Last Tuesday night [March 7th] I joined what seemed to be what was left of the Left, for an exploration, or possibly an evaluation, of the “Unresolved National Question “… sub headed: ‘Left thought under Apartheid.’ Having always been thought of by the Left as being on the Right and by the Right as being on the Left, I anticipated an entertaining evening and, notwithstanding its intermittently Monty Pythonesque overtones, it was.
I also anticipated discovering what the ‘Unresolved National Question’ was: and had not noted the sub-heading about its historical subtext?
Broadly speaking what was left of the Left were a most congenial, polite gathering of people who, in the most lethal of ways, could, under different circumstances, become, one suspects, a roomful of deadly enemies.
Perhaps, knowing how inherently suicidal the broad idea was that there was a [single?] presumed “National Question” that was unresolved; and, realizing that everyone present would have their own idea of what an Unresolved National Question would be… and that the room would be poised to slaughter anything, mercilessly, that was not reminiscent of their own pet hypothesis, the two lead speakers; plus the enthusiastic MC spokesperson for the evening’s prime sponsors, the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, managed to deliver a cluster of most entertaining, absorbing and often curiously insightful interpretations of the journey they had all gone through in setting out to resolve their ideas of what such a question that remains/ed ‘unresolved’ would be.
And somehow the room bought the message and we all, eventually, left happy once again, knowing that the question remained unresolved: and that the world was safe again for the time being.
Of course one of the important things about functions organized and or orchestrated by those who may be said to be “Left” is that, unlike, for instance, Theatrical or Corporate types, who would hand out a programme listing the speakers and agendas and some key aspects of the evening’s intentions or a summary of purpose, the old Left eschews such bourgeois indulgences in favour of an overall spirit of “last minute dot com”, egalitarianism.
I shall simply refer to 1st speaker, 2nd speaker; and random floor Kommenter’s plus the over all Mistress of Ceremonies and aim to avoid offence as much as they all did, since I had no idea regarding who was who: amongst the Left gathered crew: not being a Left Innie [or any other kind of Innie for that matter]. What I can say is that with one exception, and only briefly at that, the evening was conducted with an almost fascinating air of polite decorum…. That in a time of #Pay back the Money” and #Fees must Fall, was most refreshing.
So the first speaker opened with what proved to be an overview of what his production team had done in arriving at a book called the ‘Unresolved National Question’; and highlighted for those of us more innocent gatherers, that the period under consideration was the [so-called] Apartheid era, rather than the preceding Dispossession period: or the increasingly contentious time, subsequent to Liberation.
Their purpose, Speaker #1 explained was to find the “hidden voices” that had been silenced during the era 1948 – 1994 and prevented from clarifying what the real question of the times was… just in case no one knew.
I couldn’t help reminiscing in that moment how literally almost everyone’s voices were ‘hidden’ then on pain of retribution throughout that era. Despite all the ranting and general rage, in the present place to which the National Question refers, it is mostly normal stuff on steroids… uncool larceny perhaps rather than murderous exclusion. That time was mean vindictive and broadly driven evil … none of which has proved particularly useful for sustaining an economy long term: i.e. a Kondratieff cycle at least.
Just in case anyone was still confused about what the national question was; the editors point out in their foreword that this debate is not new… In fact they say ‘… the questions raised by the National Question debate OVER A CENTURY AGO: remained unresolved… So in other words if you hadn’t figured out what it was, no one was going to ‘spill the beans’.
The book’s foreword states: ‘The unresolved National Question’ concerns the “drive to build one united democratic nation- and is a ‘century-long discourse on South Africa’s nationhood”.
S#1 announced that the question was unresolved and that it was a neglected question. In konstrukting their book, they had looked at a relatively random kolektion of people’s interpretations of the Kwestion… Question, across a range of kontexts. We the reader can read all their opinions: and then have our own ‘National Kwestion’and see what happens. What was supposed to happen beyond some satori was unclear. Nonetheless it all seemed an interesting idea. As a marketer it has obvious usefulness in this regard and one could envisage it taking many strands.
So while it may have seemed an odd idea, to persons, such as this bloggist, who have, apparently, mistakenly considered the Question to have been answered in 1994: apparently it wasn’t.
In an attempt to deal with this possibly disturbing fact, the book production ‘team’ had chosen to explore the era [’48-‘94] under four different [Left oriented] themes that made up the first part of their explorations. Only then were they tackling the present [maybe] in Part 2.
The ‘Right”, assuming that version still persists, had their turn and it failed; and while the book pays some lip service to their vision, it was most reasonably discredited through the nastiness with which it was associated.
