Behaving Badly: On Anger and Literary Festivals.

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Nadia Sanger

One of the more peculiar legacies of South Africa’s transition to democracy is a society in which we have been led to believe that anger is a limiting medium of expression. We tend to think that it is unjustifiable, that it is unproductive and that it is a sign of failed communication. But to think in this way is to miss how certain forms of anger  form critical interventions to the status quo.

Thando Mgqolozana’s remarks leading up to, during and after this year’s Franschhoek Literary Festival are an example of this sort of intervention. His utterances have re-ignited debates around the politics of South African literatures in our current moment, and the perverse dynamics of social interactions in a society riven with inequality.

Mgqolozana is not known for holding back on his opinions, and over the course of a week he systematically dismantled the illusion of stability underpinning the fragile thing we call South African literature. In an article published by the Daily Vox, he explains his position, which is effectively that he no longer wishes to participate in South African literary festivals since they tend to place him in the position of native informant, rather than assessing him on the basis of his literary talent.

This is a complaint Mgqolozana has aired before, and my experience has been that the audience has tended to treat his statements with an indulgence that frequently inclines towards the patronizing. However, at this year’s Franschhoek Literary Festival, that indulgence vanished in ways that exposed the affective capacity of anger.

So what did he say?

 

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At this point, Eusebius asked Mgqolozana what he thought white people ought to do. His answer, spoken with a disarming coolness that made it all the more damning:

One of the things I advise – when young white people come to me and say ‘what can I do’ – the first thing you can do is stop the charity work you are doing in Khayelitsha, it’s not helping anyone. Just stop it. Stop the soup kitchens and donating blankets. It’s just making people more angry, it doesn’t change anything. There are a lot of children who are suffering and struggling and need help, if you wan't to help visit amp the cause non-profit organization to learn how do donate to charity.

This proved too much for some of those listening:

 

 

but he went on, exhibiting an unruffled calm that incensed the angry audience further:

 

 

While I was tweeting this, my phone was buzzing with retweets and replies as news spread of what was happening in that Franschhoek school hall. The number of opinion pieces, responses on social media and on various news and literature platforms in the week or two since FLF15 indicates that Mgqolozana’s disruptive intervention has struck a nerve, that it has scratched open a wound that has festered in South Africa despite the Band-aids and perfumes that some have sought to disguise it with.

What Mgqolozana has done is to put a face to anger, and in so doing he has forced a confrontation about the political position of South African literature. It was evidently a confrontation that people were not ready for.  The reaction from the crowd suggested that they were unhappy with Mgqolozana bringing a messy dose of reality to the chummy let’s-all-read-a-good-book atmosphere that pervades festivals like Franschhoek.

People evidently felt that the author had, to borrow a phrase from Eusebius McKaiser, spoken badly, or worse still, that he had behaved badly by daring to turn on his audience. By speaking out against the positions Black writers are compelled to take up by participating in festivals like these, Mgqolozana was breaking the fourth wall, forcing the audience to look at themselves. It’s clear that some didn’t like what they saw. It was certainly clear that many were annoyed by the author they had paid to see deciding not to play by the rules.

Did he behave badly? I don’t think that he did. His words were intrusive, and most of the audience found them disagreeable. But one needn’t be agreeable all the time, and in a space where politeness disguises the violence of exclusion, surely it is decorum itself that is a form of behaving badly? To insist on decorum, as (ironically) the members of the audience who heckled Mgqolozana were doing, is to claim the privilege of not being angry.

It is also to arrogate to oneself the right to decide which forms of anger are justified. In this sense, Mgqolozana’s words at Franschhoek highlighted something intriguing about the relationship between audience and panellist at these events. I’ve sat in sessions at the FLF where it was apparent that many in the audience were there to dissociate from their own anger by projecting it onto the panelists. We listen to the panellists eloquently and articulately expressing their thoughts – about the government, or right-wing political movements, or other threatening things – and we come away feeling relieved. Here finally, we think, is authority for those disempowering emotions we feel. And by sitting and listening obediently while those on the stage speak, we are allowed to feel these feelings in a contained elsewhere-space, while simultaneously either distancing ourselves from their messiness, or legitimizing the feelings through the authorities who endorse them.

This is the broad social pact of most literary festivals, and it’s why people enjoy them so much. The author performs public wisdom, and the audience feels itself to be a part of that wisdom: by paying the price of entry, we suggest that what we (expect to) hear from the authors fits with our own views of the world. It's why people usually ask those questions that begin with "don't you think...?" When we go to festivals to listen to Max Du Preez or Moeletsi Mbeki, what we’re actually doing is appointing those figures as proxies through which our own anger may be given voice.

