Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently called on the Cape Town opera company to call off their tour of Israel (with a black cast in Porgy and Bess). Fury erupted in the local press – for and against.
Interestingly, apart from Tutu himself, all participants were white. Their letters expressed a passion seldom displayed about South African politics. This is probably a reflection of how many whites have retreated into a sort of “internal exile”. Having retreated behind high suburban walls, they expend their vitriol instead in a slanging match that will have no influence in the Middle East.
The most interesting aspect, however, was that both sides resorted to the sort of generalisations one hoped South Africans, at least, would not repeat. This is the temptation of reducing whole societies to lumpen monoliths – as if the opposing group were cohesive, sharing a single ideology and could speak with one voice.
This reflects a view popularised by the United States academic Samuel Huntington in his influential book The Clash of Civilisations. Following the Cold War, he presented a simple, all-embracing scenario. “Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs”, proclaimed Huntington, “but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations.”
Of course, if you follow such logic and act on it, it is always possible to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. South Africa has done so in the past. White fears helped to create exactly the thing that was feared: a popular armed struggle.
The crucial point – what, in the past, the majority of whites in South Africa failed to perceive and The Clash of Civilisations negates – is that, as a general rule, there is as much conflict within societies. Ignoring this and treating other groups as monolithic blocks tends to force potential rivals together. Apartheid did exactly that.
Only now is it clear, for example, just what a discordant range of voices exists within the African National Congress. This extends from hardline Stalinists to gung-ho capitalists and everything in between.
Disagreements between rival ANC factions are often expressed in ferocious rhetoric.
Last month saw a renewed outbreak of vicious, fratricidal party hostilities.
This follows a conference called by some of our most progressive civil groupings, such as the Social Justice Coalition, which highlighted escalating levels of official corruption. The gathering was attended by the Congress of South African Trades Unions.
That initiative has already been denounced by the ANC, particularly outraged by the trade union leaders’ denunciation of ANC “hyenas” looting the public purse.
The COSATU unions are part of an official governing “tripartite” alliance, along with the ANC and the South African Communist Party. This coalition becomes more fractious by the day. The SACP, which has five cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, also joined in the attack on the civil society and trade union conference.
Deputy transport minister, who is also deputy general secretary of the SACP, Jeremy Cronin declared: “As alliance partners, we need to be very careful that we are not manipulated into someone else’s strategic agenda, particularly when that agenda is itself increasingly hegemonised by a much more right-wing, anti-majoritarian liberalism.”
Jeremy Cronin is a fine poet and splendid essayist. So what comes over him when he alleges unspecific right-wing “agendas” with formulaic, paranoid and opaque prose?
The SACP intellectual is part of this increasingly secretive and reactionary administration. No wonder he must rush to its defence with such tortuous claptrap.
Comrade Cronin has paid his dues before. In 2002, after referring to the “Zanu-fication” of the ANC, he was hauled before an ANC disciplinary hearing. Afterwards, Cronin issued a grovelling apology. What has changed since then? Has the ANC suddenly taken a massive leftward swing? Not according to the unions.
No, what has occurred in the meantime is the “Zuma-fication” of the ANC.
Corruption has increased and an assertive social conservatism in governing circles is far more evident. Most regressive of all is the stated ANC desire to place statutory controls on the press. It is precisely such authoritarian tendencies which the civil society conference was called to address – an initiative the deputy general secretary of the SACP, in convoluted rhetoric, now characterises as “right wing”.
He has fallen into the classic trap identified by George Orwell: “The real enemies of the working class are not those who talk to them in a too highbrow manner, they are those who try and trick them into identifying their interests with those of the exploiter.”
This is exactly the trick the ANC is trying to pull off: to convince workers that “we are all in this together” – the nouveau millionaire as much as the garbage collector.
No wonder the SACP gets itself into such a twist. In his poem, The Trouble with Revolutionism, the SACP deputy secretary – and deputy minister – Cronin wrote: “Having abolished the bosses/We became the bosses/(In the name of the workers, of course)”.
He was being ironic. I think. Today the gap between satire and ambition is hard to detect.