Frankly, by this time, having been only marginally enlightened as to what the National question really was: “The implicit idea inherent in the concept of “ONE NATION”; and why it [the Question] hasn’t been answered” seemed unclear. So since the enormous number of people who, it seems, have either contributed to of been associated with the kolekted viewpoints hadn’t arrived at an answer either, in this search: this bloggist did rather feel that it was a darn tricky question, for which came some curious enlightenment… Lights… action… camera
Speaker #1 reached a mini climax to his introduction with a resounding assertion regarding what he called “the Goals of the National Economic transformation struggle”. Simultaneously an adjacent neighbour’s struggle to figure out the video part of his Mobile’s camera thingy, whle waggling his camera/ mobile in a random manner had caught my attention. So he ‘accidentally’ [?] hit the Siri, GPS function instead.
Thus, into the resounding dramatic silence, contrived after S#1 thundered out: “ How does a diverse society come together and live in harmony?” The mechanical voice of Siri answered …
“Your destination is on the Left.”
The room collapsed. It was the only moment of actual apparently uncontrived humour… or a moment of theatricality, whichever it was fun. Of course no one seems sure of where Left is anymore, so the heartiness was a tad forced and short… a tension taker.
Then my first doubt regarding the direction the evening would take, came when speaker #1 quoted with academic enthusiasm, the late Mozambican, Samora Machel’s observation that: “For the Nation to emerge the Tribe must die”.
By that standard I thought we are already lost, given Ms. Nicola Sturgeon’s threat to break the centuries old United States of Britain, on the grounds that her tribe has not supported the [tribally bound?] decision for the ‘Nation’ to exit the European Union. She threatens to call for her Tribe to emerge from centuries of alleged “Oppression” in a suffocating Nation State: in order to remain part of another emerging bureaucratic plutocracy.
[Curiously when I mentioned that thought later to Speaker #1, in one of those momentary post presentation cocktail party type moments of brusquely interrupted discourse, he went blank at the mention of “Nicola Sturgeon” Huh Who she?, and then dismissed the Scots as irrelevant to SA’s National Question. And that is only presumptively true. Presumably too by the same logic he also may dismiss BREXIT, and Geert Wilders not to mention the recent stunningly unexpected accession to power in the centuries old nation called the USA, of Mr. D Trump, riding on the crest of what Mr. DJ Vance would call a “Hillbilly revolution”. Now there’s a ‘tribe’ deluxe: in league with atomising ephemeral ‘tribes’ on social media.]
Speaker #2 picked up the general theme of what he alleged to be the ‘failed revolution’ amongst the ‘Transformation lobby’ when he announced “You fought for Liberation but settled for Democracy” “Freedom is not Arrival” he thundered… and the reason why the National Question is not resolved is because “… we are forgetting to remember.”
And although my first thought then was Milan Kundera, I then remembered that I had thought that Freedom involved the grand pleasure of naughty activities played out for a change on a goose feather bed… ah the vagaries of memory… and freedom’s simplicity.
Speaker #2 was apparently another Professor, presumably of something Political, as he insisted that ‘The State’ was in the hands of those who had lost empathy with the people, and that the citizen [presumably] had to reassert ‘Control’ of the State by disinterested persons’… a statement that seemed to be code for “Thieving corrupt self interested persons are looting the State’s resources instead of doing the job they were voted/employed to do’… certainly a position that found favour with the now largely enthusiastic audience.
And the idea of ‘disinterested persons’ was poignant for me, given that a recent shock phenomenon [whenit first happened] in the assessment answers I get from my more, disingenuous or perhaps naively innocent teenage Business Studies learners, is the rising refrain that reads “It is best for the government to own your business so you can get rich.” When the children of Public service workers present public service as a route to riches: as a goal, rather than the high-risk route of Entrepreneurial endeavor, then we know that we are in deeply unsustainable territory.
Then he S#2 launched into the now mandatory refrain regarding the idea of transforming the State through dekolonising the structure of thought that governed its behaviour… ‘The goal is dekolonisation’, he said… So was this the New National Question, I wondered?
I did find his idea intriguing though, that he regarded the Kolonization era as having its roots in 1492 rather than 1652. And as he reached back to castigate the past, the idea of a ‘National Question’ seemed increasingly irrelevant.
