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Opinionista

ANC: The Aesop of fibbing, the Shahrzad of storytelling

Siya Khumalo writes about religion, politics and sex. He is the author of ‘You Have To Be Gay To Know God’ (Kwela Books, 2018), which won the Desmond Tutu-Gerrit Brand Literary Prize. Follow him on @SKhumalo1987 (Insta and Twitter), or like his Facebook page With Siya Khumalo.

If we take off the rose-tinted glasses and see this Animal Farm for what it is, we’ll see that the only ideology many of the ANC’s members have consistently upheld post ‘94 is bourgeois self-enrichment.

Legend has it that after discovering she was cheating on him, Persian king Shahryar had his wife executed and replaced with a virgin. The new wife would also be executed the following morning and replaced at dusk. The replacement’s replacement would be executed the morning following to be replaced at night. Having been cuckolded once, Shahryar became the proactive poster-boy for prevention over cure.

This continued until he married Shahrzad. She had a good story to tell on their wedding night. At dawn, it was stopped at its cliffhanger. It was execution time. Curious about how the tale would end, the Sultan agreed to spare her long enough to finish her story that night.

When the story came to an end, she wasn’t executed; she began telling a second tale. It was even more captivating than the first. It also continued into the next night and was followed by another. Queen Shahrzad told each of these stories as though her life depended on it. Because it did.

One night of sounding unoriginal (or no more compelling than the previous night) could be her last.

In 1994, the ANC led the first democratically-elected post-apartheid South African government. But in another version of that story, it left apartheid’s legacy of state-sanctioned economic inequality among race groups largely intact. Many members of the ruling party have personally benefited from this compromise. Yet every election year, vast numbers of my people — black people — vote the ANC in, and it (in effect) maintains structural racism.

And when white racist individuals have said one too many racist things, the same ANC has its supporters march against the racism it agreed to prop up and benefit from.

The ANC are experts at saying one thing while selling something else: this was on the surface a rally pillorying Sparrowist utterances and other forms of racist discourse. But it was effectively the launch of the governing party’s municipal election campaign,” observed Richard Poplak after the demonstration against racism/municipal election campaign. “They capture power by activating their base, by owning the streets.”

The ANC does not just have a good story to tell; it is a story about telling stories in order to stay in power and stay alive. Still, #FeesMustFall proved that 2016 is 1976 all over again. The system that students rose against 40 years ago is basically intact today, by voter consent, to the ruling elite’s benefit.

In the face of this, the ANC tells stories that deny that its victory against legislative apartheid was at the expense of financial and material liberation, though many of its members were financially and materially liberated. On top of that, it has the audacity to tell us that it’s other parties that would bring back apartheid when it is that the ANC keeps some of apartheid’s ghosts alive.

I’ve said before that by the measure of any political school of thought — radical Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, (Neo)liberalism — the ANC has disappointed black people. It gets to impute to their opponents the apartheid tendencies they’re also guilty of, and it can deny that it does this because most of its membership is black.

If we take off the rose-tinted glasses and see this Animal Farm for what it is, we’ll see that the only ideology many of its members have consistently upheld post ‘94 is bourgeois self-enrichment.

And corruption? If the looting and the patronage stopped, so would its members’ culture of shielding one another. Those who loot have no choice but to squeeze the nation, and their decent colleagues can’t stop them unless the voters do. As the naysayers keep naysaying, “Inequality is here to stay.” With that will remain the structural and social racism the ANC holds marches against. So now that it’s election season, I ask fellow black people: Why? For what?

In the Treasury’s bending back-over-backwards to reassure investors and credit rating agencies, we see that where the people could not have an accountable, honest and just government, “the markets” got (and have always got) preferential treatment. All the ANC has left for voters is one story after another, mostly about “the other” and how that other is the sole cause of their suffering. For if “they” can say such racist things about the ruling party on social media and even on mainstream media, who’s to say they wouldn’t bring back apartheid if the ANC didn’t stand in the gap to absorb their vitriol?

There is so much white denialism about structural racism and white privilege that to malign the ANC’s reasons for protesting against racism is tantamount to denying the pervasiveness and realness of the issue.

White wokeness won’t cure black people’s addiction to the ANC, but dammit it would help.

For make no mistake: the ANC is the Aesop of fabling and fibbing; the Shahrzad of storytelling.

It can brainwash whole crowds into agreeing that the sky is clear when they’re standing in a monsoon. It bold-facedly promises to deal with corrupt government officials while its leaders play judicial peek-a-boo with courts and the NPA. It stays alive night after night, notwithstanding night time announcement after night time announcement, telling stories of impending deliverance from the status quo it perpetuates and benefits from, and shall continue delivering us from all the Days of Our Lives until Jesus Returns.

The chances of it reforming itself in time to avoid calamity are pretty slim. If we don’t sharpen a narrative on the ground that convincingly contests the ANC’s, its story could end our collective story.

You can only convince Peter Pan to imagine his food for so long before he grows up and realises he’s still hungry. We’re on a knife-edge. If the ANC doesn’t destroy this country, denialism over white privilege will. One of these will be that other famous queen who told starving citizens to eat cake.

In that second, she told a terrible story and met the fate Queen Shahrzad avoided over 1,000 nights of storytelling. DM

Siya Khumalo writes about religion, politics and sex. He is currently working on a book. Follow on @SKhumalo1987

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