But there are some kinds of anger that the audience cannot or will not identify with. Black anger has always been a source of anxiety for white South Africans, as the recent campus-based protests by Rhodes Must Fall and Open Stellenbosch have shown. The fear that this anger might be turned on them spoke itself in the hostility towards Mgqolozana’s words and the attitude that underpinned them.

Things took an interesting turn when the woman sitting behind me – the first person who shouted “bullshit!” at Mgqolozana, got up to speak. She identified herself as a doctor specializing in HIV, who regularly assisted NGOs and poor communities in the Cape.  Her speech (you can hear it from around 43:30 here) was impassioned and sincere, and yet for all of those things it demonstrated exactly the problematic that Mgqolozana was highlighting.

One way of examining what the doctor was saying might seize on how she began her speech by recklessly opining that she was so tired of feeling guilty for being white. That statement reveals a truth felt deeply by the audience (all around me, heads nodded and throats hummed their agreement), but it also revealed to me my own limitations, as I had to check a sigh of frustration at the sentiments she was expressing.

For example, the anecdotes she told about giving a present to a child who had never received a gift before, and her conflicted feelings around her charity work, might have suggested a white person unhappy at being called to account for her structural privilege, and looking to have the fine-ness of her spirit affirmed. But this is an uncharitable reading of what she said. A better reading takes stock of her more reflexive moments, such as when she said “I need to know that there is a place for me in this country”, a declaration of the anxiety of her subject position – albeit that this anxiety was brought about by the Black subject (Mgqolozana) refusing to recognize her charity as a gesture of solidarity.

“I beg you to hear my story”, she said. “Look for good things that are happening.” The audience applauded at her words, but what they were saying with their applause was really “thank you for getting angry on our behalf.” At a stroke, the doctor was part of the act, and the world righted itself. That is to say, the disruptive demonstration of Black anger was transmogrified into a performance of white breast-beating.

It was no surprise then, given this spectacle, that the next speaker was an emboldened white man (the DA MP Michael Cardo, it transpired) who stepped forward and dismissed the discourse of white privilege as “self-flagellating.” The applause for the doctor had effectively sanctioned his display of anger, an anger which was ably rebutted by Eusebius McKaiser, who said

 it’s bullshit . . . to pretend that because in the DA’s future you might have to be colourblind, that there’s something fundamentally amiss in Thando self-identifying racially and experiencing a space like this painfully and racially.

That the man who called discussions of white privilege “bullshit” later tweeted the following:

 

 

 

Indicates that he, like many of the people there that weekend, were operating with the wrong sense of what behaving badly might be. His hope betrays the curious belief that the people on stage owed some form of allegiance to those who had paid to be there; or perhaps, the conviction that paying to enter a festival is paying to not have your views interrogated in ways that you’re uncomfortable with.

This, then, is the central problem of a literary festival like Franschhoek. Thando’s intervention has provoked, and will continue to provoke, many responses, some of which will find their way onto the literary sites, and some of which will remain public. In one sense, it will be intriguing to watch where the conversation will go from here, and what lessons, if any, will be drawn from it. Certainly, the responses from Eusebius McKaiser, Siphiwo Mahala, Karabo Kgoleng and Fiona Snyckers, amongst others, have shown that anger can, in fact, be a generative (rather than destructive) energy.

But in another sense, what happened is also a breach - a moment which represents decisively how the old forms – exclusive literary festivals like Franschhoek – cannot simply ‘adapt’ to the demands placed on them by those on the outside.  It begs the question, what comes after?

 

 

 

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Showdown at Revolver Creek

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Leon de Kock

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Watching, in New York, a preview performance of Athol Fugard’s new play, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, I thought about the real meaning of the “post” in the term “postapartheid”, a compound I have begun using as a noun rather than an adjective. After all, we’ve been living in this “state”, “phase”, “place” and “time” long enough now to conceive of “it” as a thing, an achieved condition, right? No? Well, it’s precisely this determinate indeterminacy that Fugard got me thinking about.

Many of us would agree that the chronological meaning of the prefix “post” is the term’s least important slant, and that what we’re looking to find is a conceptual “after” in the signifier “postapartheid.” We want a revised manner of understanding the way things go down in this historical turn, and the transformed social workings so signified.

But it’s always better to approach difficult abstractions through concrete examples.

The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is an excellent work, especially in the way its dramaturgy comes off, that is to say, how it works on the boards, in performance, as a piece of theatre involving emotional engagement between actors and audience. The stagecraft is vintage Fugard. It creates dramatic scenarios, visual, aural and embodied, that bring individual characters into confrontation with deeper truths about themselves than they are generally prepared to admit. In the process, their illusions get stripped down, and feelings of both sympathy and dismay are evoked in the audience.