Logically the pre- kolonialized reality is represented by the idealized vision of a world, before rotten foreigners came and despoiled everything; in the interests of looting the resources of the Kontinent. And then those same rotten foreigners just accidentally ended up moving from Koloniste to mean spirited Settlers: and should go away without a please. How to get them to go is the implied National Question for a rising number of commentators… [So far triple BBBEE seems to be proving effective.]
That pre-Kolonization world though was inherently a world, in which [in John Reader’s inimitable description] the ‘People” lived in a state of “biological equilibrium with Nature” … In other words even more recently, in this Bloggist’s rambling traipses around the Kontinent over the past four decades, it was normal on reading the local press in overnight hotel rooms, to routinely find reports of local people being killed by wild animals… Usually some poor sod stumbling from one place to another while loaded with congenial liquids: taken out by leopard/jackal/wild dog/buffalo/snake bites/and more. Presumably in the Pre Kolonization era life expectancy was less than half of today’s not particularly generous level.
Thus isn’t the entire point of Civility to overcome such vicissitudes of nature. And surely the point would be to expand a working model rather than usurp it and simply alter its contents. So what would a decolonized world/country be like, given that there was no civil model that was “Kolonized”? And could this be the real “National Question”?
And in the spirit of remembering to which he had just referred; I remembered that; in a 30 second exchange with Mr. Robert Mugabe in the foyer of our mutual publisher, early in 1980, just prior to his winning the 1st post liberation election that year, he had told me of his intention to return his country [today’s Zimbabwe] to the dekolonised status it aimed for in 1650 [Two years before Van Riebeeck] when his ancestors, had successfully fought, beaten and driven out, a near century long era of Portuguese ‘Kolonisation’, of the, then, Rozwi/Changamire State.
It was a statement that in retropect lends serious credence to the 1492 hypothesis.
And it was a goal he has succeeded in achieving wouldn’t you say? Thus De-Kolonization 101. Was it a ‘worthy’ goal, in retrospect: or does it fall more conveniently into the adage of being careful about that for which one wishes lest …. That question is still open too.
I also noted a radio news report this week that the same man, [whom I like to call ‘Bob the Roz’], has called for ‘someone’ to lend him US$100 million to repair the roads the more recently expelled, later Kolonizers had built: [via exploiting the indigenous labour] and which have now apparently fallen into terminal disrepair.
Of course that could have been ‘fake news’. And anyway perhaps tarred roads are not a Kolonizing instrument… [well they are] but simply a sensible way to develop a place?
Certainly though, the beginning of the Kolonization period was a time before ‘National’ in Afrika was conceptualized. Therefore Dekolonization should, logically seek a return to the borderless regions of Afrika’s past: and yet no reference to the apparent “death” of Mr.[Thabo] Mbeki’s Afrikan vision was to be heard. And obviously too this is a most narrow interpretation of what the real Dekolonization means.
Eventually reams of Kommenter’s rose to ask the usual, ponderous, kontext loaded questions that rambled further and further from whatever point was being sought. The audience fidgeted with the idea of “What the National Question” really was; and why no one was calling for… for instance… the “shooting of the Boer” or something/one closer to home… or even just ‘expelling’ the pestiferous and inkonvenient Koloniste ‘Settlers’?
After all 1492 was not only notable for Mr. Columbus and the opening of the Americas, the unintended wholesale extermination of the indigenous ‘Amerindians” as a result of inadvertently imported pandemics; and the subsequent triangular slave trade to compensate for the loss of labour.
It was also the year the newly merging ancient Spanish rival houses combined in marital unity and then forced all Muslim and Jewish people who had lived in Southern Spain for centuries, out of the country with about three months notice. As recently as only in the past few months has the present Spanish government made overtures to remedy the injustice.
Of course the gathering was much too comfortable to actually flirt with such a rude idea. In fact it is possible that some members were descendents of those who were expelled so far back… [In the case of possible Jewish attendees, those known as Sephardic for instance: known for the place that gave them refuge then] So that particularly unpleasant topic never came up… simply hovered… hints here and there.
Well that wasn’t strictly accurate, because one, possibly well lubricated gentleman, [wine was liberally available from teams of enthusiastic wine deliverers] leapt up to take his turn with the hand mike, to announce that he represented the dispossessed KoiSan who were: the true owners of the National Question [whatever it was] … and broadly implied that all property was theft and that the land invaders should “fuck off” and give his people their land back… ALL OF IT.
He was politely ignored: albeit I did feel he had a point.
In many curious ways, the moment I found to be most profound came in S#1’s response to a question raised by a Professorial addressed person sitting in front of me.
