1. The Bookfair

On Saturday I took part in the Kingsmead RMB Private Bank Bookfair, brought to us by Kingsmead College, which is a private school in Rosebank, Johannesburg for genteel gels or potentially genteel gels.

I became involved in the book fair, even though my Zuma biography is now O.P. (the dreaded "out-of-print" - and won't be back in print until I put together a new version after Mangaung), because one particular couple are good friends; because the organising ladies were exceedingly charming; because it seemed like, and proved to be, good fun; and because I thought I owed Kingsmead some of my time.

I figured a little time was the least an oke from Brakpan High could offer, given that all the best chicks who featured in my late teens and early twenties came from Kingsmead College - and they were gorgeous young women.

2. Holland, Malan & the audience

I was the so-called facilitator in a session called "Staying Power" in which the panelists were Mandy Wiener (Killing Kebble), Rian Malan (My Traitor's Heart) and Heidi Holland (Dinner with Mugabe). They were supposed to (and did) discuss "the challenges of translating the hurly-burly of news and political commentary into books with staying power".

If you haven't read those books, you ought to do so. I had not - until last week - read Dinner with Mugabe, only because I was beaucoup busy with JG Zuma when it first came out and because Comrade Bob has never moved the cockles of my heart one way or another. (Sorry, John Austin; Rhodesia just wasn't part of my purview - my loss, no doubt.) 

Anyway, Dinner with Mugabe is bloody interesting. I don't think that it ever does - or can - really answer its founding question (What turned an ostensibly decent young man into a monster?) but, as I said, it's quite a remarkable book.

But here's the thing: before long the conversation had moved, as is perhaps inevitable, and especially in relation to Mugabe, to the inevitable questions from the audience: Quo vadis? What future (for us) in the RSA?  

I suppose most people, especially the white ones, are always looking for reassurance. They want to know that everything is going to be okay. And they (the people in the audience) think that "political" authors - such as sayHolland and Malan - know something that they don't know. Well, maybe they do; I dunno.

Anyway, it wasn't very long - much, I must say, to my surprise - before Holland was saying, "Well, look, as much as it pains me to say this, it seems as though we're going the same way as Zimbabwe. It looks as though we're going to have to go through some serious fire, just as Zimbabwe is ..."

And, even more to my surprise, this sentiment was echoed by Malan - that, given the behaviour of the ANC, etc, etc, it looks as though we're sailing into some really black seas.

Can folk like Malan and Holland - basically "old Africa hands", sympathetic ones - really be seeing things this way, I wondered.

3. Doomsayers and my tits

Doomsayers have always gotten on my tits.

This was one of the things that propelled me into writing the Zuma biography - or, at any rate, one of the feelings, one of the huge indignations, that grew in me as I worked on it.

The basic view of most people - i.e. of most white people - always seemed to be this: these people (these "others", i.e. these blacks) don't wish for the best for all of us. They've got some of kind of plot to wreak havoc and cause destruction. Look at the crime - it's their fault. Look at the failing economy - it's their fault. Look at this, look at that - it's their entire fault.

Some would take it even further. Anthea Jeffery, for example, has written a 600-page, extraordinarily well-researched book (People's War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa) in which the basic thesis is that the violence of 1984-94 was the fruit of ANC strategy. And that's just one example, taken at random off the bookshelf.

For another example, have a look at some of the comments posted on this site, Politicsweb. All too often the implicit - and very often explicit - suggestion is that the "others" are hell-bent on destruction, chaos and failure (as in Zimbabwe) and, what's more, that it's the fruit of a plot. It's good ol' Marxism/Socialism-turned-to-Stalinism, the root of all evil.

4. Kafka & the NDR master plan

I don't really buy the existence of plots or master plans. I tend to agree with Franz Kafka that most men are not wicked; that they are not so much evil-doers as sleep-walkers; and that they blunder from mistake to mistake without a plan.

Look, for example, at Jeffery's "The Green Paper on land reform in the context of the NDR," on this site (see here). It's a scrupulously researched and argued "Address by the South African Institute of Race Relation's Head of Special Research to the conference on ‘the national democratic revolution, land ownership, and the Green Paper on land reform' in Pretoria, May 31 2012."  

It's about the ANC's National Democratic Revolution. "Yet, says the author, "neither the goals of the NDR nor the thinking which underpins it has ever been given much attention by the Media. The topic seems to be off-limits to the Press, which earlier generally ignored the first stage of the revolution - the people's war strategy which gave the ANC its domination over the new South Africa - and now largely overlooks the NDR and its ramifications."

As I say, it's almost faultlessly agued (there's a fair amount of side-stepping and back-tracking to overcome certain anomalies) - so faultlessly, so clickety-click do various aspects of its thesis come together, that one forgets that this stuff is about people.

And in my experience of the ANC, there is no one around who has the time or the nous to implement such a plan. Where's the little room in which the NDR, as set out by Jeffery, is being plotted? Who's doing it? Little Julie Malema? Blade Nzimande? Gwede Mantashe? Kgalema Motlanthe? Trevor Manuel?

Nah, though I like an apparently viable theory as much as the next fellow, it just doesn't fly.

5. The punch-line

But what if little ol' me is missing the point? (Some people say I'm pretty good at that.)

What if it's not so much a question of a plot but that - for whatever reasons, perhaps a collection of random ones - the wheels are indeed bloody falling off?

What if we are headed down some sort of slippery, Zimbabwe-like slope - as much as I detest the formulation of such a clichéd, lame and rhetorical question?

Jeffery has a paragraph about the "constraints", the things working against successful ANC implementation of its NDR. It runs like this: "...key constraints are to be found in South Africa's long tradition of critical vigilance, coupled with its still strong Judiciary, its powerful independent Press, its vibrant official opposition, and its diverse and often outspoken civil society ..."

Well, civil society has come out to bat recently - notably in terms of e-tolling and General Richard Mdluli. And the opposition does what it can, including marching into Braamfontein to face the sticks and stones of Cosatu.

But take a look at Jeremy Gauntlett's piece on the judiciary, also on this site. And think about the performance of our "powerful independent press" (our what?), as personified by the indecisive and self-obsessed Ms Haffajee of City Press, who squeaked loudly when she felt the prick of the spear, and maybe you'll start thinking, as I am, that I should be paying closer attention to the words of the likes of Holland and Malan.

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