If you’ve followed this column throughout January, you’ll know that it has been a literary month. It ends with a question that is, unfortunately, of significance to the wider creative sector in South Africa: which books does Gayton McKenzie read?
The man who is both minister of sport, arts & culture and leader of the Patriotic Alliance (PA) loves being in the headlines — even when this happens for all the wrong reasons, such as his recent censorial enthusiasm in cancelling artist Gabrielle Goliath’s participation as South Africa’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
In a blatant case of overreach, which he has sought to justify through a series of contradictory claims, McKenzie unilaterally decided that an artwork incorporating criticism of Israel’s brutality against Palestinians (one component of Goliath’s iterative performance and video work Elegy) should not be shown at our national pavilion in Venice.
McKenzie, no doubt, would tell us that his favourite book is the Bible. A rather idiosyncratic form of Christianity is the basis of his post-prison identity.
His Zionist fervour, for example, is supposedly a function of his religious convictions: God commands him, he has revealed, to stand with Israel. Apparently Christianity is also what drives the xenophobia and other forms of right-wing zealotry in the PA’s policy positions.
You have to read your Bible very selectively if you want to use it to endorse the death penalty, compulsory military service and ethnic nationalism. That’s the kind of thing the Maga evangelicals love to do Stateside.
But I suspect that, like his hero Donald Trump, McKenzie pays lip service to the Bible, but the book that he most admires is the one authorising his own founding myth. While Trump’s is Trump: The Art of the Deal (ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz), McKenzie’s is The Choice: The Gayton McKenzie Story, written by his acolyte and PA co-founder Charles Cilliers.
A variation on a familiar conversion narrative — hardened criminal sees the light while incarcerated, becomes a corruption buster and businessman before turning his hand to politics — The Choice has the adverse effect of reinforcing its subject’s evident narcissism. A man who confuses himself with the messiah he supposedly serves is unlikely to admit to his bigotry, self-importance and small-mindedness.
But the bigger issue is whether President Cyril Ramaphosa will heed calls to remove McKenzie from the role. Sadly, history suggests not.
The law may force him to do this: Goliath and her colleagues will fight him in court. It doesn’t seem that the minister has a legal leg to stand on, much as he may think he can exercise unilateral power in all matters relating to the arts.
But the bigger issue is whether President Cyril Ramaphosa will heed calls to remove McKenzie from the role. Sadly, history suggests not. The arts & culture ministry (sometimes combined with sport) has previously been used by our presidents as either a strategic pressure release valve or a political dumping ground.
As Shadrack Bokaba noted in the Sunday Times, the strategic pattern started with the first post-apartheid government when the ANC “ceded the portfolio to opposition leaders as part of power-sharing arrangements”, putting Ben Ngubane and Lionel Mtshali of the IFP in charge. The PA is not crucial to the government of national unity (GNU). If McKenzie were fired and his small party left the GNU — a threat he has already made a few times — the impact would primarily be felt at municipal level, where the PA likes to exercise its kingmaker status.
In terms of the dumping ground: this would explain Lulu Xingwana’s tenure, which was also marked by religiosity (recall her homophobic hissy fit about same-sex couples in photographs by Zanele Muholi). And, in a different key, the late Nathi Mthethwa, who was given the portfolio as a kind of sinecure for a decade after presiding as police minister over Marikana. Mthethwa was a man of mystery and figured ambiguously in ANC factionalism.
Which brings me to my final book: the little black book in which Ramaphosa writes down the names of those who have dirt on him or have other means of bringing down the whole house of cards. If McKenzie doesn’t get the boot, the only conclusion that South Africa’s artists can reach is that they are, once again, collateral damage in someone else’s fight.
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