We have now begun our descent

How to Stop South Africa losing its way

Justice Malala

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781868426799
• eBook ISBN: 9781868426805
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Ideologías políticas

"I am angry. I am furious. Because I never thought it would happen to us. Not us, the rainbow nation that defied doomsayers and suckled and nurtured a fragile democracy into life for its children. I never thought it would happen to us, this relentless decline, the flirtation with a leap over the cliff."

In a searing, honest paean to his country, renowned political journalist and commentator Justice Malala forces South Africa to come face to face with the country it has become: corrupt, crime-ridden, compromised, its institutions captured by a selfish political elite bent on enriching itself at the expense of everyone else. In this deeply personal reflection, Malala's diagnosis is devastating: South Africa is on the brink of ruin. He does not stop there. Malala believes that we have the wherewithal to turn things around: our lauded Constitution, the wealth of talent that exists, our history of activism and a democratic trajectory can all be used to stop the rot. But he has a warning: South Africans of all walks of life need to wake up and act, or else they will soon find their country has been stolen.

PART ONE

The Way We Are Now

1

And So it Begins

‘Yeah, every night it’s the same old thing

Getting high, getting drunk, getting horny

At the Inn-Between, again.’

– Rodriguez, ‘A Most Disgusting Song’

My brother Ernest is reading Time magazine. It is the year 1991, a bright, hot, clear April day. He is 14 years old. He comes over to me, lolling on the one sofa in our family home, a corrugated-iron shack, and asks for the meaning of a word he is unfamiliar with.

We play around with the word, factotum, which he likes the sound of, and make examples of sentences in which it appears. Then we have a short discussion about Angola’s MPLA. Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, he tells me. That is what it stands for in Portuguese. I don’t know how good a leader José Eduardo dos Santos is, which is what Ernest wants to know, as he has lately heard about the Angolan president.

Then his friend Ndembeni rides into our yard on his bicycle. Ndembeni is two years older than Ernest. They are fast friends. Ernest gets onto the handlebars of the bicycle and they ride off, free as a pair of birds.

Two hours later my cousin Dan Malala’s son, also named Justice, comes running into our yard. He tells me that two teenagers have been hit by a bakkie down in Block A of our village of New Eersterus, just north of Pretoria, near where they live. He is not sure that it is Ernest and his friend. He says I must hurry.

I walk, in a daze, to the scene of the accident, a journey of 30 minutes. A large crowd has gathered. A man stands by the side of the road, holding his head in his hands. He is the driver.

It is Ernest who is lying on the side of the road. We put him in the back of the bakkie. I sit with him. I know he is dead, but we all pretend that there is hope. The driver, the man with his head in his hands, takes the wheel. An Indian doctor comes to the door at the hospital, Jubilee. He shakes his head.

‘He is dead,’ he says, his tone flat. Final.

Hospital orderlies take Ernest’s body to the morgue.

Both of Ndembeni’s legs are broken. He is in a coma for weeks. There are injuries to his head, his arms and his face. They did not see the bakkie coming. There is no police investigation.

The driver takes me back to our house. My mother is back from work at the nearby Catholic seminary. There are women sitting with her, surrounding her. They know. I tell them. They hold my mother down. Her weeping is silent. I don’t know what to do, what to hold.

Ernest was special. Top of his class whenever he felt like it, he was already a political activist, attending South African Youth Congress and ANC Youth League meetings all over the country. When he returned from his first Young Pioneers (ANC Youth League members younger than 14) meeting just the year before he died, in 1990, he fell into memorising the ANC’s guiding document, the Freedom Charter. It begins with the historic, unifying line, ‘We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.’1

He committed the document to memory within a couple of days, and quoted it to anyone who would listen.

And so, when he died, the ANC in the village rallied to my family’s cause. It was not just that my brother was a committed ANC member at just 14. My brother Eric had been an activist and was beaten and detained for months by the Bophuthatswana police in the 1980s. My younger sister was a fierce student activist. I had helped launch the local ANC and ANC Youth League branches in the village, becoming the first acting branch secretary-general of the unbanned ANC in 1990.

