South Africa has probably never been a society that you could look at square in the face without flinching.
If this was true of pre-1994 history, it has remained true for the period since.
For every decade and every generation, it seems, there has always been something of the vexing sum of qualities novelist Philip Roth half peevishly, half ruefully enumerated in 1960 as the typifying conditions of his America when he wrote of “daily newspapers [that] fill us with wonder and awe (is it possible? is it happening?) also with sickness and despair … (the) fixes, the scandals, the insanity, the idiocy, the piety, the lies, the noise …”.
In 2022, there is no evading the sickness and despair, the insanity, the idiocy, the lies and so on.
Just in the past few days, public intellectual Raymond Suttner, harshly punished for his principled resistance to apartheid, has written of conditions in which “(illegality) has displaced legal compliance as the prevailing norm in much of political life and state functioning”.
In an almost poignantly stark characterisation of the fate of the liberation project three decades on, Suttner observes: “What is evident is that we are dealing with a category of people who see stealing as one of the expectations of office. This has become a norm within the ANC and the state, where conventional standards have been reversed and ‘wrong is right’.”
Suttner’s unflinching gaze is notable.
And – having been approached a few weeks ago by the Jakes Gerwel Foundation to consider sharing what I might remember of the former rector and vice-chancellor of UWC – it was something notably unflinching that I recalled sensing in the soft-spoken Gerwel 20 years ago when he delivered the inaugural Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture in Cape Town.
I can’t claim to have had any intimate familiarity with Gerwel – as a journalist, I was as familiar with him as I would have been with anyone else of his standing in public life – but, though there was something almost daunting in his reserve and thoughtfulness, he was always friendly and always seemed charmingly intolerant of needless formality.
Formality, nevertheless, defined his public persona as a leading figure in the academy and, given the greater setting of the 1980s and 1990s, the transition to democracy, and this was no less true of his delivery of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture all those years ago.
But what was very clear to me as a journalist back then – and it stuck with me – was that Gerwel’s sense of dignity was not contrary to but inseparable from his willingness two decades ago, when doubt and self-examination were not common features of South African political discourse, to ask hard, discomposing questions.
I wrote at the time (and the other figure I was writing about was Neville Alexander): “Activists who gave up their best years to the struggle are increasingly heard posing the discomforting question: where did we go wrong?
“It is a theme being taken up by leading ‘liberation’ intellectuals who are beginning to express disquiet, to pick at our certainties, and ask pointed questions.”
My piece on Gerwel’s lecture began:
It is time to face up to basic questions: what has happened to the “human solidarity” of the struggle, when people cared about people? Can we, by any stretch, regard the new South Africa as a “decent” society?
And are South Africans, and the ruling African National Congress especially, having a proper conversation about this, or actually doing anything about it?
The political establishment would no doubt be less troubled if these questions had been voiced by a [Democratic Party leader Tony] Leon or an [Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu] Ndungane.
But they have been raised by a figure who is not easily relegated to “the other side”, to the opposition or civil society fringe.
Coming from Jakes Gerwel, it’s fair to say they come from the heart of the liberation project.
Almost apologetically, Gerwel acknowledged that asking questions about human decency was something that “we on the old Left would probably have found somewhat outside of our core vocabulary in the public conversation”, a sort of “vacuous” idea that fell within the ambit of the Left’s “distrust of philosophical idealism and of bourgeois sentimentality and pietism”.
But he went on: “Yet we are so inundated with reports of acts and conduct of social pathology on such a scale that one is forced to ask such simple basic questions about ourselves.”
He specifically mentioned “the occurrence of crimes of seemingly senseless violence, rape and the abuse of women, or the almost unspeakable sexual abuse of children and babies”.
But it was obvious his was not a law-and-order anxiety. Framing the question, At what point does South Africa describe itself as “a qualitatively un-decent and un-caring” society? went well beyond that.
He wanted to know “how and through whose efforts is the restoration and the nurturing of basic decency in the manner we live together being made a national development priority”?
The model for this, he suggested, was the “superstructural concept” the Left once used, that of human solidarity, and he argued that “the quest for such basic decency relates to that old Left concept of human solidarity”.
And yet, he fretted, who was asking the questions, who was actively looking for the answers?
Perhaps by the standards of 2022, Gerwel’s lecture in 2002 was oblique, but I had little doubt that it represented something important. Looking back, I see it as a not insignificant foretaste of the disquiet, unease, disenchantment and ultimately open dissent that would become increasingly typical of growing numbers of South Africans contemplating the lapses and flaws of their post-1994 experience.
Harold Wolpe’s daughter, Peta, wrote in 2021 that the “just cause” and “moral code” that had inspired her father’s actions and lifetime’s convictions “have not been lived out in democratic South Africa”.
She went on: “The story of South Africa from 1948 until its democracy in 1994 is remarkable in many ways and in historical terms fairly peaceful. Yet, since 1994 the hopes, intentions and promises of the ANC have not been delivered upon. The South Africa of today is built on corruption, greed and personal gain. This is a betrayal of all citizens and is not what my father and the other Struggle veterans fought for.”
In what reads almost as an echo of Gerwel’s questions of 2002, Wolpe wonders: “Is the inherent notion of a politics of humanity something of the past?”
Quite by accident (it’s just what I’ve been reading lately), something else from late 20th century American literature offers what I half suspect might be the most reliable redemption in conditions in which so many feel betrayed and disaffected – and which perhaps Peta Wolpe at least in part had in mind when she referred last year to a “glimmer of hope”, despite everything.
It is contained in a contemplation on political leadership by the John Updike character – historian Alfred Clayton in the 1992 novel Memories of the Ford Administration – who speculates that “perhaps it lies among the President’s many responsibilities to be unconvincing, to set before us, at an apex of visibility, an illustration of how far short of perfection must fall even the most conscientious application to duty and the most cunning solicitation of selfish interests, throwing us back upon the essential American axiom that no divinely appointed leader will save us, we must do it on our own”.
I think that, were he alive today, Jakes Gerwel would unfussily judge that, indeed, the South African struggle continues, and that it is ultimately, as always, in the hands of the people.
Michael Morris was a newspaper journalist for 38 years before joining the Institute of Race Relations as head of media in 2017.