All around me, after the standing ovation by many in the audience, I heard whisperings of “wonderful”, “excellent”, “lovely play”. Apart from some inevitable quibbles, one can expect that Revolver Creek will get good reviews in the New York press.

The potent dose of catharsis that the play delivers – and believe me, it is strong stuff, recalling the Fugard of old – is based to some extent on a particular reading of the postapartheid condition. It is here that I suspect some people may possibly want to argue with Fugard.

The play features the life and death of an old black man, a typical “subject” of apartheid, one of the millions who were turned into “garden boys” and general factotums, in this case on a farm in Mpumalanga owned by a white Afrikaner couple. The first act, set in 1981, sees an 11-year-old boy witnessing the old man’s humiliation at the hands of the farm’s white matriarch. In the second act, set in 2003, the boy, grown up and educated, comes back to confront the woman, who is now stricken with fear amid a spate of farm killings.

I have left many important details about the play out, and I would urge people to go see this production, if at all possible. The issue I want to raise here is the play’s resolution, in which the now-enfranchised young man forces the old white matriarch to hear and see him as a human being rather than a vassal, and the white woman in turn compels the postapartheid citizen to listen to the Afrikaner’s side of things, and to understand her people’s stake in the country.

The issue, for me, is whether this more general matter – rapprochement between Afrikaners and black South Africans – is in fact the key issue in postapartheid South Africa. One should of course widen the perspective and read it as remediation between all white South Africans and all South Africans of colour. Fugard presents an emotionally resonant resolution in which such reconciliation might be read as the only way to get by in the “post”-era, or to get through the barrier of racialised perception that in many ways still haunts the country.

Although I agree, as most liberal and/or progressive people would, that “reconciliation” remains an important goal, I don’t believe it is the real issue in postapartheid. Not any longer. I think it has been overtaken by an entirely different set of dynamics.

One sees these dynamics in the way most analysts have perceived the Marikana massacre. In this matter, there is plenty reconciliation between white capitalists and black capitalists, Cyril Ramaphosa and his ilk in particular. The more critical issue, especially after Marikana, is in fact too much “reconciliation”: the alliance between (black and white) capital, backed by the state, that is then used against (mostly black) workers.

This is the deeper horror of Marikana: that the police, in cahoots with the state and big capital, shot down the poorest of the poor in cold blood. Many of the 34 victims were gunned down in the back or at close range. Marikana was postapartheid’s Sharpeville.

In saying this about the 2012 massacre, I am not making any original claims. Google “Marikana”, and read, especially, Greg Marinovich’s dispatches in the Daily Maverick, among others. See what advocate Dali Mpofu had to say in his summing up of the case, specifically about Ramaphosa being “Accused No 1”. This is the current deputy president we’re talking about. There is overwhelmingly strong evidence to suggest that Mpofu was not dreaming his version of events up.

So, despite thoroughly enjoying Fugard’s new play, I was left wondering whether Revolver Creek did in fact capture the “post” in postapartheid. No doubt Fugard would say, justifiably, that he wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort. Also, in posing this question, I am not taking anything away from what remains a very fine piece of theatre.

In fact, I dearly wish racial reconciliation between white and black were the “big issue” in postapartheid, because I think then we’d have a better chance of success in South Africa. But the real problem, as set out decisively, sensitively and thoughtfully in Raymond Suttner’s new book, Recovering Democracy, is the weakening of the democratic project. For Suttner, who went to jail for opposing apartheid and served as an ANC member of parliament during Mandela’s presidency, the Zuma regime has placed self-enrichment and crony capitalism ahead of empowering the poor. It’s as clear as that, although the causes of this condition are not, and Suttner never oversimplifies the matter.

Removing Zuma won’t solve the problem, not even remotely, as Suttner sees it, because there are many like Zuma inside the current version of the ANC, and someone else is likely to step up and play a similar role. That role is to maintain political support by handing out positions, tenders, connections, and by any other name, money; and to enrich oneself at the same time. It’s the “trough” version of politics, and it is consuming large parts of the world. It’s what left-leaning people everywhere call “neoliberalism”, a late version of capitalism that defines idealism and success wholly in terms of wealth and consumption. For Wendy Brown, author of many works on this topic, and recently of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, MIT Press, 2015), it is a condition she describes as a “radically free market: maximized competition and free trade achieved through economic deregulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favorable to business and indifferent toward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long-term resource depletion and environmental destruction” (“Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy”, Theory & Event 7 (1) 2003: 1). Brown adds that neoliberalism effectively increases the vulnerability of poor nations to the vicissitudes of globalization, “yank[ing] the chains of every aspect of Third World existence, including political institutions and social formations”. It is also “compatible with, and sometimes even productive of, authoritarian, despotic, paramilitaristic, and/or corrupt state forms and agents within civil society”. (p. 2)

