disquiet and discontent of ordinary South Africans who, are now starting to show serious signs of being tired of making sacrifices to perpetual illusions of economic panacea, have very little to lose. People on the ground have started to disdain submission in the name of unfulfilled promises. What the next presidential elections will clearly reveal is reconciliation and ruin faces of the same coin; and how the failure of the other inspire the success of the other where the dream has been deferred.


President Mbeki, no matter how competent, has been on the helm for too long. It’s time he made way fro some new blood, new ideas and all. Besides there’s been too much meed of clucking and cackling involving his name, like the so called Aids denialism and Arms Deal scandal. The green flies [rumour] has it his office is proposing the alternative idea of making Joe Netshitenzhe, the current government strategist, the next president of the republic. Netshitenzhe is on the high circles of Mbeki advisers and thus will probably present a seamless transition from his government.

Be that as it may, I personally feel it is time for new blood and fresh ideas. Ramaphosa has consular dignity needed for the first citizen of a country. Coming from the meretricious argumentation and paradox-mongering of our outgoing president, Ramaphosa’s lawyerly chaste brevity might be the breath of fresh air we need. But it looks like the only chance he has now is a highly unlikely 25% backing in the next ANC conference at Plokwane in December; or if the Mbeki and Zuma faction should reach a stalemate.

I’m of the opinion that the master chess player, Thabo Mbeki, has done it again. It’ll be a miracle if anyone except himself comes out victorious from the Polokwane ANC Conference. The only real question now is who’ll be his deputy who surely will be the next president of the republic and most likely a pawn in the hands of our master player. Looks like whichever way you look at it, South African politics shall be defined according to Mbeki for a foreseeable future.

What South Africa needs from its next leader is someone who would be able to build a conducive and enabling atmosphere for business to thrive, while giving support to the general populace to gain economic participation, and regain its civic conscience and cultural patrimony that was destroyed by decades of racial and colonial oppression.

There is, especially in the township—a social ticking bomb—instances of unrest rising exponentially. This obviously suggests a rising tide of discontent. If this anger is not well managed it will degenerate to the clumsy pyrotechnics of Zimbabwe-like situation. The next leader would be well advised to take seriously this fire of restlessness. Thomas Paine was of the opinion that; “Whatever the apparent cause of any riots maybe, the real one is always want of happiness. It shews that something is wrong in the system of government, that injures the felicity by which society is to be preserved.” It is easy to lament or condemn the clumsy aggression of a populist regime, like that of Robert Mugabe, but much harder to accept that it usually emerge as result of political and economic decomposition that left millions to survive without support. Neglected and polarised people tend to give their alliance to promises of instant remedies of populist movements.

What South Africa needs is what Thomas Paine called a revolution in the state of civilization. “A revolution in the state of civilization, is the necessary companion of revolution in the system of government. If a revolution in any country be from bad to good, or from good to bad, the state of what is called civilization in that country, must be made conformable thereto, to give that revolution effects.”

Rant The Beloved Country

Remember that ditty circulating in the internet round about the time the U.S.A. attacked Iraq: If you cannot find Osama, / Bomb Iraq. / If the market's hurt your Momma, / Bomb Iraq. / If the terrorists are Saudi, / And they’ve repossessed your Audi, / And you're feeling kinda rowdy, / Bomb Iraq!

Wide spread loss of trust in public authority is chic in our era. In South Africa we go further by making the government a repository of all our dissatisfactions. Lucky for us we’ve the tyranny of opinion polls—the modern day answer to ancient practise of reading the animals entrails for guidance—leaping about in response to every latest headline or cock-up to back our illusions. And so it goes:

The news is yo-yoing your opinions as the corollary to the loss of anchorage you feel deep within making you feel kind of fanciful and abstract. You are not in the mood of confronting your illusions? Why not undermine the government in cross-stitched logic and vague quatrains of Nastradamus. Call it the crime thing.

