Rattling the Cage: Reflections on Democratic South Africa

By Brent Meersman

Most South Africans have strong views on our past and present, often based on how we have been personally affected by history, and an understanding of the challenges that face us as a country. But how well-examined and solid are these positions? Have your views been properly thought through? Are you correctly informed? Do you even have the facts straight?

Rattling the Cage takes the reader on an informed tour of the South African reality: from the highs and lows, the successes and failures, FW de Klerk’s gaffes to Fees Must Fall, the Oscar Pistorius trial, the 2010 FIFA World Cup, triple BEE, global warming, the Covid-19 pandemic, gay rights in Africa, and veganism.

Among the questions Meersman asks are: Do South Africans still believe in their Constitution and democracy? Why do so many young South Africans say Nelson Mandela was a sell-out and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a dismal failure? Is outlawing hate speech and criminalising racist behaviour really a good idea? Why do communities still burn down their schools? How did the Marikana massacre happen in the democratic era? Why are African immigrants increasingly unwelcome in South Africa? Can our media be trusted to tell us the truth? And how do we embrace climate change?

History, big-picture philosophy, grassroots journalism and a novelist’s eye – animated by a genuine sense of moral indignation at the current state of the nation – come together in these essays to provide critical perspectives on and insights into South Africa’s recent past and current political, economic and social undercurrents. No matter what your views are, you are sure to find your understanding of the country deepened, challenged and sometimes changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781770107731

Book preview

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For Meshack and Ginny, and Litha –

in so many ways the best of South Africa

Rattling the Cage

Reflections on Democratic South Africa

Brent Meersman

PICADOR AFRICA

First published in 2021 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978 1 77010 772 4

e-ISBN 978 1 77010 773 1

© Brent Meersman 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the details, facts, names, events and places mentioned, the publisher and author welcome feedback, comments and/or corrections that could further enrich the book.

Editing by Russell Martin

Proofreading by Riaan Wolmarans

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg

Cover design by Joey Hi-Fi

Author photograph by Gaura Moodley

Contents

About the author

For the reader

Part One

Fear and Hope: Retracing the political transition

Chapter 1 Mandela’s funeral

Chapter 2 Do we still believe in miracles?

Chapter 3 Democracy without freedom

Part Two

Envy and Avarice: Retracing the economic transition

Chapter 4 Not that different from apartheid

Chapter 5 The descent to Marikana

Chapter 6 Born free and uneducated

Part Three

Sadness and Joy: Retracing the social transition

Chapter 7 Truth or reconciliation

Chapter 8 Apartheid for immigrants

Part Four

Anger and Surprise: Rethinking protest

Chapter 9 Burning with anger

Chapter 10 Unsurprised by crime

Part Five

Disgust and Offence: Generation Z

Chapter 11 Dignity and humiliation

Chapter 12 Fees and faeces

Chapter 13 Free but speechless

Chapter 14 Why we don’t care about the media

Part Six

Love and Compassion: Our place on earth

Chapter 15 It’s un-African

Chapter 16 Why aren’t you vegan?

Chapter 17 Climactic climate change

Acknowledgements

About the author

BRENT MEERSMAN is the co-editor of GroundUp and has chaired the Cape Town Press Club since 2013. He previously wrote for the Mail & Guardian (2003–16), This Is Africa (2014–18) and New Africa Analysis (London), and his work has been translated and published internationally. Meersman is the author of seven books, including a political roman-à-clef, Primary Coloured, and an ambitious trilogy tracing the lives of three South African families from 1978 to 2000, Sunset Claws, of which Deborah Steinmair wrote in Rapport: ‘Meersman is one of this country’s greatest story tellers.’ His critically acclaimed memoir, A Childhood Made Up, was published in 2020.

For the reader

Over the years, like all of us, I have formed views on how South Africa was shaped and where I stand on the issues of the day. But I find I am ‘no longer young enough to know everything’ and, to complete Oscar Wilde’s witty maxim, I have begun to suspect everything. ¹ I am on the cusp of that famously described stage of life when the radical heart fearfully and unwillingly starts to give sway to a mellowing conservative brain, and the issues of the day quickly become quandaries. But worse than that, as writers we condemn ourselves in print; those column inches I have produced for the Mail & Guardian, Thought Leader, This Is Africa and a dozen other titles, and as chief writer for London-based current affairs magazine New Africa Analysis, all wait to convict me. Add to that the eye-opening year I spent as a young idealist at Parliament, and my fate would seem to be sealed.

