Sailing a raft with tattered rainbow flag
SA’s government of national unity, a rancorous marriage between ideological enemies presiding over a country with a murder rate almost twice the current rate, took 742 days to produce and generally agree on the first iteration of our constitution.
SA’s fifth democratic president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has taken 638 days to produce a rough consensus that, given the right conditions, few of which exist right now, and a different team of colleagues, which he can’t or won’t assemble, he might be ready, in principle, to lead this country in a direction that, at least in theory, might be a good one, unless the trade unions say no, in which case forget I mentioned it.
This might be an unfair comparison. As our country matures, the scope for dramatic progress diminishes. Nelson Mandela’s SA was one in which the stroke of a pen could demolish dozens of unjust laws. Ramaphosa’s is a place of
cautious, incremental change to arcane bits of policy, his hand partially stayed by the very constitution he helped create.
Still, the contrast between the first two years of our democracy and the two most recent ones remains stark. In 1994 we had a multiparty government in which ANC statesmen had cool but civil conversations with their former torturers. Now, the governing party won’t even talk to itself.
Where Mandela assembled a team of capable people, the current government is a travelling circus staffed by sleight-of-hand experts, wheezing fire-breathers and clowns. Indeed, our collective focus on Ramaphosa the individual is the tacit acknowledgement of our belief that he is the only person who can lead this ragged procession out of the swamp into which it was dragged by its previous owner, a two-bit magician whose most famous trick was making hundreds of billions of rand disappear into thin air.
There are many explanations for this collapse in the quality of our government over the past quarter-century. Corruption, patronage and a kind of nihilistic cynicism loom large. But amid all those familiar diagnoses one little word remains largely overlooked, despite the fact that it helped define that first, experimental government: unity.
It has become popular on the Left to dismiss that early period as naive “rainbowism”, a term used to imply a sentimental fantasy sold to the country, designed to defer and even deny the anger of the majority for long enough to allow the senior beneficiaries of apartheid to safeguard their wealth and the new elite to familiarise themselves with the etiquette of the trough.
There is perhaps some truth in this reading of our history. But it is also important to remember that, however cynically the power brokers may have operated at the time, a great many South Africans were unified in their belief that progress was possible. Unity wasn’t just noble words in parliament or multiracial beer ads or rugby tournaments. It felt like a social necessity; a spiritual urgency.
Today, driven apart by disappointment, divisive politicians and our own fading hopes, it is easy to feel isolated and beleaguered. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of living in a leaderless state. Perhaps it’s just what the politicians want us to feel. Either way, it is important at these moments to remember that we are all still united by the same basic desires we shared in 1994.
We all want to be safe. We all want to be employed. We all want to be educated. We all want tomorrow to be better than today. Inevitably, we disagree about the best way to manifest those basic desires. Our dozens of political parties are merely large, crude containers for thousands of different worldviews and visions of this country’s future. All of us, however, want something better.
That fact doesn’t amount to political unity. It certainly doesn’t amount to social unity, especially not in a country as unequal as ours. But, as the cynics and opportunists entrench and enrich themselves by telling us that our compatriots and neighbours are our enemies; that the pie cannot be made bigger and that others want your shrinking piece; it is important to remember that we all want the same things.
I am tormented by an inexplicable but inextinguishable optimism that we might still get them, or at least start crawling towards them. Perhaps this is naive, a rainbow hangover from those years when it seemed that progress would build on itself, gathering momentum until we had the strength, courage and unity of vision to tackle the Gordian knots of economic dispossession and violence in this country.
But even if it is naive, surely it cannot be a bad thing to remind ourselves, every now and then, that our compatriots want what we want; and that, despite everything, we remain unified in our cautious, fragile, tantalising hope?
IT IS IMPORTANT AT THESE MOMENTS TO REMEMBER THAT WE ARE ALL STILL UNITED BY THE SAME BASIC DESIRES WE SHARED IN 1994.