Second Lockdown: South Africa’s own cargo cult expands its collection of misguided rituals
3 November 2020
In October 2019 I wrote a piece, “The contemporary cargo cult at the southern tip of Africa”, in which I outlined the cargo cult phenomenon, as well as my reasoning for arguing that the ANC exhibits the same type of irrational behaviour. One year later, it appears that the ANC and its cargo cult leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, are not only persisting with their well-established checklist of rituals, but have indeed adopted a second wave of brand new ones.
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic was not the only thing that originated in China and spread across the globe like wildfire: the ritual of national lockdowns did the same. Most governments tried to imitate the lockdown pioneers in order not to risk appearing indecisive or weak, while others quite clearly set out to outdo their counterparts with more draconian lockdown measures. The South African government falls into the latter category.
With the economy already in tatters, the ANC opted for one of the strictest and longest national lockdowns in the world, enforcing measures such as a curfew and banning the sale of alcohol, cigarettes and certain types of clothing and food – measures which would make even the world’s most hard-core authoritarians blush.
However, despite this strongman approach to “saving lives”, South Africa in October 2020 ranks 12th in the world for most COVID-19 cases. So what does this tell us about our own cargo cult at the helm? The ANC has shown a blind commitment to a lockdown medicine, which is holistically more harmful than the virus, and their apparent eagerness to take a second dose of the toxic potion called lockdown indicates a party motivated not by reality, but by superstitious imitation.
Just as the original cargo cults of the Melanesian islands ritualistically built mock airports with sticks and stones, believing that it would bring prosperity, the ANC is imitating what it sees abroad in a ritualistic and often exaggerated fashion.
The best example of ritual trumping reality is the fact that as soon as European countries started planning second lockdowns in preparation for an imminent “second wave” of COVID-19, the ANC – like clockwork – also started with public warnings about a possible second lockdown. A fact that needs to be considered, which exposes this entire charade, is that those countries plotting second lockdowns are almost all located in the northern hemisphere, which is entering winter in December, while South Africans will be donning shorts and hitting the beaches during that time.
Further evidence that the ANC is not driven by reality, but rather by ritual, is the fact that in 2019, about 64 000 South Africans died of TB, yet there has never been a TB lockdown. Why then has the South African government persisted with locking down the entire country to curb a virus which has ostensibly shown itself to be substantially less life-threatening than TB?
A textbook cult requires a charismatic leader, and even though, in my view, reading off a teleprompter is a charisma void, President Ramaphosa has proven himself to be the main cargo cultist, leading “our people” or his flock. When referencing the economic devastation South Africa has suffered in 2020, the president’s rhetorical strategy becomes clear.
Rather than to reflect on the corruption, major policy blunders and devastating consequences of the extensive lockdown, which he championed all along, President Ramaphosa instead elects to attempt to gaslight the population into believing it was the virus which decimated our economy. This shrewd tactic admittedly serves four purposes.
Firstly, it keeps the level of national fear surrounding the virus at a fever pitch. Secondly, it diverts attention away from the ANC’s disastrous lockdown ritual. Thirdly, it employs the dangerous combination of fear and a false reality to justify the continuation and further expansion of this bizarre lockdown ritual; and fourthly, it is used as scapegoat to hide the continued consequences of the ANC’s disastrous economic policies that have been in effect since long before the lockdown.
The expression "Drinking the Kool-Aid" refers to a person who believes in a doomed or dangerous idea, because of mistakenly perceived potential high rewards. The phrase originates from the events in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, when cult leader Jim Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by means of ingesting a mixed drink lethally laced with, inter alia, cyanide – killing 918 of his followers.
The ANC has prepared us a deadly lockdown cocktail, laced with the National Democratic Revolution, paternalistic statism, critical race theory and systemic corruption, and is calling it a tonic, like a true snake oil salesman. There is precious little time left for South Africans to snap out of their trance and to refuse the deadly “Kool-Aid” being offered, by emphatically declaring that the cargo cultist-in-chief and his loyalists aren’t wearing any clothes. If we blindly follow, I fear South Africa’s economy will suffer a similar "revolutionary suicide" as those poor souls in Jonestown, who believed the utopian promises of their “saviour”.
Ernst van Zyl is a Strategy and Campaign Officer at AfriForum. He co-presents on the Podlitiek podcast, hosts the Afrikaans “In alle Ernst” podcast, and has a South African news and politics commentary channel on YouTube. Ernst usually posts on Twitter and YouTube under his pseudonym Conscious Caracal (follow him at https://twitter.com/ConCaracal).
