Soul of a Nation: A Quest for the Rebirth of South Africa's True Values

By Oyama Mabandla

There is lament about how and why the ANC have so quickly become preoccupied with material enrichment. 
Former exile, business leader and political commentator, Oyama Mabandla, excavates the values that created a steady flow of pioneering South Africans under impossible circumstances, bolstered a liberation ethic and championed a leadership that made individual nobility and excellence aspirational.
These values, in retreat since 94, can still recapture the nation's best trajectory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9780624094494

Oyama Mabandla

Oyama Mabandla is a lawyer and businessman. He holds a Juris Doctorate (JD) from Columbia University and a BA in Political Science from the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is a regular contributor to the media on the intersection of the arts and politics. He is now based in Joburg.

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SOUL OF A NATION

A quest for the rebirth of South Africa’s true values

Oyama Mabandla

Tafelberg

For Cora, my grandmother, and Kwezi and Koleka, my parents – the trio that birthed, nurtured and launched me into the world.

Abbreviations

Foreword

Mr Oyama Mabandla has penned a remarkable book. Its value lies not just in its autobiographical content, reflecting as it does the history and his socio-political and educational upbringing in both the urban landscape of Cape Town, his birthplace, and the rural town that became the capital of the Transkei homeland. More importantly, it is unique in that it combines not only biographical stories, but also a critical look at his own political choices and life in exile, as well as an unusually unapologetic analysis of thirty years since the historic establishment of the constitutional democracy that South Africa was to become in 1994, and the constitutional state of 1996. The intellectual depth of the study derives from his trenchant analysis, drawing from his readings in political science, philosophy, literature and the arts. The book thus serves as a rich reservoir of knowledge and intellectual rigour.

I consider all of this to be ‘remarkable’ because in recent years much of the writing from political activists of his ilk is inclined to be either hagiographical, or an apologia, or simply explaining away the obvious defaults of the post-liberation South Africa. He does so without losing sight of the hard tasks that the construction of the new state had to overcome, and the reasons why it failed in certain areas, but without failing to acknowledge where progress has indeed been made. In creating a new society beyond the hazards of nearly fifty years of the social and psychological engineering of apartheid, both successes and failures must be acknowledged.

This publication is also timely. It comes out at a time when the moral and intellectual environment in our country has become very confused, where values are vested with an indescribable elasticity – so much that they no longer have meaning, where truth has become valorised in an inverted sense so that it comes to mean whatever one wishes to vest it with for one’s own peculiar understanding, where human conduct is judged and defined only by the selfish ends of those who carry the whip of power, and where the poor no longer have a voice save as the acolytes of the ruthless and powerful. That, as Canadian social scientist Henry A Giroux puts it, is what South Africa has become: an exercise in ‘dis-imagination’. A society without the capacity for imagination will forever live in the present, even when its foundation has become eroded by centrifugal forces, while denying their existence.

Giroux goes further in his trenchant critique of contemporary society post Trump, critiquing its fixation on reducing the human person to nothingness, its distortion of culture and its totalitarian and authoritarian intent. Giroux suggests that there is hardly a feature of society that has not been crippled by such criminal thoughtlessness. This means, says Giroux, that we have become immune to seeking true knowledge, understanding and intellectual engagement, and become intellectually lazy and cowards. He puts this ‘death’ of being beautifully when he says:

I am pointing to a more lethal form of illiteracy that has become the scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought … Words such as love, trust, freedom responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a commercial relationship, or to a reductive notion of getting ahead . . . Instead of loving with courage, compassion and desiring a more just society, we love a society saturated in commodities.

I make reference here to Giroux’s essay, ‘Higher Education and the Politics of Radical imagination’ (2018: 23–43) because I raised the question with the author as to how we have gotten to where we now are as a nation, and indeed how we are to get back on track. It would seem to me that two issues may be said to be the underlying causes of this paralysis. First, there is the politics of exile and the inability to adequately integrate the exile experience with the political activism of those who confronted apartheid at its worst. The second is that fact that learning – and education in its broadest sense – has been subordinated in too willy-nilly a way to a notion of liberation denuded of lasting value.

This is a valuable book especially as this nation faces a general election in 2024. It is refreshing in its honesty and is written with a beauty of language and with a clear, reasoning mind. It is commended as a ‘must read’ among the flurry of books recently published.

