After the march a cargo cultist arises with captain’s stripes on his sleeve.
The funny thing about belief is that it becomes instantly redundant when evidence appears; the troublesome thing about belief is that to the faithful no volume of evidence will sway it. This is the tragedy of South African politics, and of a few other things.
Friday’s kerfuffle is a fresh example of the nation’s folly. Several multitudes of citizens across the classes finally saw an opportunity to vent their issues: mortgage payments, demands from the ex, postmodernism and ingrowing toenails, in reverse order. Blame it all on President Jacob Zuma, is what they say. Or blame the ANC, says the thinking citizen’s placard. All we need is a new and true leader.
Perhaps we should rethink that. It doesn’t matter who or what is vilified, as long as social and economic distress can be rationalised. Millenarianism, for that is what the logical consequence of that kind of faith is called, is caused typically by an economic crisis and advanced with the rise of a prophet who would explain the crisis and foretell of an apocalyptic event in which the faithful would be spared and society would be radically transformed.
Such a circumstance arose among Melanesian island tribes when the Pacific war ended and parachute drops stopped and aircraft no longer discharged food and machines and weapons on the islands. Prophetic types, typically big-man style leaders, saw the crisis as an opportunity and devised what is known today as a cargo cult. Their rituals included imitating troops’ radio headsets and lighting signal fires to entice their ancestors to disgorge abundance from the heavens.
They didn’t last long. Ditto for the eschatological Christian movements around the turn of the 20th century.
In our own history of the Ngqika tribe of British Kaffraria in the 1850s, millenarianism appeared after British settlers brought cattle lung disease with them in the wake of the Amatola war. The solution, according to a prescient teenage girl called Nongqawuse, was to slaughter all cattle and to stop cultivation. The idea may have been epidemiologically sound, but poor Nongqawuse combined her insight with the prophesy that on the day a red sun rose, the settlers would be swept into the ocean.
Nongqawuse’s devil was Cape governor George Grey on a grey horse. Her apocalypse was famine. Tens of thousands of people died. The way of the settler became the way of all the land.
Now, in this context, consider Friday’s anti-Zuma march refuseniks. Prominent among these are certain big men rising. One of them is Collen Maine, the ANC Youth League’s president. He says SA’s sovereign credit downgrade is a good thing. "We are welcoming the junk status," he was reported as saying. "When the economy rises again, it will be held by us."
Right. And the devil is monopoly capital in a white skin. His "us" are he and former fellows of the youth league, such as Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba, in his cargo-cult outfit complete with captain’s stripes on the sleeve, whose deployment was the beginning of radical economic transformation.
Right again.
The rituals must be performed, the blue lights must be lit, the right shade of shades must be worn, fire and famine must sweep the land and then and only then will untold volumes of cargo descend on the veld. That is the prophecy.
Later, when Zuma is gone and when we’ve gathered what remains of our riches and history is being revised, and when we ask ourselves how we got here, this now-infamous passage by Ken Peters, a Czech economics professor may be helpful: "The danger to SA is not Jacob Zuma, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of a Zuma presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate, willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr Zuma, who is a mere symptom of what ails SA. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Jacob Zuma who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."
• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
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