It is, however, some consolation that, thanks to the internet and social media, we writers are now not the only ones against whom a quote might be plucked from the forgotten past to embarrass us in the naked present. I pluck a lot from the past and draw on previous articles throughout these essays,² but I find my views and tone have significantly shifted over the years. We often form opinions before we have all the facts, and columnists are under pressure to express themselves prematurely. What happens is the opinion, like a first impression, sticks, and we don’t always revise our views in the light of new evidence. Had I been properly informed of the facts back then? I wondered. And how solid and defensible is my current take on things? Were the analyses from the past, which I carried into the present, merely the consensus of my social bubble?

I have a slight advantage, as I have a ringside seat for the news-­headline makers of the day and sometimes have the opportunity to be persuaded in person. Listening to politicians, however, often makes me question how we come to believe what we say.

As the co-editor of the human rights-focused news agency GroundUp³ these past seven years, my primary purpose is to constantly scrutinise copy for truth and be mindful of my own blinkers and those of our passionate reporters. As the stories pour in, we face ethical and moral dilemmas daily, but we seldom have sufficient time to think them through to our satisfaction. We resort to clinging to facts, but even these can become slippery when put into words. Our newsroom does stringent fact checks, and we have discovered that witnesses invent, reporters misunderstand, authorities spin stories, and among all of them are people who lie outright. It didn’t take long for this constant state of doubt and a habit of being deeply sceptical about everything to rebound on my own opinions. For all these reasons, I decided it was time to closely re-examine my views of South Africa, past and present. The result is the book you now hold.

My guiding light is the Constitution of South Africa. I am proud of it. Just the writing of it, which involved huge public participation, was an extraordinary achievement for the country. It envisages a social democratic state as the vehicle to realise what are essentially liberal values for everyone in our society: a belief in the autonomy and dignity of the individual and that human rights arise from this; that all of us should be treated as equals, regardless of the colour of our skin, our gender, our status or culture, and that everyone should be shown respect even if you strongly disagree with them; that we should strive to create a society with the conditions that allow everyone to be free, to choose their destiny, love whomever they want, and find fulfilment for themselves; and that democracy is the least worst form of government to achieve this.

Our Constitution enshrines the first-generation rights of the Enlightenment thinkers: life, dignity, equality, privacy, and the fundamental freedoms associated with democracy: freedom of expression, association, assembly, opinion, belief and religion, and movement.⁴ As a nation we have also entrenched socio-economic rights in the Constitution, such as access to food, water, housing, health care and social security.

Yet, after 27 years of democracy, I am not alone in thinking we are further away from achieving that vision than many of us hoped we’d be by now. As a news editor, I watch the grassroots battles that cross my desk daily – battles by impoverished communities for housing, water and land, protests against state brutality, gender-based violence and unchecked crime, the fight to advance workers’ rights, the struggle for various social justice causes, the hundreds of community demonstrations for socio-economic rights, the occupy movements, and Extinction Rebellion.

There is no quick fix to such problems as the devastating legacy of apartheid, the financial crisis of 2008, the economic policies that caused it and the risks to which that global monetary system still leaves us exposed, or the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic, yet somehow we have to hold the course and resist the populist, nationalist, illiberal backlash that has followed the subsequent decline of our economy. What is disturbing to me is that many now oppose the ‘rainbow’ vision of a free, democratic, non-racial, united South Africa. The government keeps inventing laws, and political parties keep espousing views, that clash directly with our rights as enshrined in the Constitution. The extent to which our nation has failed or reneged on these rights, and understanding how this has come to pass, is the animating indignation of the novelist-cum-journalist whose essays lie before you.

For those who like to have a hint of what lies ahead, in the first section I re-evaluate the dominant narrative of our political transition, the fears that drove apartheid and the hopes of the liberation movement. I look at what lies behind the claim that Mandela was a ‘sell-out’ and why we the people feel disappointed by democracy.

In Part Two, haunted by the Marikana massacre, I reassess the narrative that the reason for our economic transition and the current lack of transformation was that the post-apartheid economy was an elite pact, a belief I had long held and often expressed; but was it that simple? And given the current state of the nation, will envy and avarice in the end determine the economic choices we make as a nation?

In Part Three, I revisit our social transition. I reconsider the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the light of the recent harsh criticisms of it from quarters left and right. I wonder if perhaps forgiveness and reconciliation were never real options. I go on to ask why, as a nation, against all my expectations, there is so much xenophobia.

I also look at the intersection of racism and homophobia. I wonder what role humiliation has played in the national discourse and how easily it is manipulated. Why do people still burn schools, trains and artworks, and why are people still using the necklacing method to kill one another in the townships? I want to know what the limits of offence are in free speech and if hate speech can be addressed with laws. I wonder why we don’t care about the free press as much as we should. I question whether Fees Must Fall was just a pyrrhic victory.