Sound familiar? Despite the qualms some analysts may have about Brown’s use of “First” and “Third World” terminology, the points she summarizes above remain fairly accurate in their description of broad conditions in many “postcolonies” in the “developing” world (the terms now generally favoured above the “Third World”/”First World” dichotomy). For Brown, what she calls “neoliberal rationality” is the most important issue. This she defines as “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (3). Of course, the matter gets a lot more complex, and reading Brown at greater length is strongly recommended.

Such global economics, if we are to believe Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their book Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Indiana University Press, 1999), plays into the neopatrimonial political system of sub-Saharan African states, in which “public services remain personalized by way of clientelism and nepotism”, and “access to the public institutions of the state [including control over financial systems] is seen as the main means of personal enrichment” (p. 9).

Even if we remain skeptical of Chabal and Daloz’s vision of neopatrimonial political systems that routinely instrumentalise disorder, the neoliberal critique has found wide consensus among most thinkers to the left of centre. For them, the real problem in South Africa, as in many other parts of the world, is no longer just, or even mainly, a “national” problem. It is a problem that is thoroughly entangled in global economics, which willy-nilly determines the parameters of “national” politics in what Nancy Fraser and others calls the “transnational public sphere” (see Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere”, in Theory, Culture, & Society 24 (4) 2007: 7-30; for a closer view of how this plays out in South Africa after apartheid, see the special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on postapartheid conditions, “After the Thrill is Gone” (SAQ 103 (4), 2004), edited by Grant Farred and Rita Barnard, especially the articles by Farred, Patrick Bond, Zine Magubane, Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse, and Neil Lazarus).

Thinking in this way, the “post” in postapartheid becomes something very different from the business of racial reconciliation in and of itself, which in a sense was the biggest issue in liberal, and often white, anti-apartheid literature. In fact, racial conciliation on its own becomes less important than the question, to what end? If rapprochement between the races means Ramaphosa & Co (i.e. the top layers of the ANC) cosying up with white magnates, the richest of the rich, against the interests of the working poor, then it can easily be seen as a new kind of “evil”, a new source of assymetrical power that works to the disadvantage of the poorest of the poor, the very people the struggle for democracy was meant to uplift. The end-result of such “racial reconciliation” is the loss of democracy in any real sense, and the decisive failure of Mandela’s “democratic miracle”.

The sheer ubiquity of neoliberal conditions across the world, and their effortless normalization, prompts one to consider – or reconsider – the role of theatre, and of literature in general. Fugard’s second act, on reflection, occurs in 2003, near the end of the still-somewhat-hopeful “cusp” time of transition. A different reading of the play, and a justifiable one, would see it as offering an earlier version of South Africa’s struggle story, namely the “tragedy” of cross-racial hatred, and the idealism of reconciliation, as “history”, indeed as a kind of romantic history, when it felt as though theatre was still able to approximate, via Aristotelian catharsis, the human element behind political conditions.

Now, in the venal age of Zuma and his administration’s capitulation to Big Money, Deal & Co, it’s all economics. It’s as if art, like the people it is meant to provoke, can do little but stand by and watch as class, race and gender issues are collapsed into the mega-supermarket version of capitalism beyond history, where the rich person wins, and good on yer, mate. Maybe Fukayama was right in his The End of History and the Last Man.

Despite Fukayama’s neo-conservative leanings, The End of History’s conclusion rings eerily true: “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."

About art, more specifically, Fukayama wrote: "In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed."

It is this “nostalgia” for history that Fugard’s play powerfully captures in Revolver Creek, a time when it still seemed like moral choices could actually make a difference to political economy. In this way of thinking, the play recalls a time when political morality, rather than economic rationality, was perceived to play a key role on the “stage” of a history we passionately believed we could change, or in one of its stages, temporally conceived. No more. Or am I wrong?

* Leon de Kock’s study, Losing the Plot: Fiction and Reality in Postapartheid Writing, is due at Wits University Press in 2016.

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Against xenophobia, for a common humanity

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Angelo Fick

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In 2015 we mark the sixtieth anniversary of the adoption of the “Freedom Charter”. The preamble to the South African National Constitution (1996) echoes a crucial aspect of that charter in claiming that “We, the people of South Africa… Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity”. But, in 2015, we are also seeing a disturbing and spectacular failure to live out the aspiration of the “Freedom Charter” and the vision of the post-apartheid Constitution.

