The real revolution shall not be televised
As I watched the television the staged political drama the ANC populists staged at Johannesburg airport, when our athletes came from participating in IAAF championships; it became clear to me they were building an propaganda machine along the lines of Zanu-PF by indoctrinating the minds of the people. The trick is about scapegoating and deflecting attention away from the real issues we're faced with, like service delivery protests. They decided to hype up the Semenya incident by playing on people's anxieties and fears, asking them to have hope in unspecific things and lies.
We discussed what was needed by our country to enter a more progressive and developmental mode. We came to conclusion that we need a highly intelligent, extremely eloquent leader with a clear idea of what is needed to be done make our economy more vibrant. He probably will have to be someone with no fear of the intimidating passé politics of the Liberation Movement (LM). He must have nothing to prove, which means he/she must be someone already successful in their career and well-off moneywise.
"Where would you get such a perfect candidate?" asked my friend. He'll have to come from obscurity; in modern politics every man's past disqualifies him from high public office. After the current administration I can assure you people will no longer be in a mood for the devils they know. "My question to you, are YOU starting to organize a movement such as the one you say we need?" another friend asked. "Personally I think the answer lies in a small aristocratic youth league that is not aligned with a political party (as you yourself say) - a real youth league that is concerned not about party image but about the people of our country."
What is becoming obvious is that people, young people of progressive minds especially, have become fed up with our political leadership across the board. This includes, as demonstrated in the adjoining list, that of our own party, Cope. We listened to the cloying vulgarisateur, Malema, and the rest of the snobbish logorrhoea of Winnie Mandela. We asked ourselves what had gone wrong. And we ended up putting the blame on ourselves. We spent too much time not caring for political things, which allowed the worse to rise to the top on the public arena.
We talked about the corrosive impact on our country's psyche the growing disdain for excellence; whether in education, culture, or politics, was having. The demands for excellence are now labelled elitist by the populist turn that has become blatant over the past 15 years. Ignorance is glamorised as a sign that one is close to the people, and has not forgotten their roots.
We came to a conclusion that we need an enlightened (I always feel nervous using this term, after all Lenin and Mao were avowed disciples of an Enlightenment ideology, and so is Mugabe) citizenry who understand their rights and can see in seed the dangers to their liberty. The citizenry that is able to sieve wheat from chaff in political rhetoric. Citizens that'll be able to pull themselves out the current deadening psyche that's the combination of millenarian hopes and age-old resentments otherwise know as sense of entitlement.
We also said we were in dire need of independent opinion makers who are not prepared to sell their souls to shenanigans of power or money. Those who'll not give ideological sanction to bad behaviour of powerful and greedy men, making the field of journalism look like its open to the highest bidder by prostituting their pens.
When later that night I sat to read once again the words of another journalists who had chosen the seduction of power over sincerity I was reminded of Samgrass from Brideshead Revisited. As most know, Samgrass was the don at the rich man's table, the brilliant chatterer, who moved among dinner tables to impress ignorant men who had not read as much as he had. Modern Samgrasses parade their talent as vulgarisateur chatterboxes; cloyingly boastful, and excuse the cruelty of powerful men with a stroke of a pen that says such things sometimes happen when politicians are building their careers. Of course they end up being tedious and infelicitous because they betray the progressive spirit of the people.
What is required is "To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity." This is the call the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his recent encyclical, CARITAS IN VERITATE. Indeed let us be charitable to one another, and our government, but let us stand firm in the truth, even when it is out of season castles of clay, or with public opinion. Let's stand firm for what we believe even against the tide.
A short lesson in history takes us to July 1905, when Lenin in his writing, Two Tactics of Social - Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, described the tasks that then faced the Bolshevik Party; "Undoubtedly, the revolution will teach us and will teach the masses of the people. But the question that now confronts a militant political party is: shall we be able to teach the revolution anything? Shall we be able to make use of the correctness of our Social-Democratic doctrine, of our bond with the only thoroughly revolutionary class, the proletariat, to put a proletarian imprint on the revolution, to carry the revolution to a real and decisive victory, not in word but in deed, and to paralyse the instability, half-heartedness and treachery of the democratic bourgeoisie?"
In a way this question is directed mostly to the black middle class, the only people who have potential power to turn the tide in this country. Will they listen? The choice might seem difficulty, between nostalgia and liberation movement gone haywire; or principle. Liberty is the most revolutionary doctrine that sometimes must develop by vaunting bad tradition to preserve a good principle. This is the paradox of a traditional black person that is intensified by unconditional belief in our constitution and bill of rights.
The real revolution never really expressed by a populist language which always catches it by the tailcoats. The real revolution, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw, starts in the hearts and minds of men of goodwill and run like a double edged sword through a fight, an irrepressible fight for human dignity and freedom to choose at any given time and moment the means and ways to better themselves.
As I watched the orchestration of anger at Johannesburg airport on TV I was reminded of something H.G. Wells once said about "the facile assumption that the people at a disadvantage will be stirred to anything more than chaotic and destructive expressions of resentment." The real revolution has a tendency of confounding revolutionaries, and, as the saying go, it shall not be televised.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is editor of http://copetown.org/ and COPE's head of research in the Western Cape legislature
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