Lastly, I contemplate South Africa’s place in the world and the way we as individuals conduct ourselves. I ask for compassion for animals and wonder why we are not all vegans. I ask how we must embrace climate change, which is already upon us. Throughout, I respond to the Covid-19 pandemic that started here a year ago, in March 2020.

or the reader

1 Wilde, Oscar. 1903. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. L. Smithers. ‘The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything,’ wrote Wilde.

The following articles written by me have been drawn on:

The legacy of Thabo Mbeki. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 13, July–October 2012. University of London.

Those who hate Mandela. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 13 January 2012.

Lending a strong rand. New Africa Analysis, issue 3. November 2010.

COSATU and the ANC: semblance or alliance. New Africa Analysis, issue 4. December 2010.

Zulu dawn. New Africa Analysis, issue 5. December 2010.

Old King Coal. New Africa Analysis, issue 5. December 2010.

Time to axe exchange control. New Africa Analysis, issue 5. December 2010.

Unemployment: the biggest job ever. New Africa Analysis, issue 6. January 2011.

Who wants white farmers? New Africa Analysis, issue 6. January 2011.

Special report: Global warnings: struggling to measure up in 2010. New Africa Analysis, issue 7. January 2011.

South Africa: government tests positive. New Africa Analysis, issue 7. January 2011.

Alien times for Zimbabweans. New Africa Analysis, issue 8. February 2011.

South Africa: has the Department of Education at last turned the corner? New Africa Analysis, issue 8. February 2011.

Rainbow nation sets out on the yellow BRIC road. New Africa Analysis, issue 8. February 2011.

Review: Mandela’s Conversations with Myself. New Africa Analysis, issue 3. November 2010.

South Africa’s Mandela: icon or aikona? This Is Africa. 15 December 2017.

Winnie faces the music. Mail & Guardian. 29 April 2011.

Zumangaung. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 31 December 2012.

The problem with Obama. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 7 November 2012.

After Marikana, is it the same country? Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 20 September 2012.

Why the ANC will rule till Jesus comes. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 9 July 2012.

White males, naked capitalism and ending economic apartheid. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 3 July 2012.

Sex and drugs and the Olympic roll. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 26 June 2012.

Capitalism or socialism? We have no choice. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 19 June 2012.

So let’s rewrite the Constitution. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 12 June 2012.

Blade Nzimande, the new Juju. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 4 June 2012.

Tackling President Zuma. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 27 May 2012.

The DA rocks. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 21 May 2012.

Nuclear is so Third World. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 7 May 2012.

Give me South Africa any day. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 30 April 2012.

Letter to South Africa from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 3 April 2012.

Homosexuality is African. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 26 March 2012.

Please, no God: not in our courts, not in Parliament, not in government. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 19 March 2012.

The ANC’s ‘second transition’: promise, threat or propaganda? Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 11 March 2012.

The unions: for whom do they speak? Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 4 March 2012.

An apartheid beneficiary’s guide to the budget. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 27 February 2012.

Courting disaster: is there a con in constitution? Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 20 February 2012.

How spooky is President Zuma? Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 13 February 2012.

Occupy Tshwane: behold the bourgeois revolution. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 4 February 2012.

The problem is not black and white. Mail & Guardian Thought Leader. 22 January 2012.

No one should have to bump into Eugene de Kock in the supermarket. Politicsweb. 22 July 2014.

Whitewashing Mbeki’s legacy. Politicsweb. 27 April 2012.

The rand: weaker is not better. Politicsweb. 6 January 2012.

Big business is killing off small business. Politicsweb. 18 December 2011.

Zuma’s toxic presidency is even infecting the views of civil society in South Africa.

This Is Africa. 25 July 2017.

Whither South Africa? This Is Africa. 30 June 2017.

What South Africans really think about gay rights and homosexuality. This Is Africa. 14 September 2016.

‘Exhibit B’: look black in anger. This Is Africa. 9 September 2014.

Black in the closet: homoerotic photography. This Is Africa. 3 April 2014.

South Africa gets a second chance: Malema is worried. This Is Africa. 20 February 2018.

Gunning for the poor: South Africa’s brutal policing. This Is Africa. 19 September 2017.

Why South Africans burn their trains. This Is Africa. 26 June 2017.

Why South Africans burn their schools. This Is Africa. 16 June 2016.

Is it really a good idea to make racist behaviour a crime? This Is Africa. 23 May 2016.

Zuma: time to amputate. This Is Africa. 6 April 2016.

South Africa: gunning for the Guptas. This Is Africa. 29 March 2016.