Local ANC leaders took refuge at my mother’s house when they were on the run. Even when we had little food, they were guaranteed a plate of pap and relish at our house. Every week, political education sessions were held under my mother’s roof until it became too dangerous to do so.

When my brother’s coffin was lowered into his grave, an ANC flag went down with it. The black, green and gold was in our blood. The beautiful melody of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, the ANC anthem that was later to become part of a spliced-together national anthem, rose up over the New Eersterus cemetery.

We were proud ANC members. That year, as the pain of my brother’s passing began to mend, my comrades and I were entranced by a widely circulated paper written by an ANC intellectual, Albie Sachs, who later became a Constitutional Court judge and celebrated South African author.

Towards the end of the paper he made one of the most moving declarations I have ever read about what it meant, then, to be a member of the ANC. It was as if Sachs knew my heart, the very depths of my soul.

He wrote: ‘We think we are the best (and we are), that is why we are in the ANC. We work hard to persuade the people of our country that we are the best (and we are succeeding). But this does not require us to force our views down the throats of others.

‘On the contrary, we exercise true leadership by being non-hegemonic, by selflessly trying to create the widest unity of the oppressed and to encourage all forces of change, by showing the people that we are fighting not to impose a view upon them but to give them the right to choose the kind of society they want and the kind of government they want.

‘We are not afraid of the ballot box, of open debate, of opposition. One fine day we will even have our Ian Smith equivalents protesting and grumbling about every change being made and looking back with nostalgia to the good old days of apartheid, but we will take them on at the hustings. In conditions of freedom, we have no doubt who will win, and if we should forfeit the trust of the people, then we deserve to lose.’2

It was such belief in the ANC and the possibility of a new order, a new progressive country, that made the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC in February 1990 such seminal moments in our collective history. I was walking in the Johannesburg city centre on 2 February 1990 when a huge surge of people ran towards me. They were holding posters of the afternoon edition of the Star newspaper. President FW de Klerk had that morning announced that the government would release Nelson Mandela and unban the African National Congress and its allied organisations.

I joined the surging masses of people running through the streets of Johannesburg, laughing, hugging, weeping, running, crying. The country of our dreams had finally arrived. I arrived back home in Pretoria at midnight. My whole journey from Johannesburg, in three different taxis, had consisted of people hugging, singing freedom songs and dancing.

These were the thoughts and images racing through my mind at 3.41 am on Saturday 7 January 2012, a day before the celebrations to mark the centenary of the founding of the ANC. There was nothing revolutionary about the Cubaña restaurant-cum-nightclub in Bloemfontein, the sleepy city in the centre of South Africa where the ANC was born.

As the sun rose, the morning light revealed all the signs of the crass, conspicuous consumption that we have come to expect of the ANC, not the signs of the revolution the party had set out to achieve. The evidence of the night’s partying looked more like a bacchanalian bankers’ feast than a humble ANC celebration. Outside, the streets of Bloemfontein were clogged with Range Rovers, massive Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.3 Inside, ANC leaders enjoyed Moët et Chandon champagne in massive quantities. No one, it seemed, was interested in the fine South African sparkling wines available at far cheaper prices. This was not about enjoyment. It was about showing that you had arrived. It was not about good champagne. It was about showing that you could afford expensive stuff. It was about the label, the price tag, and not what was in the bottle.

The ANC’s arrival in Bloemfontein in the Free State province – a place so racist under apartheid that people of Indian origin were not allowed to sleep there overnight – had attracted the party’s elite from across the country. And if the ANC has succeeded at anything, it is at enriching a narrow black elite that is not afraid of flaunting its material wealth. In Mangaung, as the Bloemfontein metro area is called today, ANC leaders, hangers-on and others jostled to show each other and the poor masses how big their cars and their bank balances were. That is the measure of our success today.

At 4 am the music stopped. As Cubaña...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Prologue
• PART ONE: The Way We Are Now
• PART TWO: The Road Ahead
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About the Book
• About the Author
• Imprint Page