You feel a little exhaustion from your imperialist hangover and nostalgia, and are walking around tired of being a nonentity why not manufacture your popularity from the flattering delusions your barmates give you when you are ‘out to lunch’. Better still; you’ve been having bad dreams lately of apocalypse and deeper misgiving of Cassandra fantasies that we’re tilting to wards Zimbabwe like situation. Rant! Rant, my epicurean fad; there are government’s inefficiencies all over, only the business class is perfect (and of course they promote you). Rant! The barbarians are at the gates.

You support political leaders not on principles but on shallow fancy of whether Hugo Boss shirts are in, or Armani? Base your support not on any deeply held belief or commitment, but on the fact that you wanna get on the Gravy Train. Bring on the rip-roaring umshini wam Zulu boy to fan factionalism and scar liberals out of their wits.

You are irritated by party politics and desperate for life style politics that judge your leaders by personality rather than political factors? The leader does not have a Cheshire cat smile, and is an unapologetic dweeb who walks like he’s wearing sock garters. All this flames you but can’t really nail his fault except he looks down and expose your sophisticated ignorance? Scandalise and ostracise him. Everyone is distancing themselves from their past to be pc while dwelling on its weeds in their hearts of hearts; why can’t he just go with the flow and let sleeping dogs lie?

If your moral campus is spinning out of control and you are not sure why; blame it on the government. If your partner is living you, and your first born is doing drugs. The government is surely to blame.

If you kind of feel like some publicity-generating eccentric with a tinpot flare. Pluck a crisis from thin air, and like a Pharaoh getting his authority from Ra, suck your thumb and implicate the government on your delusions. If they deny it proof enough they’ve done it. Besides, who cares, you got publicity spin-offs. You need to demonstrate to occidental masters that Africa has an independent free non subordinate press.

If you are feeling a little relative morally; feel like crapping on some pities because you are annoyed that the fundamentalist do not respect or give a f#*% about your Switzerland position—but are shit scared to offend them lest they are hiding Osima or an Inquisitor on their backyard—transfer it to the government. Those ignorant former terrorists are safer target for your blunt fictions.

You kind of feel dissatisfied with economic growth, and feel, as Clive Hamilton writes in his book, The Growth Fetish, “restless dissatisfaction, chronic stress and private despair, feelings that give rise to a rash of psychological disorders” of anxiety, depression, substance abuse that makes you “engage in a range of behaviours aimed at compensating for or covering up these feelings.” It’s definitely the government’s fault. Shout out! Get some attention. ‘Me! Me! Me!’

Who’s your Tata now? Madiba! Help, we’re sinking!

Feeling déclassé; can’t afford brands that define the fetishism of your imagined trendy self style. You discover pen marks on the surface of your expensive handbag, or too much accumulated lint at its bottom? The government is polluting your world. The made is late? This government of fishes and loaves is giving her ideas that are making her too big for her boots. You diss and dish without creative drive; it’s not that you’ve confined your ambition to the consumerist’s mentality; no it’s the government that’s clipping your wings.

In the end what is all this noise but “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” feeling intoxicated by freedom and the yo-yoing of moods, grateful to the times, and the government, for allowing freedom to run amok. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Wisdom here is not the purchase of the day.

Well Done To The Springboks!!!

We did it! Thanks to the concerted support of the nation and the Springbok's hard work, South Africa is the 2007 Webb Ellis Trophy winner. In Gugs, we celebrated the win with tom-toms and vuvuzelas blasting on the streets. Braai fires were lit in every corner. Other sheebens went as far as to give everyone a free round at the strike of the eighth minute as the Boks proudly lifted a very proud president Mbeki on their shoulders. We decided to honour the Boks with the metronymic name of our township, Gugulethu (Our Pride).



Of course, there were spoilsports who thought us mad for celebrated a still leaves too much to be desired when it comes to transformation South African Rugby team. To me they were the missing the point, which is to put it pithily: My country, right or wrong.



Understandably England was not just going to hand us the victory. In fact the game was too much on the technical for charlatans like me, which was a good thing I decided to watch through the expert's eyes next to me. With my limited knowledge it seemed the English were more committed, almost desperate, than the calm and collected Bokke. The Bokke played as if they were the defending champions and not the other way around. The Proteas can learn a lot from the Bokke with that calm under pressure, and sticking into your game. And Bafana would do well to learn precision of skill in executing and punishing the opponent's mistakes.



