His entourage said it with no irony whatsoever. I think they might even have addressed him directly the same way: I was disoriented at the time, fighting the sense that I’d slipped into a fever dream in which I was hovering in the wings of a very on-the-nose political satire, but I’m pretty sure I remember someone gesturing obsequiously towards a door and saying, “this way, Leader”.
The object of this cultish genuflection on that particular day was Mmusi Maimane, arriving at a DA event in Cape Town in 2018. Less than two years later he was no longer the Leader, but on that day I watched people work as hard as bees around a queen to wrap an ordinary person in pure, glittering unreality and projection, and I was struck by how hard it must be to hold on to who you are when, dozens of times a day, people avert their awe-filled eyes from your face and call you “Leader” or “Your Holiness” or “Your Excellency”.
I was reminded of that spectacle this week as Hristo Grozev, an investigative journalist with Bellingcat, provided an insight into Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine. According to Grozev, Russia has pumped billions of dollars into Ukraine since 2014 to establish a network of politicians and media outlets in that country to shill for Moscow. I suppose it was a good idea in theory.
In practice, however, it needed a fifth column of steely, Soviet-era ideologues, and what it got was a conga line of hedonists and con artists, who seem to have stolen all the money while doing pretty much nothing to further the ambitions of Vladimir Putin.
Still, as South Africans have learned over the last many years of ANC rule, even the most idle and half-witted opportunists have a natural gift for self-enrichment, and Russia’s people in Ukraine quickly worked out the best way to keep getting paid: telling Putin what they thought he wanted to hear. Little more than geopolitical fan fiction, this endless supply of sycophantic make-believe seems to have taken hold in Moscow. So much so, says Grozev, that Putin and his cabal genuinely believed Russian troops would be “met with flowers” by grateful Ukrainians.
For those of us raised on the James Bond trope of the tightly controlled, unemotional, eternally aloof supervillain, it is difficult to believe that a former KGB operative might be unravelled by something as banal as flattery. And yet I saw how hard Maimane’s entourage worked to separate him from the real world, despite him being — and I mean no disrespect to a man who is clearly a very good sort — an almost microscopically tiny figure in world politics. If the Leader gets that kind of treatment in a small community centre in Cape Town, imagine what happens around Putin all day.
Of course, it’s not just local politicians or international tyrants getting this treatment. Most of us have been the Leader at some stage, our failings excused and our talents inflated by friends or admirers. If you’ve been very unlucky, you might even have fallen foul of the “musical” child, who — it’s other, very real talents ignored — fulfils the grim destiny its parents have chosen for it, sawing away at your last strand of goodwill on its abused little violin, or tentatively dismembering a piano sonata, or summoning on its clarinet the final, despairing wheeze of a beached porpoise while everyone nods and smiles.
In short, we’ve been diligently dreaming up myths about ourselves and each other and doing our best to believe them since forever. Which makes me wonder why we don’t talk more about self-delusion when it comes to judging the crimes of prominent scoundrels. Then again, perhaps that’s changing, if Hollywood’s current trend — the rise and fall of the real-life, mysteriously magnetic con artist — is any indication.
Productions such as The Tinder Swindler and Inventing Anna or the forthcoming WeCrashed and The Dropout, all offer familiar thrills, whether the tingle of self-righteous exceptionalism, as we tell ourselves that we wouldn’t have fallen for such an obvious scam, or a more primal shudder, the morbid adrenalin rush of the herd watching one of its own get dragged into the water by the crocodile we all thought was a log. But they also seem to be offering something new: a touch of sympathy, or at least a willingness to experiment with empathy, and to wonder, however clumsily, about the extent to which these predators got lost inside their own lies.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that anyone should try to condone Putin’s bombing of civilian targets because he didn’t get enough hugs back when he was a toddler in the KGB. But perhaps the next time some local politician says something infuriatingly stupid and dishonest — that SA should mediate in Ukraine, for example — it might help to pause and ask: what if this person isn’t a clear-eyed liar taking me for a fool?
What if they believe what they’re saying, or almost believe it, because they’re adrift in a world in which lies are truth and Fikile Mbalula is doing a great job and Cyril Ramaphosa is an international statesman? It doesn’t fix anything, I know. But it does ease the blow a little. And until a real Leader arrives, I’ll take all the help I can get.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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