After the long, mandatory context creating k0nstrukt period he somewhat demanded to know why he [S#1] thought that the [SA] Kommunist Party and other special interest groups on the far left had chosen to support, what they had previously criticized as a “giveaway” liberal Konstitution…. And by corollary why was the Liberal [despised] Konstitution allowed to provide such roadblock preventions to restrict the ongoing nature of the stalled Revolution.
In brief, the response was that much evidence kolekted indicated that brutal treatment by [now] ruling party cadres in the old Liberation camps [Quattro et al] during the [actual] “Struggle” had convinced sufficient party loyalists that proven safeguards were necessary to restrict the possibility of such abuse in the future.
That was for me the “Aha” of the evening: the Yin to the Yang.
Eventually though the Phrase “National Question” gradually became a mantra repeated ad hoc and ad nauseum by all speakers, kommenters and even the MC; and eventually Speaker #2 confounded the room by announcing that Transcending the National [Question?] was part of the “Struggle’ and that the National Question was really less relevant, than the greater, ‘Global Kweschun’ … a strategy that always, it seems, works to defuse all arguments: and reduce them to timid pretensions.
‘The Witch’ he concluded “is in the new Order, a convergence of random traditions’. On which reasonably profound and enigmatic note the presentation ended.
The lady sitting on my left, someone I remembered being linked to by alphabet from a first year English Tut group back in 1967… suggested that she was experiencing a “whole different language… like being on a different planet.’ She said.
My own interpretation of the National Question was the unspoken “What to do about the pestiferous Koloniste who, seemingly, as one speaker had observed during the evening: ‘ Make independent original thought impossible’.
Looking around the room in which we all had enjoyed a most pleasurable evening I could see that my version of the ‘Question’ was inevitably going to resolve itself. Once again I was struck by the growing reality that every Koloniste example in the room was either as old as or older than me and my 1967 fellow colleague and the former activist author who had accompanied her, who was a good sixteen years my senior. This is something most noticeable in my local shopping centres, and my Learner’s often mention that the handful of light textured learning mediators on the institution’s staff complement are almost the only such persons that they ever see. In fact in relation to a country of nearly 60 million persons… the Koloniste are almost vanishing.
On the other hand the liberated part of the gathering, who were close to more numerous, were for the most part below forty…ish.
The reality of the national question therefore, is that the implicit idea of the diversely populated state; and how could it achieve a cohesive future, would inevitably be tempered by natural attrition. The Koloniste class, is now seemingly operating on an awkward inverse pyramid, whereby the aged and ‘Baby Boomers’ are the top end majority; and the Millenials are in short supply lower down.
This could be because they are heading increasingly for opportunity now denied them here… partly due to the economic stagnation or because they see their future restricted as the english were for decades under the boer period of Kontrol. So the pestiferous part of the population will gradually winds down to a 1% [of so-called Whitey] with loads of wealth: and a marginalized handful of Neo-‘Bywoners’, many of whom would inevitably drift into a working handicraft class or become new additions to what seems to be a growing hard case “criminal’ class if they haven’t already.
I was also reminded then, in that observance, that it is more than a decade, since my classes in the Independent school sector of the economy had more than the occasional random great grandchild of some original Kolonistés, amongst the Learners. And in looking through the photos we take of the crowds at inter-high sports events, those self same great grandkids are similarly, only occasional: and then thinly sprinkled amidst the greater mass, indicative that mine is not an isolated experience. And such exceptions as there are, are hardly disproving this growing rule.
Surely, If Dekolonization is the goal then is it not time to take seriously the late Kepple-Jones’ position, taken from his 1947 work “When Smuts Goes”: that the name South Africa is a [so-called] WHITE Konstrukt and the revolution must stagnate in an untransformed state of beleaguered Kolonization, until the inheritors change its name to something more indicative of unfettered kontrol.
Perhaps the [sub] National Question should be: what to call this liberated new Nation State at the long end of Afrika. And perhaps we should do it before the potholes take Kontrol and the road networks entirely disappear, as they apparently do in other decolonized zones… again, assuming such reports are not ‘fake’.
But then perhaps that would be too serious. Which is why that part of my Podcast serial: ‘the Jonker Memorandum’ set in the 22nd century, has ‘vehicles’ travelling by a form of ‘hovercraft’ process, because the roads have in ‘fiction’ vanished by that time.
My thanks to the organizers: Wits University Press and the redoubtable Corina van der Spoel for her usual superb organization. And thanks too to the wonderfully enthusiastic host team from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a most enjoyable, almost old fashioned, evening of pleasurable provocation.