Bitter let-down for Mbeki fans. This Is Africa. 23 March 2016.

Zuma goes: then what? This Is Africa. 14 December 2015.

The killing of Emmanuel Jossias. This Is Africa. 18 May 2015.

SA elections stuck in apartheid paradigm. This Is Africa. 15 April 2014

FIFA’s lousy legacy in South Africa. This Is Africa. 9 July 2014.

South Africa’s student resolution: #FeesMustFall. This Is Africa. 26 October 2015.

The fight for the soul of Nelson Mandela. This Is Africa. 10 December 2014.

Where the sins of the fathers are visited on the ‘foreigners’. This Is Africa. 27 January 2015.

Is UCT a safe space for art? This Is Africa. 6 April 2016.

Will Zuma end South African exceptionalism? This Is Africa. 3 April 2017.

Taking the poor for granted, a crisis in South Africa. This Is Africa. 13 March 2017.

South Africa proposes sinister new Afrophobic laws. This Is Africa. 28 February 2017.

People need lives not jobs. This Is Africa. 14 December 2016.

South Africa: have the Gupta leaks sunk the ship? This Is Africa. 4 July 2017.

South Africa’s worst budget since advent of democracy. This Is Africa. 26 February 2018.

South Africans want urban land more than white farms. This Is Africa. 21 March 2018.

Groundup.org.za started in April 2012 as a joint project of Community Media Trust and the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Social Science Research.

The debt to the Enlightenment is expressly stated on the website of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. See: https://www.concourt.org.za/index.php/constitution/your-rights/the-bill-of-rights. Retrieved 10 August 2020.

Part One

Fear and Hope

Retracing the political transition

Chapter 1

Mandela’s funeral

Nelson Mandela, a sell-out?

– Was the Constitution merely an ‘elite compromise’?

– Obama’s selfie – Winnie Mandela as antithesis – Mandela’s legacy

I hear that Nelson Mandela sold out the liberation struggle. It is more than just rumour now. The much-touted South African ‘miracle’ was apparently no more than an ‘elite pact’, a pernicious charade to preserve capitalism. What kind of revolutionaries fight to share power with their former jailers? ‘The people shall govern’, but why do they have neither jobs nor land but instead ‘neoliberal apartheid’ – ‘the suspended revolution’, the ‘unfinished revolution’, ‘the dream deferred’? After decades of struggle, no apartheid generals were shot, and no generals shot themselves. This is deeply unsatisfying.

To some extent all great men hoodwink us. In the case of Nelson Mandela, it was probably for our own good. How could we not have believed in a man chastened by 27 years in prison? A man President F.W. de Klerk said he could ‘do business with’, and vice versa.¹ Mandela’s extraordinary credibility uniquely placed him to sell the compromise which was South Africa’s political settlement.

When I think of Mandela, his flirtations with Hollywood, rock stars and sports heroes are not the images that spring to mind. What I remember is his legendary ability to be fully present in the moment. When hecklers were ejected by security guards at rallies, he would worry about whether they were hurt. Often, he’d amble over to picketers to find out what they were demanding. At state banquets he’d want to go to the kitchens to thank the cooks and dishwashers. When a documentary film about his life on Robben Island was being made shortly after his release, Mandela held up the whole shoot, insisting the prisoner occupying the cell be found and asked for permission before he would sit for the cameras on the inmate’s bed.

During apartheid, images and recordings of Mandela were banned. Before June 1992 there was no internet. The most recent picture available at the time of his release was 24 years out of date. For its cover story, Time magazine had to use an artist’s impression, imagining how Mandela might have aged (wrongly, as it turned out). The magazine’s headline still carried a question mark: ‘Mandela: Free at Last?’ Despite De Klerk’s announcement in Parliament, it was a case of ‘believe it when you see it’: that is how little the apartheid regime was trusted.

So, white South Africans knew nothing of the man, yet in a remarkably short time he won over most of the white citizenry. It was not De Klerk but Mandela who would lead the white race in the end: so much so that as far back as 1997, journalist Lester Venter brought out a book titled When Mandela Goes: The Coming of South Africa’s Second Revolution, which asked, what will happen to ‘us’?

For over a decade after leaving the office of president, every time Mandela was rushed to hospital, the old fears of ‘darkest Africa’ resurfaced among some white-skinned people expecting imminent genocide, as if Mandela were their personal protector.

White South Africans knew, whether they liked it or not, they had to change the system, but their fears had to be calmed first. For whites, Mandela replaced the fear of the unknown with hope for redemptive change. De Klerk was left as the last leader of a hopeless, doomed, dead-end project, defeated and fearfully surrendering, while Mandela was the incarcerated man embodying ‘the struggle’ through a lifetime of hope, sustained by an invincible faith that justice would ultimately triumph.

