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Opinionista

The good, the bad, the dreaming, the fabulating and the tale telling

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Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.

We live in quite perverse times, times of erasure and reimagining... For several weeks, we have been going through a process of trying to erase bad memories and icons from our iniquitous past. For a much longer period, our elected leaders have been purging the state and ancillary institutions of people considered undesirable, like a president or a public official, or who no longer serve the malleable and apparently pecuniary interests of the ruling elite.

Elsewhere, communities are being rather selective about their own roles in our past. Some folk remember the deep history (especially the good parts, of Europeans in the region) but seem to draw a blank on the period between 1948 and 1994. In a separate instance, one knucklehead ignores the cruelty and barbarity of one of the 20th century’s worst human beings, and extracts, expediently and quite dangerously, ‘good things’ the mass murderer did. The ‘bad people’ now point to ‘good’ things they have done (we may have colonised you, but we built dams and highways). The ‘good people’ ignore the ‘bad’ things that they have done or have presided over. We may be presiding over the worst inequality in our recent history, ours may be a profoundly violent and cruel society, but ‘we liberated you’.

Like a lesson gone horribly wrong, our stories are written on a blackboard, and before we learn them, they are erased, in rushes of neurosis and anxiety. We dare not look at ourselves, or examine ourselves, lest we see bad things. So much of this re-imagining and erasure has to do, in some ways, with how we remember our past, and how we, ourselves want to be remembered. We seem to rely as much on convenient intellectual occlusion and a selective morality as we do on a non-clinical (literal) type of confabulation. We tell porkies about ourselves and of our past to make us feel better. We are part of what Lawrence Durrell described as a land given to “dreaming, to fabulating, to tale-telling”.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, during a spate of farm murders, when young white men, drunk and emboldened by militarism and, what was then described as kragdadigeheid, I covered very many murder trials, mainly as a press photographer. In almost all such cases, mothers would testify on the stand that their sons were the kindest, gentlest and least harmful boys. The mothers would almost always be shocked that their sons could be accused of repeatedly stabbing and gutting a black farm labourer like a fish, then towing his body behind a bakkie along bone-crushingly bumpy, rural roads, the young men drunk on cheap beer and mampoer, and roaring with laughter and triumphalism.

Mothers are not alone in telling only good stories about their children, or of having blind faith and complete trust in those closest to us, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that may tell a different story. Mothers and friends, and those of us, who are loyal to a fault, tend to remember only the good things about those we loved and respect. We sometimes also use ‘good stories’, produce sanitised self-images, and in some cases we apply a type of socio-emotional selectivity, to help us cope with our own fallibility, with declining fortunes and, well, when we have our backs against the wall. Part of this selective memory retrieval is to chose only those aspects of a person who is no longer alive – or who may still be alive and kicking about actually – that make us feel good, or that confirm our particular biases.

For instance, two of South Africa’s finest historical figures, Chris Hani and Steve Biko, are often (quite correctly, I believe) hailed as great people. The problem with that statement is, of course, its reference to the present. Beyond semantics, and the obvious reason that they are no longer with us, there are very real and important reasons why we should speak of Biko and Hani in past tense. We ought to do so for two reasons: one is historical and the other is, well, philosophical. As with most thinkers of the past, they did write and say the things they did in the past. The other, perhaps more important point is that we need to leave room for the possibility that between the time when they expressed their ideas and today, they may have changed their own ideas. We have to assume that perhaps the thinker (Hani or Biko) may have revised their own thoughts as historical conditions changed.

If, indeed, we ascribe great wisdom and insight to our past heroes, we have to believe that their own ideas may have changed, or that the historical and social relevance of their ideas may be wanting. To be sure, very many of Biko’s peers joined the ANC, it would not be sacrilege to consider that he may well have done so, too. Hani died before the negotiated settlement was reached in the mid-1990s. Who knows whether he would have been part of the so-called Class of 1997, or of the Class of 2014, or maybe he would have joined his old comrade, Ronnie Kasrils, who rallied against the ANC in the last general election. We cannot be sure. This does not prevent us from holding on to highly idealised, and sanitised beliefs about Hani and Biko.

None of what I have written should be taken as a denial of Biko and Hani’s intellect and what they stood for. I simply believe that we are doing them a disservice if we think that they may not have changed their ideas or positions over a 20 or 30-year period. In this respect, it is worth bearing in mind the passage by Friedrich Engels in the Anti-Dühring: “[H]ow young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views…” In other words: Dudes, things change.

I lack any deep insight into neurological and psychiatric concepts of confabulatory amnesia. My understanding of the process of confabulation is, therefore weak. It is, essentially, a clinical condition resulting from brain damage, and it does not always involve intentional lying. Let me, nonetheless, deploy the concept here more literally, (with apologies to the psychiatry and neurology fraternities) as the willful fabrication of events to make up for losses in memory, or to conceal shortcomings. I do remember one strand of confabulatory accounts that has to do with the covering of deficits in memory with implausible content. Anyway, having said all of the above, my understanding is that we tend to tell porkies in order to save face, to explain gaps in one’s recollection of the past, and, I want to suggest, to help us cope with our own decline…

For example, in some ways the ruling party’s insistence that it is “the party of Nelson Mandela”, that it has “good stories to tell” can be explained by some form of confabulation, and by sanitised conceptions of themselves. In the first instance, there is certainly an argument to be made that the ANC has left behind the beliefs and values of Mandela. That it is no longer the party of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. This is not outlandish when one considers that today’s Republican Party in the United States would probably be a very uncomfortable place for Abraham Lincoln, who was, arguably, probably one of the more likeable members of his party. The ANC would insist, nonetheless, that they are the party of Mandela. In some way that is an historical fact. However, parties can change. People change. People change parties.

In the second instance, we tell good stories about ourselves because there may be overwhelming evidence that things are, well, not going well. Like a once handsome young cleva, whose bounce and shine has been replaced by a pate, arthritic joints, a face pock-marked by ageing spots, suffering from incontinence and has to wear an adult diaper, the ANC seems to be longing for the time when it was virile and the main man in the good books of all good people. The ANC cannot seem to reconcile the memories of its own grand past with the abundant reality of its own decline and everything that has gone wrong under its watch.

A child stabbed to death during a car robbery, an octogenarian raped and murdered, a generation of people who have never had running water, flushing toilets, or electricity, and who believe that misery, poverty and squalor is normal and their destiny, are the bad news bearers of ANC’s time in office. Like the handsome young Casanova who cannot control his bladder or rectal sphincter, and who is unable to deal with his flaccid self, and whose rancid breath and gnarled joints are out of sync with its self-image of virility and mass appeal, the ANC tells only good stories. They indulge, then, in socio-emotional selectivity to deal with their decreasing appeal. Their response is an unconvincing suggestion that society will auto-correct, and the country will return to equilibrium of ANC hegemony. Next year’s local elections, may well be the first of several disruptions that started at Fort Hare University, where the memory of the glorious ANC has been replaced by the life world of poverty, inequality, breakdown, misery amid crude accumulation. DM

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