Many people seemed underwhelmed by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet reshuffle last week, but as someone who yearns for SA to start building towards political mediocrity, I must say it felt to me as if the country was taking a step forward, or at least tripping forward, or at least falling forward into a forgiving hedge.
Yes, our new deputy water & sanitation minister did insist in 2017 that if a child dies in a toilet it’s God’s will. And yes, Nathi Mthethwa is still sports, arts & culture minister, which suggests his initial appointment was deliberate, and not, as I assumed, because Ramaphosa lost a dare.
But that’s what happens when, like Ramaphosa, you’re treading water while trying to build a life raft with people who either have a deep ideological suspicion of boats or else have made a deal with the sharks. You have to move slowly so as not to alarm the morons or alert the criminals, and you end up having to use rotten wood, mouldy canvas and Bheki Cele.
But many commentators were having none of it, which is where I saw a familiar demand being made, one that is repeated whenever there’s a reshuffle or an election: a call for more young people in government.
It is true that African politics is gerontocracy. Ramaphosa might have been 65 when he became president, but he is now 104 years old. It feels sensible to demand the vigour and the perspective of the young. Still, at the risk of sounding terribly curmudgeonly, I would urge caution, or at least introspection, when it comes to these sorts of demands.
Many of those calling for younger cabinet ministers believed they were doing something diametrically opposed to cadre deployment. And yet by simply calling for “youth”, rather than talent or excellence or basic competence, they were unwittingly calling for the deployment of another cadre of people employed because of their identity rather than their skills.
More importantly, by using “youth” as a synonym for hope and excellence, and therefore implying the opposite about old age, they were, I would suggest, also revealing the extent to which ageism has become an acceptable form of prejudice in our society.
Of course, ageism has been around for millennia, most visibly as the elderly dismissing the abilities and tastes of the young. These days, however, these laments hold less cultural and political sway. Clint Eastwood might have meant business when he told those kids to get off his lawn, but for the most part we are encouraged to see such complaints as the ramblings of Grampa Simpson, hopelessly lost in the present, yelling at clouds.
Ageism that aims the other way, however, whereby the young dismiss or diminish anyone older than themselves, seems to raise no alarm whatsoever. English speakers use “old” as a slur almost constantly — think how easily “stupid old” slips off the tongue —and yet I doubt we even think of it as a slur.
The other night I rewatched Jordan Peele’s 2017 satire Get Out, in which a community of elderly, apparently welcoming WASPs is revealed to have been (spoiler alert!) snatching young black people to use their bodies to achieve a kind of parasitic immortality.
The film remains a masterpiece of subversion, presenting in comically horrific microcosm a vision of the white establishment co-opting black bodies to achieve a facade of friendly, even liberal society. But what struck me this time was how even the most intelligent, conscious and progressive piece of art can recycle ageist tropes.
Yes, the wicked white body snatchers in the film are enabled by systemic racism. But you could argue that the primal, motivating evil at the root of their actions is the fact that they are old people who don’t want to die. Their racism, and that of their society, presented them with a diabolical solution to that problem, but it wasn’t what made them kill in the first place. That, one might argue, was their age.
The villain whose age makes it monstrous is almost everywhere in popular culture, from witches hiding their hideous, ancient faces under magic charms to the creature Gollum given unnaturally long life by his precious ring, to the shrivelled Emperor in the Star Wars films.
Harry Potter saves the world by killing a 71-year-old who went off the rails while trying to achieve immortality. A sizeable chunk of the “young adult” fiction genre is premised on nasty grownups, many of them elderly, trying to steal, cheat, disinherit, brainwash, enslave or simply murder children.
I suppose there are sensible explanations for why this prejudice is still so deep-rooted and uninterrogated. Extreme old age is the human face of death, that primeval horror that birthed all others. Too many people also live in the rigor mortis grip of men who should have stepped aside decade ago in favour of more competent people.
But as most of the world grows older and older it’s becoming more essential for us to examine our own relationship with age and our prejudices around it, whether they be an automatic respect and admiration for people simply because they are young, or an unconscious suspicion of their motives and their abilities just because they are old.
Because once we start demanding youth in government, instead of leadership or talent or honesty, well, then it’s the same old, same old.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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