South African President Nelson Mandela (R) and Second Deputy President F.W. de Klerk hold their hands high as they address a huge crowd of people in front of the Union Building after the inauguration ceremony in Pretoria in this May 10, 1994 file photo. Mandela has passed away on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95. REUTERS/Juda Ngwenya/Files (SOUTH AFRICA - Tags: POLITICS OBITUARY)
I shall deal with some truths that I have circumvented since the advent of this column because I am not the conscience of a society, nor a trained researcher nor a know-all in the affairs of men. But I have a notion of the truth which I shall expound.
These are my personal views, and I take full responsibility for the possibility that I stand to be condemned by my readers.
We are gearing up for an election. My take is that we shall be repeating the same old merry-go-round of a pseudo-free country that is cunningly tied into the old lies. I remember Wilfred Owen’s poem which said: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (the Old Lie): It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. At the time, it was perhaps a valid utterance.
But, since we have started deconstructing the world according to Garp, many of the old adages do not hold any longer. The relation of signs (signification) to each other forms the structure of language. Synchronic reality is found in the structure of language at a given point in time. Diachronic reality is found in changes of language over a period of time.
Hence, we deal with the irony of Mandela sharing the Nobel Prize for Peace with FW de Klerk for achieving the new South Africa. Add to this the unspeakable truth that the lucrative funding that makes this the most sought-after validation is based on Alfred Nobel’s discovery of dynamite.
Factor in the unspeakable joke of the ANC sitting down with the perpetrators of racism and dehumanisation based only on skin-colour in order to write a new constitution for a country where all men are equal and free. The notions resonate in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech, or the utterings of Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King, or even our local vocals by Bishop Tutu, Allan Boesak and all the others.
This is a series of ironies which my good breeding prevents from calling a circus. The ironies in the sunset clauses that made the rich white colonisers more secure than they were when their reprehensible racism was backed by the military and an active secret service bolstered by non-white pimps.
Factor in that many of those who bayed for freedom are in bed with those same whites, who control the country by paying crippling taxes to earn the right to stay without fear of reprisal or recrimination from thugs like the EFF or other like-minded hooligans.
I do not condone the mindless baying for blood and confrontation, followed by a redistribution of historico-politico entrenched wealth. I have spent seven long years writing a column which suggests that self-improvement, self-respect and literacy were open roads that all could travel.
I might as well have been baying at the moon. The entrenched “haves”, who include what used to be called “playwhites”, “coconuts” and “wannabees”, smile patiently and with ill-concealed tolerance at voices who cry for the truth to be faced or revealed, and then, hopefully, acted upon in a civilised, enfranchised and constructive way.
Nobody needs to lose anything. No blood needs to flow. The president once uttered the noble maxim: “Here am I. Send me.” (I do not have the Latin translation). This was a show of bravery, a willingness to stand up to the injustices which our euphoria as a newly released racial society prevented us from seeing.
These are the truths I posit. Save the country at the expense of a vote. Assign a bloc of votes to the ANC because it earned its colours in the struggle. But use the remaining bloc not to fracture and atomise any semblance of a coherent opposition.
Do not condemn a third of the nation to subsistence and mendicancy. Be more honest and admit that politics is a game for the rich. Tin-Pan Alley sang: “The rich get rich, and the poor get children/in the meantime, in-between time, ain’t we got fun?
Wake up, South Africa. The mango is about to hit the fan. Again.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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