South African politics is usually described through various dualities: left versus right, liberal versus nationalist, progressive versus conservative, black versus white, and so on. These have varying degrees of usefulness depending on the context and the issue. Yet looking back over the response (or non-response) of civil society to the Mbeki presidency what is interesting is that these dualities don't really fit. The key divide was between those who decided, at one point or another, to take a stand and those who didn't. What differentiated them? It wasn't race, class, political tradition, or ideology. The divide was really between crunchiness and sogginess.
This distinction was famously delineated by the late Nico Colchester in an August 1988 leader for the Economist. He wrote: "Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive.... Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty." This essay deals with something slightly different to systemic crunchiness (or sogginess) and that is with how these qualities apply to individuals and institutions.
In soggy societies like modern Britain, it is often hard to tell who falls onto which side of the divide. This wasn't the case during a crunchier era. Winston Churchill was clearly crunchy; Neville Chamberlin soggy. Appeasement was a soggy policy; fighting on against Germany after Dunkirk a crunchy one. Animal Farm by George Orwell: crunchy. Soviet Communism; A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb: soggy.
Similarly, in the mid-1990s it would have been relatively difficult to distinguish the soggy apart from the crunchy in South Africa (they had become rather intermingled). But what Moses did to the Red sea Mbeki did to sogginess and crunchiness - and that is part the one side from the other. The following are a handful of illustrative examples of where certain institutions and individuals fall on the soggy-crunchy divide.
Crunchy: Democratic Alliance, the Treatment Action Campaign, the Mail & Guardian, the SACP, Cosatu, SAIRR, Solidarity, the Sunday Times, the Scorpions.
Soggy: The National Party, Love Life, the Independent newspaper group, the parliamentary ANC, Idasa, (much of) big business, the Public Protector.
Crunchy: Tony Leon, Zachie Achmat, Zwelinzima Vavi, Blade Nzimande, Jeremy Cronin, Richard Young, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Vusi Pikoli, Mondli Makhanya, Helen Zille.
Soggy: Kader Asmal, Richard Calland, Steven Friedman, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, Nadine Gordimer, Frene Ginwala.
The difference between the two usually came down to the question of whether one should fight the crocodile or feed it - in the hope, as Churchill put, that it would eat you last. Part of what made these crunchy individuals crunchy was that they all reached the point where they said: ‘This far and no further. Here I stand; I can do no other.' The soggy lot meanwhile involved themselves in an endless process of compromise and moral repositioning - to seek an accommodation with those in power, or to keep in with the prevailing opinion, or both.
Pikoli's decision to order the arrest of Jackie Selebi was crunchy, as was Madlala-Routledge's criticism of the president's AIDS policy while deputy minister. It was crunchy for FNB to launch an anti-crime campaign, but soggy to back down on instructions from the presidency.
Not every person or institution that ended up on the crunchy side of things started out that way. The Sunday Times became considerably crunchier under Makhanya's editorship. And to be fair to the Independent group (which has some crunchy journalists) it is no longer as soggy as it used to be. Andrew Feinstein's recent memoirs - "After the Party" - are essentially an account of a soggy person who discovered his inner crunchiness when confronted with the choice of keeping his political career or standing by what he believed in.
Jacob Zuma too found himself in a highly crunchy situation (not of his own choosing) when he was presented with a choice between either accepting his fate - dismissal, prosecution, and potential imprisonment - or campaigning to depose Mbeki as ANC president. Equally, there are once crunchy institutions that have succumbed to the allure of sogginess. The Helen Suzman Foundation is one that comes to mind.
Sometimes the difference between crunchiness and sogginess is a matter of timing. It was crunchy to oppose Mbeki's dissident views on AIDS before April 2002, a bit soggy to only do so afterwards. Indeed, it would be a sign of great crunchiness to publicly defend those views today. Similarly, to now suddenly criticise Mbeki's dictatorial tendencies is rather like shooting bullets into the corpse of Mussolini (soggy rather than crunchy).