Something that spoilt my celebrations in my eyes was the surly attitude of English players after the game. Perhaps I was spoilt the graciousness of Fiji players after loosing to SA, those long lap of humility and all. As the result they become my second favourite team. I counted about three English players who snubbed president Mbeki's extended handshake during medal presentation. I was thinking what's that all about. My friend, when I asked, just shrugged his shoulders and sighed; "There goes our colonial masters again."



It takes just a quick perusal in the sober stile of history to see how bad losers the English are, not just in sport. Remember the battle at Ntab' Enzima, which history books as Waterkloof. In that Frontier War, amaXhosa, in the leadership of Maqoma, a chief of amaNgqika and son of Ngqika, routed amaJoni, otherwise know then as the 'Red Devils' then. Today you'll hardly find a single English historian admitting to that. The Zulu Impis did the same at the battle of Isandlwana; the same happened in many of the skirmishes that made for what used to be called Anglo-Boer War, now the South African War.



As I write the English press, ever easily led away by ancient prejudice, are spouting rants of sophisticated ignorance about this or that concerning the game, our players, and our country. Well, you know how the saying used to go: "Nothing doth make havock of mankind as the sons of Albion." Always when involved in anything they want to flourish even to rankness by uniting prejudice and fraud to force, trying to out master the Roman imperialistic mischief. In their outrage I see their weaknesses, polished and published as wounded pride.



In 1994 we made a contract, called a Constitution, which, in the words of Mandela was 'to lead our country out of the valley of darkness." The following year it was cemented by the euphoria of winning the Rugby World cup. The euphoria is back again to assist us with the renewal of our vows. Luckily the majority of us still agree to stand by our contract, the general kind of commitment; a commitment not merely of the will but that must be of deeds also.



We all each have to compromise there and there to further this collective deal. We must divest ourselves from prejudice, paternalism, and worship into the deal the ideal of 'nationhood' as defined by Ortega y Gasset called 'nationhood'. Gasset was of the opinion that we must first get the statehood right. "State begins when man strives to escape from the natural society of which he has been made a member of by blood or any other natural principle like language, race, or ethnicity."



I truly believe this country of ours is destined for glory. Of course there will be prices to pay, like proper differentiation of the burden of our history and overcoming the baggage of attitudes that need to be changed. "A State is," said Gasset, "a superation and cross-breeding of these natural origins." As the young poet (Philip Larkin) saw it; If one can accept the dream / The rest is best forgot.

Swabbing the Deck

There was a time when 'freedom of the press' laid largely on the fact that it was not an industry, but those times are now long gone. The press, as a forth estate, is not only an industry, but foremost a business and striving to be a political force. Perish the idea then that the press is an independent non biased messenger and let's look at issues straightly.

In modern times the press has forged its stance as a counter-medium of dissemination, mostly hostile to government propaganda. In our country this as can be noticed in present Pikoli saga. Regrettably it is prone to exaggeration in reporting, especially when it comes to government short-comings. For instance, the press should have correctly reported the suspension of Vusi Pikoli, the national director of persecution as a suspension, not a dismissal, since the law does not permit the president to suspend the national director of persecution without due Parliamentary process. It is no wonder that Frank Chikane, the director general of the Presidency and Secretary of the Cabinet, accused it of manufacturing a crisis.

Be that as it may, it does not mean all the issues the press raises lend credence to centaurs and satyrs. Personally I agree with the leader of the opposition party, Helen Zille, that Frene Ginwala is not an ideal person to lead the inquiry of the suspension of the national director of persecution. We don't doubt her competence, just her bona fides, considering the fact that she is the member of the National Executive Council, thus too associated with the higher echelons of the ruling party. In the ideal world this would have no bearing on her objectivity, but we don't live in an ideal world.

