GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Today, we are all Afro-pessimists

Remember the African renaissance? What a thing that was. Whatever happened to that, by the way?

Those were the glory days of SA nationalism. How the ANC’s collective chest swelled with pride. Cock of the walk. Today, well, there is a cock in there somewhere.

No point in listing all the problems. We are all in the grips of some manic depression as a result of them. Besides, Fikile Mbalula, like many others, says SA is a “banana republic” and, if that is what an ANC minister thinks, why elaborate.

Come to think of it, most people seem down on the country, its political leadership and its future these days. Peculiar. A decade or so ago that kind of thinking was a definite no-no. To the extent that the gatekeeps of political correctness had a name for it: Afro-pessimism.

In a time before “cancel culture” existed, this was the equivalent. Should you be found guilty of Afro-pessimism, you would be dragged into the public marketplace of ideas, put in stocks, and pelted with patriotic clichés until you vomited up an apology for everyone to see.

Conveniently for the ANC — “Africa’s oldest liberation movement” — it could seamlessly merge criticism of the party with the idea of Afro-pessimism, to evade accountability or responsibility for its policy or actions, and no-one would blink an eye. So very often it led the charge.

Therefore, the greatest purveyor of Afro-pessimism at the time was the DA, obviously. To make matters worse, it dared to try and establish the very idea of an opposition in an environment where the ANC had 66% and the public mind was utterly beholden to the ANC’s hegemonic worldview. Legitimate, democratic criticism — an outrage, the ANC would have none of it.

The ANC decided to elect Jacob Zuma as its president. Not the best strategy. Zuma was a moral anaesthetic and intellectual opiate

Here, for example, was Aziz “Silent Diplomacy” Pahad, speaking in parliament on Tony Leon and the DA in June 2000: “Sadly, elements on the left side [of parliament] are the Judases in our country who are the purveyors of not only Afro-pessimism but also of SA pessimism. The interventions made by Hon Leon and his party reflects muddled and distorted thinking of right-wing neo-liberalism and infantile disorder. Like Goebbels and Führer Adolph, they also believe that if they continuously repeat lies and distortions it will become the truth.”

That’s right, to criticise the government back then was to behave like Goebbels. Leon had dared to take issue with the government’s approach to Zimbabwe. As it turns out, “quiet diplomacy” achieved nothing and Zimbabwe imploded anyway. Leon was onto something.

Pahad said back then of the DA, “They refuse to acknowledge that the SA government has principally and consistently championed the cause of democracy, human rights, peace and stability.”

Today, the ANC wants to withdraw from the International Criminal Court because it frowns on the country hosting murderous dictators such as Omar al-Bashir, in defiance of both national and international law. So, the DA seemed to be onto something there too.

Not just the DA, mind you. And not just Zimbabwe. There was a small collection of truth-tellers, who would say, in perfectly well-argued, evidenced-based and reasonable terms: “All of this is going to end badly guys”. Cadre-deployment, ignoring human right abuses, poor audit outcomes, these things are worrying.

But the anti-Afro-pessimism brigade would have none of it. How they used to populate the opinion pages. Shame on all those who questioned SA’s bright and glorious future. Shame on those who questioned the ANC’s competence. Shame on the naysayers and the doubters. Afro-pessimists all of them. It was a public evil, and it was to be eradicated.

In 2006, then-sports minister, the late Makhenkesi Stofile said, “We believe that hosting the [2010 Fifa] World Cup offers us the biggest opportunity to banish Afro-pessimism.” Back then, all Afro-pessimists were going to be outlawed for good.

Unfortunately, at about exactly the time the World Cup was going to destroy Afro-pessimism, the ANC decided to elect Jacob Zuma as its president. Not the best strategy. Zuma was a moral anaesthetic and intellectual opiate. Once he had suitably numbed the party, unchecked populism and incompetence produced destruction and theft on an unprecedented scale. This worked against Stofile’s objective.

Even then, as the DA said “Stop Zuma” in 2009; many in the media would say that sort of “negative campaigning” was just not on. That is, until they all sang in unison a few years later, “Zuma must fall.”

