The uprisings of June 1976 are remembered as a revolt of school students against an oppressive education system. But they were much more than that. Among other things, they spawned a radical temperance movement. En masse, kids tried to stop their parents’ generation from drinking.
As they moved through Soweto, groups of students poured wine, sherry and beer into the streets and strewed temperance graffiti across township walls. “Less liquor, more education!” read one slogan. “Away with boozers!” read another. By October, the students had formally declared a ban on liquor; a shebeen association was hastily assembled to negotiate with them.
“When our parents leave work with their pay, which is very meagre, they immediately buy liquor and then go back home without money,” Black Consciousness leader Harry Ranwedzi Nengwekhulu wrote from exile in the wake of the uprisings. “But since the 16th of June bottle stores no longer function because [they were] the first targets ...”
I tell this story because the ban on alcohol and cigarettes that accompanied the Covid-19 lockdown, and which many find inexplicable, is best understood historically. There is a powerful strain in African nationalism in SA, perhaps best described as paternalistic, that places on the shoulders of black leaders the duty to save ordinary people from the ravages of history.
One example is the children of 1976 trying to save their tired and depleted parents from alcohol dependency. Many others abound. One can see this strain operating through the eyes of Thabo Mbeki, for instance, when he returned to SA in 1990 after a quarter of a century abroad. He was shocked at the state of the SA people, he told his biographer, Mark Gevisser. They seemed to him deracinated, ripped up from their history, their culture, from a stable place in the world. He spoke of seeing too much alcohol, too much violence, too many people not in control of themselves.
This is an awkward discussion for a white columnist, for it is about a dialogue strictly internal to black nationalism; and it is about a burden this dialogue has placed specifically upon black leaders. The argument is that generations of white domination have ravaged ordinary people; now, in the democratic era, the task of black leaders is to use the heavy hand of government to enforce a process of cleansing.
This line of thinking is hardly a dominant one. It has always had to settle for a relatively minor place among competing sensibilities. But it has nonetheless manifested itself in innumerable ways since the beginning of democracy. In 2007, for instance, a statute was passed criminalising consensual sex between two teenagers. A 16-year-old boy could now be convicted of statutory rape for having sex with his 16-year-old lover. That the Constitutional Court struck down the legislation six years later is not the point of the story; more interesting is that it galvanised sufficient support among ministers and parliamentarians to briefly become the law of the land.
The paternalistic strain was working at full throttle here. On the one hand, a sense that ordinary people were out of control: too much sex, too much drink, too much decadence and decay. On the other, a conviction, born from a sense of despair, that nothing less than extreme state action could remedy the problem.
It is hardly surprising that with Covid-19, the paternalistic impulse has come centre stage. Everyone, after all, is talking of not wasting the crisis. Free marketeers think the space has magically opened for widespread privatisation. The standard bearers of radical economic transformation think the white economy will collapse and businesses can be bought up on the cheap.
The paternalists are also not wasting the crisis. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and her ilk genuinely believe the space has opened for extreme state action to cure SA. The bans are not a mask behind which evil plots are concealed. They are the latest expression of an old and passionately held desire.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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