I also think that, for maintaining the dignity of the office the National Commission of the SA Police Service, Jackie Selebi should at least step down until all the shenanigans that surrounds him are sorted out. For the press to say the whole thing is what Rabelais evoked as inevitable sites of murmur and plot might be spreading it too thickly, but that it is what the press does when not supplied with clear information. Rev Chikane might despise the rattle, or try to disown the gibberish, but providing clear information is the only thing that'll relieve the fatigue of the situation.
On the other hand if the reported allegations against the Sunday Times editor and his deputy of illegally being in possession of the health minister's hospital records are true then the law must take its course. None of us are above the law, and freedom of expression does not excuse anyone from obeying journalistic ethics and the laws of the country. It beats me how that would spell degrading towards the Zimbabwean situation, as some of our media commentators (especially at Johnnic Media—I’m not sure what those guys are smoking), howling on the strength of delusions of their pen, have taken to vacuously saying.
The ideal would be for our journalistic commentary to broaden the perceptions of our collective consciousness into nationhood, instead of invoking people to retreating Lagers that are defined by their respective prejudices. As it is now we're trapped in cloying political leader trashing than proper analysis. Whatever maybe wrong with our president's style of leadership it sometimes seems more is growing wrong with our avuncular self-assured rehearsed imitative arguments. The problem is not that we are underlings, but are iconoclasts bent only on bringing the prominent to dust.

Perhaps what we need now, more than in 1995, is to win the Rugby World Cup to re-inject our sense of national pride. Something that'll embody the conception of social and cultural transformation while giving voice to the true nature of our generation. We need something that will attribute our characteristics and values across racial, social, cultural, and historic timelines on the basis of our common geographical and experiential roots.

It does not mean we need to stop being frank and honest on with each other; whitewashing things is not going to help us. But a change of tone and depth in analyses as opposed to superficial pettiness is desirable. Somehow we've to find ways of rising above our purée of disgust and inherited mistrust for we're starting to sound ludicrous and foolish.

Ghandi once said that "the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality". And Steve Biko was wont to quote Aimé Césaire that no one "possesses the monopoly on truth, intelligence, force and there is room for all of us at the rendezvous of victory." If only.

Saffron Revolution

The only thing that has been keeping us informed about what has been termed the Safron Revolution in the Burma, the Bloggers, is now been silenced. How disgusting and self-defeating. The Burma Junta has seen the capabilities and freedom that comes with people on the ground who have in the past weeks been keeping us informed of what was happening in that country as monks and ordinary people marched on the streets to demand more freedom and democracy in their country. Pity that the country has no coveted natural resources otherwise the elected junta in Washington would have long made a fuss about liberating the Burmese people. Like Mandela, Aung Suu Kyi, shall be free soon, and with her the Burmese. There’s no resisting the will of the people when they stand united. The struggle goes on!

Mbeki vs The Press

South Africa got its political freedom at the time when the era of ideologies came to an end, ushering the politics of personalities and fear. The ANC profited well from the charisma and statue of Nelson Mandela but his departure from the political scene drove it into politics of fear.

Politics of fear are something almost all political parties of significance in South Africa rely on. The DA was built on the foundations of ‘fighting back’ strategies and fear of turning South Africa into another corrupt African State. The fear ANC relies on is that of things going back to the realities of apartheid era. Its current talk of ‘The enemy manoeuvres but it remains the enemy’ trying to offset the gains of ‘National Democratic Revolution’ make the point clear.

To complicate issues in our nascent democracy, there’s has been a rise in careless prattle and untrained clump of words that are the usual consequent of dynamics of free press, which is lifting the lids off the immature ANC government. Instead of taking this trumpeting manifesto as occupational necessity of a free democratic country the ruling party wants to compete with it.

Mallarmé once ironically explained his poem, La nuit approbatrice, to his friend Henri Cazalis by saying; ‘If you murmur it yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation.’ Mostly what the press murmurs gives it cabbalistic sensation they believe to be the splendour of truth.

Unfortunately the cabbalistic sensation has rubbed off into the ruling party, as demonstrated by statements like; ‘Our historical opponents have the task to convince the nation that under our leadership, the democratic revolution has failed. The revolutionary duty of the ANC is not only further to accelerate the process of social transformation, but also to conduct the political and ideological struggle to ensure the cohesion of the masses of our people as a united force engaged in the long march towards the creation of a truly non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous democracy.’ [ANC Today; Volume 7, No. 34 • 31 August—6 September 2007; A silent mood of trepidation?] Talk about wearing the mantle of your purported enemy.

