They say one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons the living get away with so much.
The original version of that popular little finger-wag was even more restrictive. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans told us, echoing the ancient Greeks who’d given them the idea: “Of the dead nothing but good is to be said”. In other words, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Of course, part of this tradition comes from the admirable convention to show compassion to those who have lost a loved one. But at its heart the restriction on speaking ill is based on basic fairness. The dead, the thinking goes, cannot defend themselves from accusations or refute the allegations being made, so it is fundamentally unjust to point the finger at them.
What this requires, plainly, is the belief that the dead aren’t really dead. After all, if their reputations need to be protected by the living, it must follow that they not only still exist as themselves but are also able to get news of the accusations being levelled against them.
This is the nature of the injustice: they are still them, and know they are being denounced; and yet, because of famously ropey lines of communication between their world and ours, they can’t send through their rebuttal.
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, who knew exactly where they were going after death, this approach would have made a lot of sense. I suspect it also comforts many modern South Africans, the overwhelming majority of whom are religious and therefore probably believe that they will continue to exist in some form after death.
To be fair, there are good things about the ancient tradition of nil nisi bonum. It prevents funerals from turning into fistfights. It offers a relatively safe period of mourning to the bereaved, and confers a quiet veneer of dignity on the rupturing experience of death. However, the trouble is where nil nisi bonum sinks so deeply into the consciousness of a society that it becomes a form of self-censorship.
It goes without saying that the legacy of someone like Mangosuthu Buthelezi is a slippery thing, not least because legacy, for all its pompous claims to represent history and posterity, always comes down to relationships in the here and now; and there is no accounting for relationships.
Humans love the worst people. We hate the best people. Today, there are South Africans who are sure they have lost the finest, noblest, kindest man they have ever known. There are also South Africans who know, deep in their scarred bodies, that an apartheid collaborator and warlord has finally left the country he bled in the 1980s.
Inevitably, the weekend’s accounting has been scrambled. I have read softball eulogies and vitriolic denunciations. But what has struck me is how the former dominate the latter, and how the indictments were seen as some kind minority report by a famously grumpy, dissenting judge.
Mondli Makhanya’s front-page shredding of Buthelezi in City Press at the weekend was extraordinary in its ferocity and honesty. And yet across social media a remarkable number of people wrote comments about it suggesting they weren’t so much being schooled as entertained by a familiar shtick, as if funny old Mondli was at it again.
Of course, there are pragmatic reasons for some of the sanitised tributes offered by politicians over the last few days. It’s one thing for journalists — or the survivors of Boipatong or Vosloorus — to remind us that Desmond Tutu ejected Buthelezi from Robert Sobukwe’s funeral in 1978, or that Buthelezi and his puppet Bantustan ministers had their salaries paid by Pretoria, or that Magnus Malan’s SA Defence Force trained IFP death squads in the correct method for killing all the inhabitants of a house, or how ready Buthelezi was to implode the 1994 elections if he didn’t get his way; but there’s another election coming, and that right soon.
The last thing the ANC wants is to drive yet more voters towards the IFP by stirring up old animosities in KwaZulu-Natal. And on the other side of the aisle the marriage of convenience between the DA and IFP — the so-called moonshot pact — would end in rapid divorce should John Steenhuisen start calling spades spades.
The rest of us are not running for office, though, and I think we could all do with a little less nil nisi bonum and a little more complexity and honesty.
I would also suggest that Buthelezi doesn’t need the protection of pious or euphemistic remembrance. If there is an afterlife, he is beyond our help and judgment now. If there isn’t, and he is simply gone, then his reputation is irrelevant to him now, and all that mattered is the life he lived. And here too there is no cause for his fans to worry.
After all, if you die at 95, four years after your spouse to whom you were married for 67 years, surrounded by family and acolytes, never having had to account for your role in a civil war or the atrocities stemming from it, rewarded for trying to undermine and destroy democratic elections by being made a cabinet minister for a decade and an MP for three, brother, you did more than OK.
You got away with the whole damned thing.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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