A noted human rights lawyer with an influential social media presence has, in recent days, taken to posting on Twitter images and facts relating to Auschwitz, with the comment: “This was a crime against humanity.”
Posted just days after the demise of FW de Klerk and renewed debate on social media platforms as to whether apartheid constituted a crime against humanity, it is hard not to assume these comments are anything other than this particular lawyer’s determination that apartheid does not so qualify.
I’m not particularly interested in this ostensible debate. There isn’t one. Apartheid is and was incontrovertibly a crime against humanity and there is nothing remotely revelatory or controversial in observing it to be so.
I’m more interested in this phenomenon of pettiness that would have someone seek to publicly deny what is inarguable fact, and to draw acclaim for doing so. It’s an impulse motivated seemingly by a desire to inflame, to goad and to offend.
And you might well say, correctly: “Well, what else is effective social media?” But this phenomenon seemed at work in our larger public debate also in relation to the occasion of De Klerk’s death. News that arrangements for the funeral were to be kept secret for fear of political disruptions and the online shaming by EFF politicians of his former political antagonists — who had risked their lives fighting the apartheid state — for pausing to bow their heads, seemed to reflect this same phenomenon of pettiness.
It is hard to understand how threats to disrupt the funeral of a man now dead offers any gesture of resistance to De Klerk and what he represented, other than the most empty. And to look to shame those who offered courage and conviction in their fight against a system De Klerk led and represented when he was at his most powerful seems to underline our passage as a country from a politics of courage to a politics of spite.
That we as a people believe little is vested in our public life is unambiguously underlined by the recent local government election results and the frighteningly high number of people who chose simply not to vote. But it isn’t just that because nothing seems to matter — that basic service delivery appears a mirage; deepening poverty and inequality just received fact — nothing matters to us.
We aren’t simply nihilistic or apathetic or cynical. We seem to be spiteful, our gestures and our debate intended only to hurt, annoy or offend. We seem to believe that in the absence of the capacity to meaningfully change our conditions, there is nonetheless something of value to be won in gratuitously wounding.
The tragedy of this orientation is that far from taking us closer to what needs to happen to effect change and reverse rot, we are taken further from it. A relatively new book by London School of Economics director Minouche Shafik, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, addresses the urgent need of states after the pandemic to rebuild the mutual trust and support on which citizenship and societies are based by pooling and sharing more risks with each other while optimising the use of talent and enabling individuals to contribute as much as they can.
She writes that we are “increasingly living in ‘you’re on your own’ societies, a situation which gets translated into the politics of anger, an epidemic of mental health issues and both young and old fearing for their futures”. That seems especially true for SA, where manifest failures in service delivery and crises relating to power, water, sanitation, security and health care mean the average South African feels very much abandoned.
Exacerbating this may be that we are promised something different: our founding constitutive document pledges social security, health care, housing. This chasm between reality and rhetoric understandably likely only inflames our anger.
This slide into spite makes even the imagining of a new social contract, the building of mutual trust and co-operation, all the more impossible.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is CEO of Freedom Under Law.
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