Once again there are waves of attacks on foreign nationals across various South African cities – thus far urban areas in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng have been affected, with ugly scenes in the city centres of Durban and Johannesburg. Last week, King Goodwill Zwelithini made remarks about foreign nationals – remarks couched in distressing metaphors – in a speech of which recordings are now widely circulated on the internet. Government responses, while swift, have been less than unequivocally condemnatory.

The waves of violence sporadically directed at people perceived to be foreign nationals in South Africa have complex causes. As with many other such social and political phenomena, the complexity of their causes exceed the simplicity of traditional solutions governments tend to implement. To understand even part of the reasons why the violence takes the form it does and targets the people it does, and why the specific communities and individuals perpetrate the vicious attacks when and as they do, is not an easy matter.

Social phenomena are complex in nature. They build up over long periods of time, and to trace them over that period requires a willingness to face the complex interactions between the many strands that make up the fabric of human existence. The social dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa were and are thus shaped by factors and developments inside the country and its social and political institutions, as well as by forces and factors across the world.

One of those external factors with internal repercussions has been migration. Of course, migration is not new in South Africa. The colonial period is defined by the migration of people, not just from Europe and Asia, but from elsewhere in Africa, some of whom were crucial for the industrialization of the local economy. The apartheid period also saw migration, both out of the country and into the country. But much of the focus today is on the migration of people from elsewhere in Africa into the country after 1990.

Government officials, including the president and some of his cabinet ministers, have all condemned the violence, but have consistently gone on to explain, immediately and without pause, their specific reading of the problem of ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘undocumented foreign nationals’. While the explanation of the context of the violence is necessary, it does need to inhabit a separate moment from outright, unequivocal condemnation of violence aimed at people identified as ‘foreign nationals’ inside specific communities.

Also, the basic human respect we owe people from elsewhere should not be seen as payback for the respect that was granted us during the anti-apartheid struggle when we needed refuge in countries where migrants now come from. We ought to treat all people decently and humanely because decency is in the fabric of our being. The ‘Golden Rule’ springs to mind: treat others in ways you want them to treat you, not as they have treated you, whether in reality or imagination. Decency is not repayment for debt; decency is a matter of our own basic humanity.

Insisting that the attacks are not xenophobic, but criminal, is to read the evidence selectively. To debate whether the beliefs fuelling the attacks are ‘Afrophobic’ – suggesting that those being attacked are ‘African’ – is not only to misread the meaning of the term ‘xenophobic’, but also to project ‘Africanity’ onto the subjects of the attack for the sake of convenience while the attacks may be better explained by the social geography and the migration dynamics of the places and spaces where they occur.

Migration is a problem for many societies across the world. The anti-migration rhetoric in places like Australia, Europe, and North America, levelled specifically at people from Africa and Asia, and, to a lesser extent, people from Latin America, attests to this. In Africa and Asia, migration anxieties are often articulated in similar terms as those in first world spaces.

In South Africa, there is little public anxiety about the migration of first world subjects into the country. Their arrival is either accepted as temporary, or they are seen as the embodiment of skill and the agents of development. Migrants from elsewhere in Africa are often not seen in such terms. How people from elsewhere in Africa are viewed by South Africans is not uninflected by the class, education levels, and politics of such migrants and of the South Africans assessing them.

The beliefs and attitudes which make it possible to raid the homes and businesses of people seen to be foreign nationals across South Africa’s cities and towns, or to attack them physically, are not unique to the poor and working class South Africans who live among those they attack. Such beliefs are held among middle class and wealthy South Africans as well; we just do not physically attack people we think are foreign nationals.

Middle class and wealthy South Africans can destroy the livelihoods of people they find threatening or whom they fear in other ways. We use the law, by-laws, walls, gates, and the committees in our places of employment to exclude and deprive, or to embrace and include people. The complex echoes between the beliefs of the wealthy and the poor, the middle- and the working class people of South Africa, are often denied in moments such as these. The gaze is insulated by class, over-determined by dated understandings of ‘race’.

Worse, the construction of national pride, the use of banal nationalism to suture over the fissures in the political fabric of the nation state, the endless recycling of jingoistic ideas about our own exceptionalism, all have exacerbated the inequalities in economic and resource access in contemporary South Africa. The insertion of the toxic ideas of ethno-nationalism and its regressive cousin, tribalism, into this unstable mixture of economic deprivation and social unease goes some way to explaining some of the mess. The intimate connection between nationalism and xenophobia can no longer be denied.