R.S. Roberts’ competent book, ‘Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’ is a clear example of what happens when one allows the need to address the platitudinous tendencies of the media distract you. The book reads more as if its purpose was to prove the impotent shallowness of our media commentators. Even when you achieve this goal, as Roberts has, the victory is pyrrhic. Taking the media too seriously when it violates modesty by heaping spleen and cultivating hysteria against is like squaring circles. It is self-defeating and dancing to their drums.

Impression is a survival skill to the media, more valuable than reflection. It is in the nature of the media to leech in order to inject vitality on its content. Press freedom has, world over, been raised into a political creed. That’s what is meant by the Fourth Estate. The sooner the ANC government realises this the more it’d be better structured to exploit, rather than fight it.

Although political parties are still electoral machines—mostly out of inertia—the times have changed. Political parties have ceased to be issuers of alternative ideas as can be seen by writers and thinkers throwing their lot with broadcasting networks that have acquired industrial and commercial life. In short, money has become the only sinew in the war of airwaves. Hence instead of ideas has come the struggle of images and personalities, the battles of the scoop and the soundbites.

The only way political parties will survive here is by aligning themselves, for tactical reasons, with media communication. That’s what the aesthetically assertive leader of DA, Helen Zille, with her look-at-me style of politics, has learnt very well to do. Instead of huffing and puffing about she milks it, beating the tom-toms of publicity to her advantage.

The press is not only an industry, but now an industry first and foremost. Political journals, like ANC Today, might serve as internal organs for intellectual power struggles, but to capture the attention of the vox populli you need media. Media form bridge between the theory of the vanguard and the spontaneous movement of the class, in Lenin’s idiom.

The ANC needs to stop retreating to bellicose politics and placidly put out into the world why millions keep voting it into government election after election. Despite what the self-appointed fundi of our political scene say about the nostalgia and ignorance of masses who keep voting for the ANC, people know exactly which side their bread is buttered. It is the failure of the ANC technique that it has not translated its democratic legitimacy into sound publicity strategies.

The lesson we all need to relearn, as the bickering starts to show some serious personal misfiring, is that that politics is essentially about maintaining social stability. Transformation is a necessary step for furthering our freedom but none of us have anything to gain from the state of anarchy. It might be that every anarchic situation is the herald of a renaissance, but there are no guarantees, and the price to higher to pay. The gods of apartheid who fled through the front door of our democracy are starting to come back through the backdoor and the windows. It is time to take caution.

Drawing their authority from the sun, like Egyptian Pharoahs, some in the media have lately been at pains trying to convince us that things in our country are falling apart. Most of us do not believe the bagarre in the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, COSATU & SACP) leading to Polokwane means anything more than proper differentiation within the alliance. They’re encouraging signs of democratic change happening, and the necessary beginnings for severance of artificial coalitions that have outlived their usefulness.

We all need to be done with our irrational anger, dishonest evasiveness and greedy opportunism, and admit some few truths to ourselves with the humility they deserve. Like the fact that we are a country emerging from a wounding past, bankrupt of ideas to take us into a non-racial and multicultural future we want to be; instead of trying to be poor ersatz of other systems and countries.

Our media needs to learn sensitivity to complex issues, whose value is to be found in its receptiveness and proper understanding of our past experience. The government, especially our president, needs to open up more, learn not to be emotional against the criticism of their policies and failures; because this is how the country will establish its own reflective consciousness. Only then will we be done of these cabbalistic sensations.No one is saying the battle for hegemony should also sieze.

म्बेकी

The publication of Ronald Suresh Robert’s book Fit To Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki [FTNI], in South Africa, has been equivalent to the hauling of a boulder into the murky pond of political chattering class. Roberts is no stranger to controversy in South African since his publication of Nadine Gordimer’s biography whose authorisation he was refused at the last hour. Roberts also has recently lost a defamation case against South Africa’s biggest Sunday paper, The Sunday Times.

