In its time, the ANC’s 1994 manifesto has enjoyed a great many critical reviews. Today, 25 years since it was first published, it remains a staple in the fiction genre. It wove together dreams and truth-telling in equally uplifting and frank fashion, as it effortlessly carried you along to an imagined promised land. But how has its redemptive message held up? Should we consider it a classic?
Written anonymously and released in March 1994, there was, for many years, a great debate in literary circles as to whether the manifesto was in fact fiction at all. It seemed ground in reality. Thus, it garnered a cult-like following among many, who regarded it as no less than the truth and the way. Only in the last decade was it revealed to be a fantasy. And even then, only to some.
The narrative was straightforward enough: a country torn asunder faces a great reckoning, from the shadows emerge a force for good, “the ANC”, the central protagonist. Led by a political messiah, the book describes how his organisation would go about righting wrongs and building a just society.
“Our country is in a mess,” the narrative begins. Back then, this sort of brutally honest language leapt out at you. Today, as our democratic lexicon has devolved into a series of euphemistic allusions, we are told there are, “challenges”. There was a time when certain truths were spoken out loud.
There were passages of great wonder too: “The millions of people without jobs will be at the top of the ANC government’s agenda. In establishing a dynamic and growing economy we will employ various means to create more jobs and opportunities.”
In this way, the manifesto swept you along. How could you resist its siren calls of justice and equality, prosperity and peace?
As we look back today, through the lens of an economy fairly decimated by decades of ruinous policy and greed, we hear the same promises. But the manifesto was the first to make them, and so the more contemporary echo of sentiments such as “a growing economy” always feel like some cheap knock off of the real thing. And unthinking repetition has rendered them hollow.
But take a moment to appreciate the novelty of that first articulation. That is where the power of the manifesto lies. There were majestic, overarching themes to the manifesto. Among them, the idea of justice was omnipresent.
“The ANC will encourage private citizens to use the independent public protector to investigate corruption, dishonesty or violation of rules of conduct on the part of government officials — those found guilty will be dealt with.”
In real world, in 2019, institutions such as the public protector, have become farcical. First, politicised and neutralised; then denigrated, maligned and disrespected; finally, imbued with incompetence and reduced to a parody. Where once it was ignored, now it is no longer trusted. It is perhaps for this reason, that the manifesto still resonates so powerfully for so many. It captured something impossible: a serious attitude to wrongdoing, and the will to equip those institutions dedicated to fighting immorality with the necessary authority.
Who could ever imagine such thing?
Excellence too, runs through the manifesto like a river: “Our objective is to use resources more efficiently and not to increase the tax burden. Large sums of money already go to education, health and other areas. But the results are poor. Money has been used on a racial basis and squandered in corruption and bureaucracy. This will be done away with.”
Again, it is hard in the here and now to relate to this kind of wild ideal. It seems today like a mirage. Indeed, given the extent to which money is wasted, stolen and mismanaged, the idea that the tax burden would be limited or lessened, or the public administration transformed into an efficient bureaucracy, is fantastical. But the manifesto captured hearts and minds with the utopia it carefully sketched out.
Consider these similar dreams: “People must be free to express their views without fear, including criticising the government of the day”; “All SA languages will have equal status”; “Government administration exists to serve the people. It must be answerable to them”; “An ANC government will ensure that SA has an efficient tax system”; “An ANC government will make education a priority”; “An ANC government will ensure that criminals are dealt with to the full extent of the law.”
These ideas and many others, drawn from the imagination of the author, compel you to believe — not just in the fantasy, but because the fantasy seemed, for some considerable time at least, realistic, in its realisation. It is no small surprise the manifesto acted like a time machine, trapping people and ideas forever in its dreamland; a prison from which many have never escaped.
And who can blame them, really? The audience to whom the manifesto spoke, broken and destitute, had an insatiable appetite for every kind of miracle cure it offered up. It became a religious text more than a contract with the people, and so this idealistic relic has survived today, underpinned as ever by blind belief more than sense.
The manifesto’s greatest trick, testament to its rhetorical grandeur, was to offer up a potential nirvana, that would act as a surrogate for reality. So when corruption took hold in the real world, when the public administration collapsed and dishonesty became commonplace when incompetence was rewarded, crime spiralled out of control and education regressed into illiteracy, believers could visit its pages and escape to a fantasy island, away from all the suffering and pain.
The spirit that moves the imagined ANC of the manifesto — one motivated by transparency, accountability, compassion, honesty and merit — cuts a violent contrast with the zeitgeist that defines the ANC in real life, in which secrecy, arrogance, deceit, contempt and ineptitude drive behaviour. The gulf between the two serves only to fuel the desire to indulge the dream.
It joins a great pantheon of literary pamphlets to have capitalised on the millenarian impulse that animates so many societies: the Communist Manifesto, Mao’s Little Red Book, the Bible. All one has to do is believe, then anything is possible. And while things such as liberalism and science have cut great holes out of those other sacred texts, the ANC’s 1994 manifesto seems to endure, albeit with ever-diminishing returns. Time will one day see to that but, for the moment, enough people still believe.
There is an argument to made this is the wrong way to approach the manifesto. There are those who would have it the book a serious and considered experiment in rationality, a work of non-fiction. If time has done anything at all to the manifesto’s enduring appeal it has at least put pay to that particular school of thought. One can consider the debate closed. There is simply too much evidence to argue it anything other than fantasy.
Consider this particular pledge, from late in the manifesto’s pages: “Our programme will create more job opportunities by making it easier for people to start their own businesses.” Like all the great literary turns of phrase, that take on a life of their own (“four legs good, two legs bad”, “it was the best of times and it was the worst of times”), its power lies not in its application, but in its metaphorical appeal. And so it is endlessly regurgitated by those in government, year after year after year. But it never makes the transitions from dreamland to the waking world. If it did, it would lose its power.
No-one with a vested interest in any church actually wants heaven on earth. If that ever came to pass, the church would go out of business. What the church wants is for the idea of heaven on earth to exist forever in the minds of its followers, always just out of reach. That way it can control not just the congregation but retain what ostensible authority it has, to interpret the divine as it sees fit. In the ANC’s 1994 manifesto, the SA church has its sacred text.
Without a doubt, the book is a classic. And its redemptive message, although having taken a hammering in the years and decades following its publication, continues to carry along many in its wake.
The greatest works of fiction you always wish possible on some level. Who wouldn’t want to visit Wonderland and have tea with the Queen of Hearts? The great dystopian novels of our time — 1984, Darkness at Noon, Fahrenheit 451 — all imposed on us an series of uncomfortable truths. There is value in that. But the utopian novel — the particular genre to which the ANC’s 1994 manifesto rightfully belongs — offered up something else: wonderful lies.
Only the most pessimistic would ever chose the former. And, in a society powered by a desperate optimism, it was somewhat inevitable this particular work of fiction remains today, as ever, our greatest best-seller. The reason is simple enough: taken word for word, it could just as easily have been published yesterday, as opposed to 25 years ago. Its promises remain eternal.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.