Jacob Zuma and Che Guevara and other wondrous examples of South African kayfabe

Language reveals, conceals and perverts in equal measure. In Soweto in 1976 young people were “rioting”. The government of the United States had Nelson Mandela on a terrorist watch list until 2008. Conservative activists to this day believe that children are the “property” of their parents. Vaporising children is called “collateral damage”. A “plausible genocide” is not a suitable topic for discussion at a University Senate meeting. The Israeli Defence Force killing at least 270 people and wounding 1,000 to rescue four hostages is described as “surgical in its precision”.

When young people rose up in 1976 against the lies, racism, and ideology and said ‘this shall not continue’, they were providing us all a lesson which, as I hope to show in this article, may be more necessary than ever.

There have been a number of events recently that have surprised even the dystopian cynic in me. In October 2023, Joe Biden stated that “respect for international law” was imperative for Israel in its response to 7 October 2023.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Netanyahu must ‘change course’, or lose global support – Biden; UN General Assembly demands ceasefire in Gaza

In May 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. To remind you, Gallant has been quoted as saying that Palestinians are worse than animals and should be exterminated, while Netanyahu is, well, Netanyahu, making arrest warrants seem clear-cut and obvious.

But of course, in the worst-kept secret of the last four decades, a parade of European and American diplomats then savaged the ICC for its temerity at thinking it has the authority to ask for such a thing. Biden spoke of his “outrage”.

Selective outrage

The outrage of the colonial powers was of course compounded by the fact that the ICC Prosecutor was Karim AA Khan, as far from a handpicked white American “yes man” as you could find. The infinite depths of Western arrogance was revealed when the ICC prosecutor told of how a high-ranking official said to him that the court was “built for Africa and for thugs like Putin” and not for the “democracies” of Israel, Europe and the United States.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GADg_WRvrw

And in a paroxysm of arrogant US fury, Senator Lyndsay Graham and Mike Johnson (Speaker of the House) condemned the ICC decision and the ICC with Mike Johnson stating that “if the ICC was allowed to do this and go after the leaders of countries whose actions they disagree with, why would they not come after America?” and that “America should punish the ICC and put (chief prosecutor) Karim Khan back in his place.”

Being brown, ICC Prosecutor Khan is of course seen as a child and needs to be “put in his place”. Outside of the racism, there is something mesmerising about American exceptionalism and hubris in openly acknowledging that they would have to answer for a variety of transgressions of international law.

And then, to top it all off, on 17 May 2024, The Atlantic writer Graeme Wood wrote a piece ostensibly querying United Nations accounts of the death toll in Gaza. The revision of estimates of the death toll of women and children in Gaza by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in May 2024 provides Wood with the permission he needs to become sarcastic and to morbidly quip about “raising children from the dead”.

And not being content with that, he then goes on to argue that “it is possible to kill children legally”. Full disclosure, I did not continue reading his article. Life is too short and dealing with the horrors of the world right now too difficult, to spend time with a privileged American intellectual cradling a cappuccino in his book-lined Connecticut brownstone musing about whether children can be killed legally.

But how did Wood get to this point? How is that human beings have a seemingly infinite capacity to compartmentalise, to self-delude and to deny?

Grappling with kayfabe

And then I listened to an episode of the The Blindboy Podcast, and it is there that I heard the word kayfabe for the first time. Kayfabe is “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, are genuine”. It is the suspension of disbelief that is essential for any enjoyment of professional wrestling.

In the podcast, Blindboy employs the term to describe the world of those in the global North who have suspended disbelief in order to continue living in a world despite what is being done in their name and on the coattails of their extractive colonialism.

How they know that Iraq was invaded for its oil; that when Gaza has been destroyed, Israel and United States will start harvesting the oil and gas off the Gazan coast; that their mobile phones are dependent on keeping Congo in a state of perpetual war; that increasing private plane production and the launch of the gothically ugly 250,000 tonne Icon of the Seas are acts of collective suicide.

Kayfabe allows them to continue, cushioning them in a state of suspended disbelief.

In South Africa, we have thankfully avoided some of the worst excesses of kayfabe. Our response to what is happening in Gaza is an example of principled political action of the highest order. We have journalists and a free press which is the envy of much of the world. We had Mandela and Tutu. And we have had seven free and fair elections.

But I fear that 2024 is a portent of what might be to come. In short thrift, we are now faced with the Zuma family (Jacob and Duduzile), neither renowned for their counting skills, challenging the Electoral Council for the counting of votes.

We have Jacob Zuma, possibly the most compromised politicians alive on Earth today, being able to retain massive support. And we have the recent discovery of how Zuma managed to fight alongside Che Guevara in Angola, decades after Guevara had died in Bolivia in 1967.

And we are also faced with the DA complaining that they should not be referred to as “white-led”, and not racist when one of their new MPs (Editor note: Now suspended)  is the whining white victim of a thousand racial rants, Ronaldo Gouws.

I worry that this is a sign of us speeding headlong into Trumpian Alice in Wonderland territory with lies, fake news, the stoking of tension and our potentially unique South African brand of kayfabe.

My plea is that as we watch our politicians reveal their worst selves to us — which of course they must — that we hold in our mind the vision of those young people of 1976 who saw the racism and horrors for what they were and said quite simply — we see the truth and we will not acquiesce to your lies anymore. DM