There were invidious speculations also that the book, FTNI was commissioned by the South African presidency’s office, with ABSA bank made to pay the author a six digit sum for the work. A démenti was issued from the presidential office but the press was not convinced. So the ripples of the book were felt well before the effect of actual publication, all for the wrong reasons.

Roberts has a skill of clear writing, and a gift of insight, required by the strict demands of non fictional work. Regrettably he suffers also from the lawyer’s argumentative personality that makes his writing sometimes digressive. In FTNI he lines up an assemblage of South African self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, charlatans, spoiled reporters and unprincipled academics that make up the vague organism I conveniently call the chattering class. He target practise on them with his accumulated academic counter arguments to reveal their lack of analytic intelligence, and accuse them with what Edward Said would have called their ‘imperial attitude’.

Roberts ruffled a lot of feathers by exposing the stereotypical pretensions of South African political/journalistic commentary ‘who inhabits the imperial attitude’. The kerfuffle of wagging tongues have since been humming and hawing about this or that, as people who live in glass houses are wont to do when stones are thrown back on them. It is not worth the effort of dealing with these personality scoring and intellectual pillow fights. Suffice to say Roberts gives a full measure of ad hominem dose of it in FTIN. These syndicated columnists have since been paying him in kind, revelling and ostracising his name in every newspaper. What they don’t reveal to the public is that FTIN actually is a very good book to read, fraught with argumentation, quotations and on-line footnotes fit to be a thesis, but still a good read.

Quoting the playwright David Hamet’s citing of the book of Ecclesiastes castigates the chattering class’s tendency of denialism of not willing to confront South Africans problems head on. He says the country has fallen on ‘evil times . . . a time in which we do not wish to examine ourselves and our unhappiness’. Roberts blames this denialism in what I’ve, somewhere called the lack and fear of native intelligence. The dearth of commentary in the media, for instance, about president Mbeki’s well constructed recent Steve Biko’s lecture in Cape Town supports this argument.

What is more interesting to me is Robert’s head on confrontation with the most annoying habits of condescension in most South African liberals; their tendency to trim others to fit liberal prejudices, and the failure to recognize their own bigotry. The historian (or should I say pseudo-historian) RW Johnson, gets the brunt of Roberts’ punches in this case. Hellen Suzman and Tony Leon do not escape either. The majority of South African liberals, of cause, need to disabuse themselves of notions like ‘relaxed acceptance of things that are crazy, macabre, or wildly alarming is very African’ as written by Johnson in 1996.

It would have been more interesting and ideal had Roberts felt obliged to tackle the hierarchal mentality inside the ANC [African National Congress] also, which is clearly antithetical to democracy for lack of vitality if nothing else. ‘Instead of a soul-searching enigma-breaking biography, this book is a displacement of certain fictions—an engagement with many of the myths and invidious discourses that have pilled themselves high around Mbeki, as around the numerous native leaders of the anti-colonial past. Rather than producing a nice life story of the cradle-to-grave sort, I want to highlight and contest existing accretions of false impression—both about the ANC and about Thabo Mbeki.’ And that to the parlance of South African media makes Roberts a praise singer and FTIN an unworthy hagiography. Fuck them! I’ve seen only one review of the book, in the Mail and Guardian by Vicki Robinson, that approaches anything near to positive.

Tis’ true that more openness and uninhibited debate about national issues is needed within the ANC echelons where receptiveness and towing the line is valued more highly than individual perception. Robert in his book had an opportunity of expanding the platform of dissenting freedom within the party. Also of touching on the issue of class politics within the ANC that are now spawning a gleaming nest of worms on the road to the ANC’s 52nd National Conference in December where a leader of the ANC would be elected.

Robert’s book also has very little to say about the majority of poor South Africans who have been left behind by present economic growth who has now become restive as seen recently burning and looting in basic service political demonstrations against township municipalities. Of course every book is by necessity limited in its scope by its thesis, but one would have expected a discourse about Mbeki’s fitness to govern to go into depth into the situation of the majority of those he governs, especially seeing that they are presently disgruntled.