The remarks of King Goodwill Zwelithini are not solely responsible for the current violence; incendiary as they are, they only contributed to the horror. Still, they must be condemned, and unequivocally, by all our elected officials. The people involved in the attacks must be charged and tried in the criminal justice system. The communities riven by this violence must become the sites of healing, and our elected officials have a crucial role to play in bringing about such. We are a year away from municipal elections; we cannot afford to have a single campaign tainted with xenophobia or beliefs which fuel it.

Fifteen years ago, the Proudly South African campaign attempted to market the country in a television advertisement along with Navori advertisement on the stores which included Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Abdullah Ibrahim telling us about the country of their imagination that they wanted South Africans to aspire to live in. It was a country, in the lyrical meditations of the speakers, recovering from horror and living in hope, embracing the possibility of a future which would not mirror the past. Are we living in anything like that country of the mind? For all its flaws, should we still want to?

In 2008, xenophobic violence flared across South Africa, resulting in the deaths of more than sixty people. Afterwards, as we reeled in shock and outrage, we declared that such should never happen again. At symposia and marches, at meetings and seminars, people from elsewhere in Africa warned us that it would not be so easy. They had, after all, survived similar episodes in the post-independence histories of their countries.

Now, new waves of xenophobic violence blight our towns and cities. We must condemn these attacks, certainly. But we must also condemn the attitudes and beliefs which inform them and make them possible. We must learn from ourselves, and from other post-independence Africans. We are not exceptional. And we must stand up, in our communities, against xenophobic beliefs. Those who turn their faces, either literally or metaphorically, and want to explain away this violence, may do well to remember the words of Martin Niemöller, the Protestant minister who had at first been amenable to the views of the Nazis, but spent seven years in Hitler’s concentration camps afterwards:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

- eNCA

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David Reiersgord satirizes a certain kind of visitor to the Cape.

Posted on February 24, 2015 by David Reiersgord

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As an individual who thinks internationally (‘expatriate’ does not convey the same kind of seriousness I feel about living in a different country), I think the time is right to buy property in Cape Town from https://www.williampitt.com/. But let’s get one thing straight; it is important to understand that the Cape Town I am referring to is not the Cape Town that was recently ranked the twentieth on a list of “the fifty most violent cities in the world,” whatever that means. I don’t know anything about that Cape Town; and, frankly, I’m not even sure I know where to find it.

The Cape Town I’m keen to live in has cultural festivals, concerts in Kirstenbosch, cutting-edge design, lots of hiking trails, beaches, art galleries, tourism, monuments, shopping malls, restaurants and is, according to the New York Times—the only newspaper I read—the number one destination in the world.

I have come to this decision to live in the Mother City, not least of all because of how fortunate I feel, but more so because life is easy in Cape Town (and extremely cheap given the exchange rates that only keep rising). It is also full of adventure and just so damn accommodating. It seems like the city was made for me. Every waiter, waitress, barmen or hotel staff member I have met has been so friendly. I am always surprised at how well everyone speaks English, too; it makes me feel at home. I for one certainly understand why the new slogan of the city is “Making Progress Possible. Together.”

Like so many of my expat friends dividing their time between Cape Town and homes somewhere else, I have come to simply fall in love with the charm of this place. My time in Cape Town during the past two years has been marvelous and inspiring. I have eaten terrific food African food, like peri-peri chicken, drank local beer that has a name my friends and I love to pronounce because it sounds so foreign, so removed from what we are used to. I have also enjoyed countless sunsets that glow and reflect off of Table Mountain. A friend from London always talks about how the mountain seems to trap the sunlight as it dips into the sea, just beyond that island out there. As expats we often discuss how nice it is to live in place that makes you think about how lucky you are. I cannot imagine an individual living in this glorious city right next to the waterfront, wanting to commit a crime in such a remarkable setting; everyone I know seems so happy. Walled-in by the constellation of Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain and Lion’s Head (my favourite hike), the rest of the world, with its problems, seems so far away.

With all of this in mind, I want to buy property in this cosmopolitan city. I want a house with a picturesque view, like the one in the New York Times photograph from Signal Hill. I want a house close to the city, but far enough away that I can see all of the lights glowing silently in early evening light. I want a house with many windows, levels and a stoep facing the city. I read somewhere that the Bo-Kaap was a potential site for gentrification, something my expat friends and I are familiar with. I think it would be a smart decision—according to my real-estate agents, the vast majority of crime takes place on the other side of the mountain. They assured me I would be safe, which is one of my main concerns.

