I have, of course, left out the beautiful moments, the fine words spoken from the heart by friends who were actually friends, the brief seconds of dignity that Mandela was afforded in all the mess – the genuine expressions of love and pain and grief that individual South Africans poured out after they learnt of his death. Yet these same South Africans were actors in a drama they didn’t write, playing roles they were assigned by impresarios from afar. Dance, cry, complain. Exeunt stage left.
There were times during this gruesome theatre when the country seemed like an ingénue after a botched plastic-surgery procedure, nose whittled down to a needlepoint, collagen-stuffed lips where the ears should be. Nothing looked right, sounded right. Deaf people were drawn pictures by a schizophrenic who was conversing with angels – no word on whether the angels approved of all the hoopla, but I’m guessing not so much.
We were revealed, in the light of this long goodbye, as a sort of half-dystopian, subfunctional backwater with immense stadiums, fairly quick internet connections, large military airports and a deep appreciation for the burnishing sheen of celebrity. We were revealed as a place in which the presidential praise singer seemed more on top of the moment than the president did.
We were revealed as a divided country, deeply troubled, wherein our most important historical figure was over the past week co-opted out from under us. He will be replicated on posters and T-shirts and cellphone guards; he will become a character in many more movies made by men and women with only a glancing understanding of his life. Yet we somehow have to find a way back to him, a way back to his contradictions, his genius and, yes, his violence. Mourning him isn’t good enough, praising him isn’t good enough – we have to own him once again.
No nation should be afraid to grant a 95-year-old man his peace. And no nation should be governed by a T-shirt. The machine has powered down. In the real moments of silence following the mandated moments of reflection, when we’re no longer acting as cannon fodder in a reality show in which none of us are paid to perform, we might want to say a proper, dignified goodbye. And then create a possible future, rather than have others fashion an impossible past.
Thank you, Madiba. Hamba kahle. Exit stage left.
And now for Act II.
ZILLESTAN
26 JANUARY 2013, ROSEBANK
In which the Democratic Alliance kicks off campaign season by releasing a list of candidates perfectly picked to reflect the rainbowism of South African diversity.
Strangely – or perhaps not so strangely – every time I encounter Helen Zille, my mind flashes to a Braveheart-style montage: the Democratic Alliance’s stalwart leader, head shaved, face smeared with blood and war paint, guiding 10 000 troops forward into battle. It’s just a flash, but it happens every time, and it makes me a little scared and uncomfortable, this sense that if Zille ever did become president of this country, a role she most certainly covets, I would be conscripted into service for the invasion of Zimbabwe or Mozambique, or some other nearby candidate for regime change, urged to war by the howling president herself.
I can’t figure out if this is just a Freudian reaction to a Strong Woman, a mother figure who is uncompromising and ambitious and cunning, and who could have my balls for her Sunday lunch hors d’oeuvres before I realised they were missing. And yet I don’t feel that way about all Strong Women. Lindiwe Mazibuko was sitting two chairs down from Zille and I received zero Braveheart vibes from her. No, some people are born warriors, genetically predisposed to consume the livers of their vanquished enemies amidst the gore of a war zone.
Helen Zille is one such person.
So, I’ll confess to being a bit disappointed by the choice of mise en scène for the DA’s announcement of their candidate list for the 2014 election. I wanted Zille to be her best possible self, surrounded by a phalanx of Spartans, their abs rippling under bronze armour and bronzing tanning oil.
Instead, what appeared to be the board of directors of a detergent multinational sat before a roomful of reporters, Zille at the centre of the table. The room was a supremely warm conference suite in Rosebank’s Hyatt Hotel, the lobby crowded with pink Germans alternately sipping cappuccinos and loudly complaining about their quality. The list of the DA’s Chosen Ones seemed perfectly calibrated to reflect diversity, as if the pigment of all of the candidates had been run through a software program designed to identify the Platonic ideal of racial rainbowism, and reflect that ideal back to South African voters.
Whoever you may be, stated the candidates wordlessly, we have your flavour.
When my colleague Ranjeni Munusamy, clearly thinking along the same lines, asked Ms Zille during the question period whether the candidates had been chosen by a strict racial quota inspired by a Coca-Cola commercial, I got my most powerful Braveheart flash yet. Zille swallowed and looked hard at Munusamy, in a way that suggested that, should Zille ever occupy State House, Munusamy would be one of the first – but perhaps not the very first – to be dumped down an active Karoo fracking hole. Meanwhile, at the mention of the word ‘race’, the DA candidates’ eyes widened in abject alarm, as if a locomotive had crashed into the room, followed shortly by a 747.
‘We believe in excellence and equity,’ said Zille slowly, ‘and those two are not contradictory.’ Munusamy fiddled with her iPad. I assumed she was hiring a security contingent.
So, what of these candidates who hope to run our provinces and administer the country? Are they indeed excellent? Well, it was hard to tell. For one thing, I hadn’t heard of many of them – which is to say that I’d heard of some of them, forgotten a portion of those I had heard of, and really had no clue as to the rest. Zille introduced them all, with pithy bios that summed up their manifold achievements. She gushed over the number of master’s degrees her troops had accumulated. Some of their names rhymed: referring to Zakhele Mbhele, candidate for the Western Cape, Zille said, ‘There’s a lovely alliterative lilt to that.’ There is! But alliteration is a poetic technique, not an election strategy.
Mbhele, like many of those gathered around Zille, was a graduate of the DA’s Young Leaders Programme – aforementioned software created to generate aforementioned racial rainbowism – and had thus been groomed from the ground up for just such a moment. But, still, and despite the presence of the DA’s big guns, the candidates did seem a tad fresh.
But that is the whole point, you see: ‘The DA doesn’t ossify,’ said Zille. ‘We don’t grow into a piece of petrified wood. We grow new timber.’ This was a reference to the gerontocracy creaking its way through the ANC upper echelons. Or maybe they were aping Julius Malema’s nascent Economic Freedom Fighters’ strategy: put a whole bunch of kids in red berets and, hey presto, 5 per cent of the electorate is yours for the taking.
I like new things – we all do, the odd Sunday-afternoon antiquing session notwithstanding. But why wasn’t I excited? Why didn’t this field of fresh, young, overeducated political flesh get me all horned up and ready to go? Why wasn’t I randy for change?
I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with the DA’s bunting, the background of which was the colour of a Cape Town dusk just as the sun sets behind the mountain and the last of the gin and tonic drains into the mush of the lemon wedge, and the first faint whiffs of a calamari braai drift up from the fourth patio of a Camps Bay penthouse apartment. I supposed that the scrubbed, eager DA folk in their Sunday best brought to mind the political aspirants of a South Africa belonging to an alternate realm, a more genteel spot where master’s-degree graduates pow-wow about the latest political strategies learnt from a Rockefeller Foundation-designed app, and the cruel, craven steel of reality is many, many light years away. I got the sense that this was all play-acting, and that the responsibility wasn’t mine to believe that these fresh new candidates were capable of governing