The real problem, perhaps, with the book FTIN is that it is told ex parte of the governing party, or rather of Thabo Mbeki, who some feel is bent to be the only one playing dauphin in the hegemony of the ANC. It must also be a limiting factor for Robert, as an expat from Trinidad, to have to rely solely on written word and media reporting to gauge the mood and Weltanschauung of South African vox populi. Which perhaps is why he decided not to venture too much in that direction.

To be fair, Roberts does compare the South African situation well with other emerging similar markets, like Brazil, and comes out convinced that the South African government does more in its GDP spending on the poor than the rest. But, in my book, it could do more and quicker if it were not too obsessed with fiscal health as defined by the Washington Consensus. In an era when those who are at the loosing hand of globalization are resorting to aggressive militant tactics against the prevailing capitalist status quo not to talk about it seems like a regrettable missed opportunity to me.

The major South African press has been trying their best to discourage people from reading the book on pretext that Roberts is nothing more than an intellectual manqué who recycles old squabbles and plagiarizes witticisms. Some go as far as to call the book a waste of intellectual energy. That, in my opinion, is a gross misrepresentation. In fact I feel a book like this has long been coming in South African debating scene. Most of those who are hurt by it have reasons to be because Roberts does pull some heavy punches in attacking the mediated kitsch of rococo coffee-shop intellectualists who’ve appointed themselves avant-gardes of South African Zeitgeist.

The problem with most South African commentators is that they think wearing a badge of dissent is a sign of substance and enlightenment. They do not even research things they want to discuss, only relying on instant occidental skulduggery for their commentary. Most have little to show beyond afflictions of self-aggrandizements and gross careerism that are called freedom of conscience in these ‘evil times’. Roberts does a commendable job puncturing and putting out a little wind out of their sails.

To say, for instance, that Roberts’ effort on the book was a waste of intellectual effort is to deny facts he’s stating without engaging them. To deny facts without material counter argument is banality; and that is wide spread in the petting circles of South African chattering class who are fast making themselves into a waste of public space and amplification of foolishness that has become vulgar through its gain of cheap confidence.

The adolescent intellectual pillow fighting of our press Roberts engages would be a shame if it was not for the fact that media is highly regarded by the vox populi who regards its opinion as the first base for popular sentiment. By blunting the cloying imputations of the narcissist culture in our chattering class Roberts compels the reader to ask what drives popular press. Cui bono? Who stands to benefit?

Roberts has his flaws also, in the book, like too much slapstick leeriness; spluttering bile and occasional tendentious rants when disgusted by the subject he discusses. Indeed one gets the feeling that Roberts takes too seriously the paladins of newspaper syndicated pet tics whose goal, some of us have learned, is to survive their publicity budgets.

The book does get sketchy in narrative flow, betraying its eclectic assembly of journalistic topics. What are wonderful are facts of interpretations Roberts brings to these and the background of president Mbeki’s speeches. That will surprise even a reader who has been an avid reader of what’s been happening in South Africa in the past few years. Roberts in FTIN intellectualises our history since the coming of Mbeki to presidential seat with peppering from traditional historical similarities, especially from Xhosas Frontier epoch.

I can imagine those without much intellectual foundation of political philosophy getting easily discouraged in trying to follow Robert’s arguments that are fraught with learned references to David Hume, Frantz Fanon, and so forth. But political philosophy is central in considerations of good or just society, so they just will have to tear their hair, gnash their teeth and wring their hands, because in the end it would be worth their effort.

Whatever shortcomings Roberts have, a vapid writer he is not, which is quite refreshing from the recycled fodder of intellectual pretensions we tend to be fed on in South African political analysis. The South African debating platform will be indebted to him for opening up space partitioned by superficial commentary. For debunking intellectual bankruptcy and raiding intellectual black holes that have long been promoted by the hue of our journalistic cliques. That he did not extend this space to the haunts of the ANC is regrettably, and betrays his intellectual objectivity.

Even if Roberts’ book does little more than shake up the establishment of gate-keepers (as it is already doing) in our press and political echelons of liberal circles it would have achieved a lot. Nothing will convince one about the merits or demerits of To Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki short of actually reading it for one self. The significance of Roberts’ arguments depends on which side of the fence you stand. The book is aesthetically appealing, intellectual fulfilling, politically expounding, but limited as a window to South African economic realities.