N Barney Pityana

Gqeberha, 8 January 2024

Introduction

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.

– Edward Said, Reflections on Exile

The notion of home, what some have referred to as the ‘tyranny of place’, has long consumed and preoccupied philosophers. During our struggle for freedom, the rallying cry in the 1950s was the slogan Mayibuye iAfrika (Come back, Africa), denoting our yearning for the return of our home, Africa, from those who had stolen it from us through colonial dispossession. Later, when the liberation movements were forced into exile, there was a physical separation from that home. So, for us, this quest for home has been a perennial odyssey, reminiscent of the epic poem by Homer, The Odyssey, which traces the journey home by the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, following the Trojan War. Initially, when we were still physically ‘home’, we yearned for our home which had been wrenched away from us by the colonisers; and when we were forced into exile, uprooted from that geographic space we call home, we longed for the physical return to that geographic space. In the epigraph above, Edward Said is referring to the latter ‘exile’, ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place’. But, as I will argue below, exile goes beyond the physical separation from a native place. In my construction, it goes to the fundamental alienation of the self from an ontological ‘home’. One can be in ‘exile’ while physically ‘home’ – that is, alienated from the true values that constitute a home. This subversion of values, meaning and purpose results in nihilism and psychic death.

In July 2015, Bob O’Meally, professor of literature and jazz studies at Columbia University in New York City, delivered a lecture at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg. Prof O’Meally was on these shores as part of his global travelling exhibition on the work of the artist Romare Bearden. Bearden, one of the artistic forces behind the Harlem Renaissance, is also celebrated for his portraiture of the Jazz Age and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

During a question-and-answer session with prof O’Meally, I put forward a question that seemed to have been misunderstood by our interlocutor and programme director, Dr Thembinkosi Goniwe, and many in the audience. ‘Why is it,’ I asked, ‘that diaspora intellectuals and artists such as Romare Bearden, in his Black Odyssey series, and Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott, in his celebrated epic poem Omeros, insist on the Homeric tropes and echoes of homecoming in their art, a theme that seems to be a fixture and staple of diasporic artistic and intellectual preoccupation and imagination, from Du Bois to Garvey, and yet this theme remains largely absent from the work of continental artists and intellectuals, certainly in the recent past?’

I continued: ‘This imaginary may have indeed been a theme of our exilic assertion we are going back home, but no one seems preoccupied with the theme of homecoming any more. And yet for me, akin to Professor O’Meally’s argument in his opening address, homecoming is not only a spatial construct – coming back to a physical or geographic space. Homecoming is a much more profound and metaphysical concept. It is coming back to a desired place. A place of loftiness. A sanctuary from our harried and grubby present. A place that offers comfort and succour. And in our context here in South Africa, it would mean coming back to that place that midwifed our freedom. The place that produced Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Chris Hani. So, homecoming for us is our imagined values and futures. Our better self.’

I admit that my question may have come across as meandering and abstruse, but a fair number of folks seemed to understand what I was straining to say and where I was going with the question. I soon encountered a lot of anguished voices asking, ‘How do we get back home indeed, comrade? How do we go back to that place of loftiness that had made us synonymous with the idea of freedom and justice?’ The quest for ‘home’. I had touched some nerve. I began to reflect on this over time. Is it reasonable to expect a people or a movement to remain suspended in ‘loftiness’? Is civic virtue not a temporary condition, contingent on certain material conditions? Something that is accessible as a resource for struggle but seldom has anything to do with the transaction of politics and statecraft?

This is, in many respects, the question at the heart of political discourse in our country. There is a perennial fascination and lament about how and why the African National Congress (ANC), the midwife of freedom and justice in South Africa, so quickly morphed into a feral rabble solely preoccupied with material enrichment – at the expense of the people they did everything to champion, including being ready to pay the ultimate sacrifice, dying for the cause of freedom.

This brings us to the next logical question: Were these freedom fighters fighting for the so-called people, the mythical ‘masses of our people’, or were they fighting for their self-actualisation as human beings, which the apartheid reality was both negating and impeding? And now, with the apartheid fetters swept aside, could self-actualisation include the rapacious pursuit of material wealth?

