MICHAEL MORRIS: Fikile Mbalula’s simplistic reasoning discounts true scale of black oppression - Business Day
Michael Morris
Fellow columnist Tony Leon’s readers will have applauded inwardly last week at his choice description of ANC contributions to polluting the common understanding of things as “stupendous euphemisms and verbal holidays from reality”.
This deft summation refers to the perverse dynamics at work in umpteen recent instances detailed in Leon’s piece (“‘Nonaligned’, ‘pick up the rand’, ‘president’: when words mean fokol”, May 30).
Fittingly, Leon concludes with this passage from Martin Amis’s account of Stalinism, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million: “The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced towards his much stranger objective of breaking the truth.”
If “the truth” is seldom within mortal reach, we should always be alert to the risks in thinking that we can get by without at least making an attempt to grasp it.
On this quite simple mental habit seems to depend the larger, always more or less urgent task of choosing how to live, and making history. It means paying attention and watching for those silken euphemisms and fanciful departures from what’s real.
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, in his recent appearance on BBC HardTalk, provided a vivid example in casting his party’s record of governance against a backdrop of the “300 years of oppression” that preceded it.
I’d forgotten that Mbalula had used this argument before, in his 2021 appearance on the same programme. He must have thought it was such an effective riposte that he’d recycle it. The tragedy is that he might have been right; I suspect many more people than you or I would hope did actually think Mbalula was making a fair point, and speaking a kind of truth to power.
What’s tragic is that by such simplistic, persuasive, almost cathartic reasoning the bitter truth of black oppression becomes, by cynical remodelling, a myth of black helplessness. It implies that for three centuries black people were not agents of history, but simply its subjects, or indeed that this history could be divided racially. In this light, how could you reasonably expect corrections over a mere three decades to remedy more than the tiniest part of the burden of grievance?
I often think back to historian Bill Nasson’s 2010 inaugural lecture at the University of Stellenbosch, in which he sought to test assumptions about SA’s 20th century “abnormality”, noting — as I wrote in this column in 2018 — that while apartheid with its “devastating long-term consequences” was the “true continental abnormality”, SA was not “completely without ... the usual rhythms of modern history”.
Demography and population history revealed, for instance, that the period from 1880 to 2000 was one of almost continuously rising life expectancy, in which mortality declined, fertility dropped and households became smaller; urbanisation increased, the proportion of agricultural work in total employment declined, and the average level of education of the adult population rose. “In any contemporary historical perspective,” Nasson observed, “this is the standard portrayal of trends in all industrial societies.”
As I suggested in that 2018 column, the “quiet force accumulated in the millions of choices individuals make (can and do) ... work against the wishes of the powerful and the edicts intended to keep subjects at heel”.
Mbalula might remind himself that misperceiving the actual history and agency that have brought us to where we are today discounts the true scale of a continuing SA struggle, and the collective identity of those who continue to drive it.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.