Throughout much of Western history it was regarded as axiomatic that all swans were white. As such the "black swan" became a metaphor for something which did not exist. According to Wikipedia: "The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote in 82 AD of rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno (‘a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan'). He meant something whose rarity would compare with that of a black swan, or in other words, as a black swan did not exist, neither did the supposed characteristics of the ‘rare bird' with which it was being compared. The phrase passed into several European languages as a popular proverb."
Up until the late seventeenth century then the black swan metaphor "existed in the European imagination as a metaphor for that which could not exist" while the statement that "all swans are white" was regarded as a well-established truth. However, in 1697 the first black swan was sighted by European explorers in Australia. In 1726 three specimens were captured and taken back to Batavia (Jakarta) as proof of their existence. In the writings of John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper, and more recently Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the metaphor of the black swan now came to denote "an exception to the rule and the very existence of the improbable."
For Mill the story of the black swan highlighted the danger of extrapolating past experience - no matter how uniform and consistent - into the future: "The tendency, which some call an instinct, and which others account for by association, to infer the future from the past, the known from the unknown, is simply a habit of expecting that what has been found true once or several times, and never yet found false, will be found true again."
A black swan event could usefully defined as one in which the weight and uniformity of past experience obscures a recognition of an objective shift on the ground, presaging an imminent change. There are three such events which come to mind in recent South African history.
The first was F.W. de Klerk's decision to unban the liberation movements, dismantle apartheid, and pursue a peaceful negotiated settlement. There were clear objective reasons for De Klerk's actions (international pressure, internal insurrection, the collapse of Communism etc.) but his actions took everyone by surprise partly because they ran against forty years of grim determination by the National Party to keep power in white hands.
The second was the dramatic shift of support by Afrikaner voters from the NP to the Democratic Party of Tony Leon in early 1998. Again, no-one really saw it coming. Five decades of failed efforts by the parliamentary opposition to win over Afrikaner voters obscured just how profoundly the political landscape had changed.
The third was the rebellion by the ANC rank-and-file at the party's National General Council in 2005 which forced the reinstatement of Jacob Zuma as ANC deputy president. For the previous nine years Mbeki had - with apparent impunity - steadily tightened his group over party and state, despite his increasingly capricious and despotic behaviour. It appeared, throughout that period, that an accounting would never arrive. Yet as Tony Leon notes in On the Contrary the reality was that Mbeki had been "storing up a terrible rage which would all explode after he made the decision to fire Jacob Zuma as his deputy in 2005."
All three of these events were widely unpredicted and yet, after the fact, it is easy enough to formulate persuasive reasons for why they occurred. As Mill noted, "The unprompted tendency of the mind is to generalize from its experience, providing this points all in one direction; provided no other experience of a conflicting character comes unsought." Of course, once it does turn up, the mind can adapt fairly quickly. That which was wholly unforeseen becomes ‘inevitable' not to long after its unexpected arrival. After all, why shouldn't the colour of the swan have varied in some distant and as yet undiscovered region of the world?
The question is, are there any more black swans over the horizon of South African politics? I think there are three that could come into view. The first is some kind of breakaway from the ANC. In a sense the ANC has already split and yet, despite their mutual fear and loathing, both factions remain within the same union - like a couple continuing to share the same bed after an acrimonious divorce.
A second (possible) black swan is a serious decline in the ANC's popular support. The ANC's majority has remained stubbornly fixed at sixty percent or over for the past fifteen years - as measured in both opinion polls and elections. According to the Mail & Guardian last week, a poll conducted by Markinor in May this year found that none of the parties would have won "more than 10% of the vote" if the country had gone to the polls that month. The ANC, meanwhile, would have maintained its support, "securing two-thirds of the vote."
In the light of this past experience, it difficult for the mind not to succumb to the habit of expecting that that which has been found true for the past 180 months won't be true next month (or next year) as well. One sign of this is that those currently floating the idea of an ‘arms deal amnesty' don't seem too concerned about the electoral repercussions of such an initiative.
Yet, here again, the ANC is objectively speaking more vulnerable than it has been since 1993. It has lost much of its moral authority, is widely disdained by the intelligentsia, and seems to have no effective answer to the corruption that is steadily eating away at its capacity to govern. Weighing against these factors is Jacob Zuma's potential populist appeal. Still, if the ANC were to suddenly start shedding support the political scientists wouldn't exactly have a hard a time identifying the causes. (As an aside, a Markinor poll conducted in November 1997 gave the NP 12% of the vote and the DP 3%. Six months later the two parties were level pegging.)
A third potential black swan event is a peaceful transition to democracy in Zimbabwe. This would require the arrival of not one black swan but two (or three). Thabo Mbeki would have to reverse his eight year old policy of support for Zanu-PF, Mugabe would have to decide that he could not hold on to power for much longer, and/or the lower ranks of the army would have to turn against their top commanders.
This is not to say that these three black swans will turn up. It is just that, in each case, the once wholly improbable has shifted to the possible (if not the very likely). The potent forces keeping the ANC together, its popular support intact, and Zanu-PF in power, may well continue to prevail over the countervailing ones. But there is no reason, as Mill points out, why present trends will continue into the future simply of their own accord.
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