Is not getting ‘filthy rich’ a universal siren song of the neoliberal epoch inaugurated by the triumph of capital in 1989 and the collapse of socialist pretentions and piety? As ANC activist and diplomat Smuts Ngonyama once observed, ‘I did not struggle to be poor.’ Could he have been articulating a zeitgeist that, while politically inelegant, was incontestably true? Is there a place for ‘loftiness’ in a normalised society and politics?

Aren’t people transported to that lofty place only in times of national crisis, such as war or the struggle for national liberation, and in those unique moments of valour and humanity, as when a passer-by leaps into roiling waters to save a drowning child or a citizen runs into a burning building to rescue an infirm granny trapped on the top floor? Are such heroic feats the stuff of normalcy? Or is the quest for material wealth more in keeping with the normal human condition?

And if the latter is true, why are we so outraged by those at the helm of our new dispensation who mirror this human condition? Now, we may argue that the ANC’s electoral platform speaks of a ‘better life for all’ and not of a ‘better life for us’. But surely the ANC has indisputably transformed the lives of ‘our people’ for the better – at least for a while, until the collapse presaged by the nine wasted years of the Zupta imperium, which we are still vainly trying to obviate. The work of the ANC, especially in the early years of the new democracy, has given many people a sense of dignity and justice. And in a struggling economy buffeted by a global economic meltdown, the social grants system, while increasingly onerous and burdensome on the fiscus, has made the difference between survival and utter destitution for many families.

Are we not holding the ANC to an unfair and unattainable standard, one achievable only under conditions of a national emergency? One of the most iconoclastic intellects in this country, Moeletsi Mbeki, argues that the ANC delivered its historic mandate with the adoption of the Constitution in 1996. Then, having reached its apogee with that achievement, the ANC ‘normalised’, becoming preoccupied with what political parties are ‘normally’ consumed with – patronage.

Were we perhaps unfair in expecting the ‘comrades’ to demonstrate supernatural revolutionary qualities of abstinence and asceticism while everyone around them was engaged in normal human pursuits, including partaking of the opportunity afforded by conditions of freedom for personal material advancement?

Or had we ourselves perhaps become so disengaged from the vocation of an engaged citizenry – to hold accountable those who rule over us – that we expected them to miraculously be in defiance of what was ‘normal’ and to remain perennially ‘lofty’? To keep marching to the drum of ‘struggle’, even when the struggle was long over? Dr Martin Luther King famously stated that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But that arc does not bend by itself: social forces and an engaged citizenry are responsible for that ‘bending’ towards justice.

I have argued elsewhere that the ANC, infatuated with its self-importance and vanguardist pieties, made a fatal mistake in making itself the portal for material success as it sought to referee who was up or down in the Black Economic Empowerment game, under the guise of creating a ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’. In so doing the ANC made itself, ineluctably, the prize to be captured in the titanic contest for material success by a people who had been excluded for aeons from the mainstream of economic activity. And since the ANC had, by its election, made itself the pivot around which the de-racialisation of the South African economy would unfold, those who were skilled at the political game leveraged that for business dominance.

This, in effect, became the political economy of the new South Africa, with the ANC at the centre of business action. And because capitalism by its nature is a ‘private’ as opposed to a ‘social’ enterprise, at least with regards to whom the spoils of economic activity accrue, the ANC found itself rent and riven by the logic of this ‘privatisation’, which was necessarily a zero-sum game. If your faction or network was ascendant within the ANC, your reward was material benefit; if it was in decline, you were out and would proverbially be prevented from ‘eating lunch in this town again’. In a sense, those were the battle lines as the two gladiators, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, faced off in the epic battle of Polokwane.

On Mbeki’s side were those who were perceived to have benefited from his reign and were impressed with his stewardship of the ship of state, while on Zuma’s side were those intent on replacing the Mbekites in the gilded cage. Among the latter were people such as Sandile Zungu, Mathews Phosa, Robert Gumede and others, allied to an assortment of folks who had been ‘hurt’ one way or another by Mbeki’s long reign atop our government (hence the moniker ‘coalition of the wounded’) and to Zulu nationalists aggrieved by the forty-year ‘dominance’ of the ANC by Xhosa-speaking people. In the end, the ANC was the prize to be won. You capture the ANC, and you are on your way to the bank, or so it was believed. This was the new frontier. The new site of struggle, as the ANC was fond of saying.

My rumination and protestation about ‘normalcy’ notwithstanding, it is abundantly clear that something