Anyone who read Zuma’s Zombies, Marianne Thamm’s story in last week’s Daily Maverick DM168 newspaper, would probably have been as appalled as I was. It was about “the sycophants who paid a high price for their blind political loyalty to Msholozi”, and included a collation of the long list of ANC members who so happily facilitated what she calls “Jacob Zuma’s long rampage to kleptocracy”.
Thamm wrote about those who had been held accountable, either by law or circumstance, but also about the much, much larger number who have gotten away with it.
I know what you’re going to say. Why am I so surprised? I’m not Cyril “Shocked” Ramaphosa, and it’s not as if the rampant corruption and crime detailed in Thamm’s story are new. They’ve all been exposed over the preceding years, thanks to the great investigative work of journalists from a number of reputable news titles, and in some cases, thanks to the bravery of whistle-blowers. But all together on a page, it just looks more … discouraging, I guess. More enervating.
But the really shocking thing isn’t how much corruption there has been. It’s the fact that many of the people in the story are still happily going about their venal business as if nothing has happened. Even worse, despite the ANC’s own integrity (LOL) commission red-flagging 97 members, some of whom were implicated in the State Capture enquiry, the ANC has chosen to ignore that and include them on the elections list submitted to the IEC.
One fears that the ANC might have confused their PR phrase “clean up the party” with the more accurate “launder the reputations of criminals”. Or “alleged criminals”, as they prefer to be known.
One could expend many words on discussing how we got here, and on lamenting the indecent speed with which our foremost liberation party transmogrified into renifleur revolutionaries with their noses wedged in the gravy trough, apparently willing to sacrifice all democratic principles in pursuit of the not-so-mighty rouble. But perhaps as important as facing the facts about our sadly compromised democracy is how we choose to live with this reality.
The Near North is a recent book by Ivan Vladislavic, and it’s an account of trying to come to terms with, or at least an accommodation to, life in a decaying Johannesburg. I can’t do better than Jacob Dlamini’s description of the book: “Some of the most moving prose ever written about this former mining town … What a chronicle of a city in perpetual crisis.”
The Near North has the febrile, hallucinatory feel of JG Ballard’s earlier apocalyptic novels, but tempered and made gentle by a Proustian attention to the ordinary that manages to make the book both paean and threnody. Many South Africans will recognise this flowery description as essentially the condition of existence in our country today. We are living in a constant state of crisis, so we need to hold on to those rituals of existence that allow us to keep going.
So much of what we see around us is surreal. How on Earth can we be voting in an election where the governing party itself has pointed out that almost 100 of its own candidates are suspected of acts of corruption? And where one opposition party is headed by an ex-president with multiple criminal charges against him? What has happened to the sinews of our democracy?
There are many evocative passages in Vladislavic’s book as he narrates his attempts to hold on to his idea and experience of Johannesburg. “Losing territory, in the sense of access rather than ownership, undoes memory,” he writes. “As the doors to parts of this city have closed, the memories associated with them have faded. I am cut off from this past as surely as if I had emigrated. Like other exiles, I write against the fear of oblivion, tending and replenishing my file in the archive of collective memory. Recreating a place in words gives it some kind of continuance, even if the exhibit has the artificiality of a museum and cannot provide a home.”
I couldn’t help thinking of this passage while reading Thamm’s story about how Zuma and his party vultures have hollowed out our once shiny democracy. The parallels I’m making here might be overly facile, but it seems to me that, in the same way that Vladislavic walks the streets of Johannesburg in an effort to re-inscribe them into some notion of normality, the way we act out election cycles serves just to superimpose our memory of democracy over a failing superstructure.
In a section titled “What shall we do with the ashes”, Vladislavic writes about the problem of deciding where to scatter his father’s ashes in a country where graveyards are vandalised and stripped, and where access to sacral places is compromised and dangerous. He considers Our Lady of Fatima, a church his father attended, as a possible home for the ashes.
Vladislavic describes how “in the great demographic reshuffling that followed the advent of democracy, the East Rand congregations began to integrate … and reorganise themselves along new racial lines. The process took decades. By the time a Nigerian priest arrived in Springs, most of the whites had drifted away to other parishes.”
Vladislavic’s father stays with the church, and the writer relates a story his father told him: “One Sunday morning when he was taking up the collection, as he always did, he saw a man helping himself from the plate instead of putting something in. He spoke to Father Xavier about it, but he did not seem to mind. We collect the money for charity anyway, the priest said, so this man is not a thief, he’s just cutting out the middleman.”
There is a strangely seductive logic to this, even though it’s also a ridiculous logic. I’m not quite sure what lesson I draw from it. In one sense, it helps me to think about the way some of our politicians seem to believe that the people they’re always promising to lift from poverty are, in fact, themselves, so it’s more efficient for them to skim their bloated portion off the top. Perhaps there is an economy of realignment at work here, one that is proving stronger than our democratic ideals.
But the story’s arc, and the way the book describes the slow whittling away at our civil society that has taken place over the last few decades, does serve to emphasise some of the moral contradictions South Africans have had to learn to deal with.
Thamm’s article ends with this sentence, referring to the promise of change that our upcoming elections bring: “It is a moment in history when we will either succumb to the toxic charms of the venal or self-serving, or begin to rediscover common humanity and cooperation.”
The section in The Near North titled “What shall we do with the ashes” describes the July 2021 riots as starting “the day after Jacob Zuma is jailed for contempt of court, but the trouble has been a long time coming. Zuma’s supporters have been threatening violence and chaos for years, as the former president sought to evade justice on corruption charges, and now they act on the threat”.
The warning is clear. We’re at a point where the populist parties that feed like remoras over the discarded scraps of the governing shark are becoming vicious and untrammelled. We need to embrace Thamm’s call to rediscover our common humanity and cooperation. In Vladislavic’s The Near North, you will find a model of how to do this.
And it’s by not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by the inevitability of the evil that politicians will do, but by walking a path that re-inscribes the democratic ideals that we share on the sorry palimpsest of our current political reality. DM
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ANC has perhaps confused ‘clean up the party’ with ‘launder reputations of criminals’
So much of what we see around us is surreal. How on Earth can we be voting in an election where the governing party itself has pointed out that almost 100 of its own candidates are suspected of acts of corruption?
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