There are a million variations of the current SA conversation, but basically they all end with the same question: and then what?
I had one of these conversations the other day with one of the best thinkers I know, a man who simply would not take for an answer “I don’t know” or “it will work out” or “we’re all going to die”.
The Great SA Conversation arises every time people get together here because the sense that the country is in a deep crisis is everywhere.
The evidence is everywhere too. The government breaks everything it touches. The currency is tanking. There’s literally no leadership. The governing ANC is corrupted beyond recognition, and the official opposition, the DA, cannot devise a way to capitalise on the opportunity presented to it.
We have just been ranked absolute last on a global study of our children’s ability to read for meaning. We cannot get skills into the country. Cholera has broken out around our capital city and we have electricity, if we are lucky, for only half the day.
Crisis, emergency, catastrophe: call it what you will, our situation is severe beyond anything we and the rest of the world imagined at the so-called “dawn” of our democracy in 1994. What is going to happen to us?
My friend and I agreed that this — now, not 1994 — is the real end of apartheid. We agreed that no electricity, no trains, cholera, the utter failure of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency and the prospect of a President Paul Mashatile, rampant poverty and greylisting, far more accurately describe the way apartheid and a few hundred years of colonialism would, indeed should, look like than the queues of hopeful voters 30 years ago.
I’m sorry, but apartheid was never going to heaven. It was always hell, and we’ve finally arrived.
We agreed that the slow death of the ANC marks the end of it all far more faithfully than anything else. We agreed that the ANC is itself the last substantial vestige of apartheid still standing; that it is, literally in word and deed, a child of apartheid. It was created by colonialism and apartheid and is in every way a living consequence of it all. It is Rosemary’s Baby.
And so, he asked? I said that as the ANC dies or fragments (it could take another two elections to prise it away from unconstrained power) it would be increasingly replaced by ethnic politics. Inkatha is already making headway against the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal. The Freedom Front Plus and Patriotic Front eat away at the DA base. That the emergence of independent candidates in elections from 2024 would encourage the politically ambitious to mine their own ethnic communities for support.
Still we agreed. But he wanted to know whether we would be a democracy in 10-20 years’ time. I tried to say we would, but the truth is we don’t know. We agreed that the fact that we are a fundamentally conservative and religious people is a good thing. The political centre is where votes are to be found. Fringe parties, even big ones like the EFF, have a ceiling.
But it was frustrating not be to able to get past his pessimism. He drew a cross. The left of the horizontal was optimist and the right, pessimist. The top of the vertical was knowledgeable and bottom naive. Where would I place myself? I chose the middle of the knowledgeable/optimist quadrant. He was in the middle of pessimist/knowledgeable.
It isn’t the most scientific measure but I can’t bring myself to think it is all over, that the next stop is Zimbabwe. His response was that all the white Zimbabweans he knew would have made the mark I made 20 years ago.
We talked about the English and Afrikaners. What English speakers had made any real, measurable difference here in our lifetime? There were no English-speaking business figures we could agree on, and I could only manage Helen Suzman. We agreed that if a few hundred Afrikaners under the Solidarity banner, happy to contribute, were let loose on the country for a year they could fix all the broken water pumps, the power stations, the potholes and the broken schools and hospitals.
And then what? I had no answer. Where are your assets, he asked, here or offshore? I reckon I’m 60-40. I suggested that as ethnic politics come to the fore the country might begin to fray, that KwaZulu-Natal, annexed by the British in 1843, could be the first to try to secede. It has all the trappings, damaged though they may be, of a viable state and a homogeneous society. And a popular monarchy.
Yes but, he said, secession would require the rest of the country to agree, a small constitutional difficulty secessionists face from Scotland to Catalonia. But in SA I firmly believe the prospects for the future are very different either side of the Fish River in the Eastern Cape, which we know now to our cost, the settlers should never have crossed.
Too much time has passed and too much blood has spilt since then, and we all now face an existential crisis. We cannot start again, but what I do know for sure is that history doesn’t respect cliched dates with destiny like 1994.
As they say, history is just one thing after another and the only way to find out what happens here may be to stick around and find out. Or at least try.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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