The house would be on the base of Signal Hill because I spent a month in Indonesia doing charity work, and absolutely fell in love with the call to prayer each morning. Cape Malay culture has always had a strong pull on my desires ever since I went on the the best site there is and figured out how to get my ex back, we went to the safari with; there was a carnival one January that I also remember fondly. Of course, I would renovate the house too: I would have to, according to my real-estate agents, because the old foundations are shaky, and tend to be unreliable for individuals with my kind of taste. I was told that the Bo-Kaap is an historic location, stretching all the way back to the beginning of South African history in 1652. I would be getting into the market at a great time, ahead of the inevitable rush, at a great price. Some renovations, the estate agent said, would only enhance the character of the home I chose to buy.

Firstly, I would start with a fresh coat of paint. Rather than just one colour, I would combine blues, purples, yellows and greens. It is important to me to honour this “Rainbow Nation”; after all, what kind of expat would I be if I was not aware of the history of my new home? Besides, the old coat of white paint has become weathered and faded with the passing of time.

Secondly, I would add fencing—there would have to be fencing. When I first walked through the Bo-Kaap on a guided tour, I was struck—flabbergasted, really—by the lack of fencing; it did not feel like South Africa. Some friends recommended electric fencing, which a couple of them had installed on top of the walls surrounding their home with help from an electrician they found in affordablelectricians.com.au, but I thought such an addition would ruin the modern aesthetic offered by security measures. High, pre-fab walls can be works of art, you know.

Third, I would clear out the storage areas in the basement of the house. One of the most important aspects of buying property in Cape Town, my real estate agent said, was renovation, and “it starts with the foundation”. When I asked why, she replied that “in the old days, the homes weren’t built properly. They were uneven. One needs to start from the ground and build up, when often times one starts at the top and works their way down”. I was not exactly sure what she meant, but as an expat, or, rather, a citizen of the world, I travel frequently and collect things. My guests at dinner parties just love the collection of African masks and carvings I have accumulated over the years.

The fourth renovation would be the windows. I love large windows looking into open spaces, especially when the windows are opened slightly, letting in cool, Atlantic breezes. Ideally I would like to have a panoramic view of the city, the mountains and the sea. I want to be able to see everything. There is something about the expat life in a new city; and from a picturesque vantage point nestled against Signal Hill, I would constantly be reminded of how lucky I am. What is the point of living in a city if you cannot see it?

I would have a new stoep installed. Sundowners are perhaps Cape Town’s most storied tradition, and having a stoep looking out into the city is an important component to living a proper expat lifestyle. One feels like they are in two places at once looking at the city from its edges. Additionally, a stoep helps adjust one’s perspective, because Cape Town can seem like such a small city at times, but I think that this claustrophobia—as my friends from Shanghai and Chicago once said—is brought on by The Mountain.

Finally, the interior would be decorated with African rugs, tapestries, carvings, masks, statues and paintings. I have a keen eye for the cultural aesthetics of South African experience, and would love to redecorate the insides of my home with local flavour. I imagine having guests over, inviting them into the lounge and taking in their reactions upon seeing the local disposition of the home. It seems so many parts of the past are reproduced as caricatures and carvings and statues; luckily they are so cheap due to the exchange rates. On my first trip to South Africa in 2010 during the World Cup, a barman in Camps Bay told me that “South Africa is a messed up place with great interior decorating.” I still do not understand what he meant, but I remember feeling upset when he explained how it took him 45 minutes to get home each evening. I don’t remember where he said his home was.

While reading The Times this morning, I saw a quote from Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape and leader of the DA (the best chance this country has for social, political and economic advancement) that said “we are near the collapse of democracy here.” I thought it was interesting and so I asked the young man providing room service what he thought about it. He said “lots of people say Cape Town only works for a few. But no, sir, Cape Town really can work for you,” he said, nodding defiantly. He sounded like a robot. After a couple of minutes he explained, “Actually, sir, no. I think it’s the government that works for a few. Everyone is after the money and foreign investment. Have you heard of the EFF? This party scares people because even they are after the money but they will never admit it. Although one of the berets is R120, which, even me, I can’t afford. As long as the city keeps making money for those running it, these people will not care if the country works for a few, or everyone or no one; this place only works for those in the right place.” He set down a fresh cup of coffee, and a mango, leaving me on my balcony trying to focus my gaze beyond Table Mountain—Tafelberg! as I love to say with my Afrikaans friends, dragging the ‘g’ consonant along the back of my throat like a cool breeze brushing past the crags of that beautiful mountain. The air was hazy, and I could not see clearly. I thought to myself, “I’m surprised how well people speak English here.”