Even as Helen Zille warned in 2009 that the ANC’s “closed, crony society for comrades” was, “about making a few people rich and everyone else poor. It’s about jobs for pals and deals for political contacts”, many would say these were “scare tactics” and a futile attempt to turn the election into “some kind of moral referendum on issues of leadership”. That is, until they all bemoaned in unison, years later, about “state capture”.

You might argue Zuma himself was a big Afro-optimist. After all, he believed all other continents could fit into Africa. But that, unfortunately, was just foolishness. No, he was as big on Afro-pessimism as the ANC was big on corruption.

Where Mbeki would argue, “I am an African”, Zuma would say, “We can’t think like Africans in Africa generally. We are in Johannesburg. This is Johannesburg. It is not some national road in Malawi.” Where people gushed and fawned over Mbeki, the ostensible philosopher king, they would laugh and shake their heads at Zuma, the clown prince.

Today we are ... united in our despair at the total mess the ANC has created and our uniform lack of hope in the next decade, to look anything other than bleak

Ironically, “Africa” didn’t have much of an opinion about SA under Zuma either. Zambian vice-president Guy Scott, said in 2013, “The South Africans are very backward in terms of historical development ... I hate South Africans ... they really think they’re the bee’s knees and actually they’ve been the cause of so much trouble in this part of the world.”

It took a while, but slowly and steadily South Africans themselves came round to Scott’s point of view, as opposed to Zuma’s.

The ANC under Zuma was largely responsible for making Afro-pessimism fashionable again. Not just fashionable; so complete was the devastation the ANC wrought, it is now almost politically incorrect to suggest the ANC is a well-meaning bunch, who are just misunderstood. It has been a remarkable effort.

The ANC has produced hard evidence of such a depth and breadth, covering every aspect of its brutal demolition of the SA state in such detail, even if you wanted to believe, in Panglossian fashion, that we lived in the best of all possible worlds, someone would have you committed.

It is true, SA optimism was briefly resurrected in the first few months of Cyril Ramaphosa’s new administration. Denial is a powerful fuel and on it the nationalistic flame burnt bright again for a while. But Ramaphosa and the ANC soon snuffed that out.

So, today we are all Afro-pessimists, united in our despair at the total mess the ANC has created and our uniform lack of hope in the next decade, to look anything other than bleak. How funny it is, to see so many of the gatekeepers from the days of old, publicly lament the state of the nation and its political leadership. What happened to all that patriotic positivity guys?

Admittedly we don’t focus on the continent too much, but then we never did. Nor was the phrase Afro-pessimism ever used to denigrate anyone in a continental sense; rather, typically, for an entirely domestic agenda. Africa was just an excuse to make some or other local point.

In the ultimate twist of fate, today it is the DA that holds up the Western Cape — the best run ship in the country — as a beacon of what is possible, and a source of hope and belief. In turn, it is the blind optimists who are often taken out for a good public session of abuse and humiliation. No room for that nonsense. And, If you think the DA is “negative”, they have got nothing on the EFF, which, like Mbalula believes SA is a banana republic and, unlike Mbalula, believes the president a murderer with blood on his hands, who precedes a dictator.

There are probably some real Afro-pessimists out there, who are loving SA’s implosion. And while the ANC did much to transform the idea into rubbish, by endlessly abusing it to denigrate the perfectly valid criticisms of its political opponents, you do get the sense things have changed regardless.

It is such a loaded term, most will shirk the idea that it best describes our collective outlook today, but then it is not possible to describe our outlook, at least not with a straight face, as being in any way optimistic. The ANC has taken a sledgehammer to that possibility.

Perhaps then, what we have, is South Afro-realism, as least as far as the ANC is concerned. It hasn’t yet filtered down to all the electorate. Some of it has. We are getting there. Turns out, the ANC isn’t just Africa’s oldest liberation movement, it is also quickly becoming its most useless. And it’s OK to say so. That’s a positive development worth being optimistic and patriotic about.