Mandela touched our lives deeply at a time when collectively – black and white – we were in great emotional need. Were I writing a novel, he’d be the revolutionary hero I’d invent, with all the key elements of a messianic figure: a charismatic male; a man who has suffered greatly for his beliefs yet has stayed true to them; a man of peace who leads an army; a man who made people aspire to be better than they generally were; a unifier – righteous and judicious. And it has come to light that he continued to suffer for us in his dying years; instead of being allowed to pass away peacefully, he was resuscitated and even rushed to hospital in an ambulance that caught fire.²

Yet now, a growing number of people and a younger generation say he sold the masses a bill of goods. When Mandela was still alive but ailing and many people were praying for his health, I came across a social media post by a Black Consciousness ‘poet’ calling for the death of Mandela. The poem, which claimed to be a reworking of a ‘classic’ Black Consciousness work, exhorted: ‘His [Mandela’s] continued survival threatens the aspiration of the children … He must be destroyed! / Expose his lie.’ In bloodcurdling language, it incited the people to ‘Burn him, beat him and crush even his blood when it falls!!’ (The punctuation is not mine but the author’s double exclamation marks.)

A dozen or so people ‘liked’ the post and approximately the same number shared it. Some added messages of their own on the author’s Facebook page: ‘Indeed, that dog of settlers must die’, ‘Mandela must die literally speaking!! No ambiguities’, ‘Mandela & all these other sell-outs must die period’.

It was re-posted on a political forum and quickly attracted over sixty comments. A few people were upset with the administrator of the site for even airing it, especially given Mandela’s frailty at that time. I think the administrator had a valid point; that this view of Mandela was out there and needed to be addressed. This was in 2012; it is a view that has only grown since then.

Unsurprisingly, the post was seized upon by right-wing websites (accompanied by adverts for buying property in Cyprus) as proof that white people had better emigrate before it was too late. One site also posted a screenshot of a Facebook page with a comment by a man, apparently a member of the South African Police Service, who wrote: ‘When the Black messiah [Nelson Mandela] dies, we’ll teach whites some lesson. We’ll comit a genocite [sic] on them. I hate whites.’ I still can’t quite figure out why he should have waited for Mandela to die first.

After I wrote about it, the author defended the poem, saying it was not Mandela the man but ‘The Mandela’, a symbolic founding father of the neo-apartheid state, and that the ‘oppressor in the minds of the people’ needed to be burned, not Mandela the individual. But his audience certainly had not seen it that way.

Attacks on Mandela have come from various quarters, from those who loathe him to those who are suspicious of the myth.

The journalist Nadira Naipaul claimed Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said in a hotly disputed interview that she could never forgive Madiba for betraying the people. The ‘mother of the nation’ later denied giving the interview.³

In a strange moment of poetic licence, Breyten Breytenbach launched an emotional jeremiad and personal attack on Mandela in Harper’s Magazine.⁴ His complaint seemed to boil down to the fact that Mandela was not God.

Commentators in the other camp write that Mandela was no humanist and always intended black supremacy; he merely hoodwinked the turkeys (the whites) to vote for Christmas. In their narrative, it is De Klerk and the white generals who sold out.

A student friend at the University of Cape Town was recently set an essay for his second-year course in South African politics. The lecturer heavily encouraged the class to argue from the standpoint that Nelson Mandela was, quote, a ‘sell-out’.

It is easy for smug academics in ivory towers with feeble memories or disenchanted youth who were not even born during the violence and mayhem of the 1980s and early 1990s to sit decades later and criticise the peace terms. That we survived at all still has a miraculous quality. Mandela did not do it alone, not by any means, but it was belief in his integrity and honour that would ultimately deliver our constitutional settlement.

Mandela – the man who now stands accused of ‘selling out’ – is the same man who, together with the Youth League, ousted the old liberal thinking and sclerotic leadership of the ANC in 1949; who launched the armed struggle by founding uMkhonto we Sizwe; whom the ANC disciplined for his famous ‘we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violence policy’ interview in 1961;⁵ who refused to come to any compromise with the prosecution during the Rivonia trial, and who was prepared to hang. The death penalty was a real possibility right until the moment the judge pronounced sentence,⁶ and for 27 years he languished in prison, his confinement continually extended because he refused to renounce violence. That this man should now be described as a sell-out, as if this were accepted wisdom, does an intolerable injustice to one of the finest men in the history of African politics.

Critics of Mandela either begrudge the praise lavished on him ­personally, believing