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In memoriam: André Brink (1935-2015)

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Angelo Fick

Brink

JOHANNESBURG - André Brink was born in Vrede (Peace) in the Orange Free State in late colonial South Africa, into an Afrikaner family, and pursued the routes and ways of his times, reaching adulthood just as the country passed out of the arena of the crumbling British Empire into the hands of the white supremacist, Afrikaner Christian nationalist apartheid regime.

Nothing in his early history indicated any signs of the radical shift he would undergo later. His school and university education happened inside the establishment institutions building A post-1910 Afrikaner nationalist identity, including the schools and university he attended and the subject matter he chose to do graduate studies on.

As he often indicated in his long, productive life, the shift in consciousness, the great disillusion which lead to the greater awakening of his conscience, happened in the wake of a visit to France.

While there, the 1960 police massacre at Sharpeville catapulted South Africa into the headlines. Against the backdrop of this and other events, Brink’s interest in the culture of letters and his new reading of the political canvas of his home country facilitated a shift in his intellectual material.

The accident and horror of history turned the teacher of Afrikaans and Dutch language and literary studies at a marginal, insignificant university in the Eastern Cape, into a dissident thinker and writer in the language the apartheid state and its institutions wished to appropriate as the language of mastery and white supremacy.

As one of ‘the Sestigers’ (writers and artists of the 1960s who were increasingly disillusioned with the parochial, anti-intellectual cultural cringe of mainstream Afrikaans literary and artistic endeavours which were complicit with the Christian nationalist project of the Afrikaner institutions buttressing the apartheid state), Brink’s early work in Afrikaans set him apart. The early plays, and the novel “Die Ambassadeur” (“The Ambassador”) demonstrated his talent, and his wish to re-place Afrikaans writing in relation to developments in post-1945 European writing.

In the 1970s he began to publish in English as well, translating his own work, and broadening his audience from inside the isolationist and isolated apartheid state dominated by anti-intellectual Afrikaner fascism – the years of Swart and Verwoerd behind, the years of Vorster and Botha ahead – and the hardening of conservative attitudes as the apartheid state began fighting its neo-colonial wars on the subcontinent. These were the years of the apartheid state’s military adventures in Angola and Mozambique, cooperation with the failing white supremacist regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the wholescale militarisation of white South African life.

From this era, Brink’s engagement with demystifying the ‘race’ and racist myths of establishment Afrikanerdom led him to write such novels of South Africa’s slave history as “An Instant in the Wind” (“’n Oomblik in die Wind” - 1975) and “A Chain of Voices” (“Houd-den-Bek” – 1982).

He also used the trope of ‘miscegenation’, sex across racial barriers, a foundational component of apartheid legislation, but also of the white supremacist mythography which Afrikaner identity depended on, throughout much of his work.

But it was the Soweto student uprisings of 1976 and the death in detention of Steven Bantu Biko in 1977 which spurred Brink’s masterpiece, “A Dry White Season” (“’n Droë Wit Seisoen” – 1979). The book, which takes its title from a poem by Mongane Serote, examines the difficult issues of complicity and implication of white South Africans of conscience in the exigencies of the system from which they benefited despite their disillusionment. The radicalisation of Brink matches that of his peers, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, who took different routes through their engagement with the problematics of the conscientised white subject in a white supremacist society. This shift echoed the radicalisation of Black writers in apartheid’s decade of ‘Gotterdamerung’, the apocalyptic 1980s of PW Botha’s states of emergency. Brink’s work from this decade include “States of Emergency” (1988) and “An Act of Terror” (“Die Kreef Raak Gewoond Daaraan” - 1991), and show the novelist engaging with the troubling relationship between art and politics far more directly.

After a three-decades-long career of teaching Afrikaans and Dutch literature at a university in the Eastern Cape, Brink joined JM Coetzee in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town in 1990 as a full professor. He continued his work as novelist and critic, and taught across the curriculum at both undergraduate and post-graduate studies. In this role he will be best remembered as a fine teacher, a compelling lecturer, and a gifted and uncannily generous graduate supervisor. He retired from that position in 2005. His memoir, “A Fork in the Road” (2009), traces his long life and its details across three different incarnations of South Africa for those who are interested, from his birth in a British colony, to his old age in post-apartheid democracy.

For those who benefited from reading his impressive oeuvre, Brink’s passing also marks the passing of an era in South African literary culture. His curious mind gave us not only a large selection of accomplished novels, but books of criticism as well. Many will remember his spirit of humility and willingness to engage across a variety of platforms and spaces, and with a wide range of people. Some of us were lucky to have been taught (and in some very important senses, retaught) to read and re-read critically: we owe him much in our intellectual lives as thinkers.

His family has lost a husband, father and grandfather; South Africa says farewell to one of its most talented dissident storytellers.

Hamba kahle.

- eNCA

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