If you want to understand the character of a person, listen to their music; but if you want to understand the depth of their mind, visit their library.

A personal library mirrors the kind of literature that interests them. Thus, it can give a glimpse into the ideas that have shaped or influenced a person’s mind. 

However, personal libraries can also be deceiving. We know of people who buy books to decorate their homes, to show off to their friends, but not to read them. Such people yearn for the prestige that is associated with books. Yet, they are lazy.

The truth is that reading and gregariousness do not mix. Reading requires self-discipline and love of solitude.

Meanwhile, real politics is and ought to be a contest of ideas to shape society. Hence, it should be expected of politicians to write books and articles to share their ideas and propose alternatives to the status quo.

In developed societies, especially in Western and Eastern societies, politicians publish their books to share their ideas even before they contest power. It is from his or her books that society can decipher the ideas of and understand what a politician stands for.  

However, in South Africa, we have neither a culture of reading nor a contest of ideas as an integral part of our political system. More than anything, ours is a cult of personalities.

Meanwhile, the evolution of South Africa has seen four different forms or eras of governments — colonial, Union, apartheid and democratic government. In these eras, there have been influential characters that epitomise those epochs.

In the colonial government, it was Cecil John Rhodes, while in the Union government it was Jan Smuts. While Hendrik Verwoerd epitomised apartheid, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki are, by far, the key figures that shaped our democratic dispensation.

Similarly, the future of our politics, whether it would be a break from or a continuation with liberation politics, seems certain to be shaped by three characters, namely John Steenhuisen, Julius Malema and Herman Mashaba.

Let us start from the beginning to examine the books that shaped the minds of the politicians of our epochs.

Colonialist Cecil John Rhodes was goaded into politics by his desire to exert influence for the construction of rail and road to transport minerals from the mines to the harbours. But he realised that for him to gain access into the British aristocracy, which would be crucial in endorsing his political ambition, he needed to have a qualification from a prestigious institution. Thus, he set foot to Oxford University. There, he met his intellectual godfather, John Ruskin and read Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man.

But the book that had much influence on his empire-building ambition was, according to Sarah Gertrude Millin, his biographer, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, Rhodes saw England as a successor to the Roman Empire.

Rhodes was not allergic to books. He had a collection of over a thousand books including  “250 volumes of history, 130 volumes of biographies, 175 volumes on Africa, 130 books classified under classics, 80 under social science, 70 under travel, 60 under Federation and Constitutional Government and 50 under Geography and 25 novels.” The list goes on. But the library was, as Millin puts it, “not of a reader, but a conscious empire maker”.

The next phase of the evolution of SA was the formation of the Union government in 1910, of which Jan Christian Smuts was a key player. Smuts is perhaps the greatest intellectual South Africa has ever produced. His book Holism and Evolution accorded him an acknowledgement as the “intellectual father” of holism philosophy, whose central thesis is “that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

In his Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, Richard Steyn explains that in his saddlebag Smuts kept, among others, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason during the Anglo-Boer War and would “withdraw to his tent at night to read”.  Smuts’ book, Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of the Personality also gives an idea of the books that influenced him.

A visit to the Smuts museum in Irene, Pretoria, introduces you to a personal library with more than 2,000 books on war, peace, philosophy, religion etc, all of which he had read.

Read A Century of Wrong and you will appreciate the depth of Smuts’s reflective mind. Published on the eve of the Anglo-Boer War, A Century of Wrong is a forceful manifesto of the Afrikaners at the level of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

Smuts’s intellectual genius was respected worldwide and he was bestowed with the honour of crafting the preamble of the United Nations Charter. But Mandela would later say of Smuts’ hypocrisy, “I cared more that he helped the foundation of the League of Nations, promoting freedom throughout the world, than the fact that he had repressed freedom at home.” However, we take solace from Smuts’s letter to Alfred Milner,  because, after all, “history writes the word reconciliation over all her quarrels.”

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The epitome of apartheid, Henrik Verwoerd, was a highly educated man, with a doctorate in psychology and was awarded a post-doc scholarship in Germany. From the speeches he delivered, it becomes clear that his belief in apartheid social engineering was anchored in his background in psychology.

However, it is not far-fetched to suggest that he was a secret admirer of Francis Galton’s eugenics — a theory that became popular in Nazi Germany and was used to advocate racial hygiene or racial purity — the non-mixture of the “superior” and “low” racial groups. It is from eugenics that white supremacist drew their inspiration.

The next era of our country’s evolution was the 1994 democratic breakthrough, with Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki at the helm. Where exactly did Nelson Mandela get the inspiration — even in the face of death at the Rivonia trial — to stand firm and pronounce that he was “prepared to die”? Fidel Castro’s, “History will absolve me” speech and literature that extolled man to have an “article of faith” inspired him.

While on Robben Island, Mandela read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and put his signature along the much-quoted passage: “Cowards die many times before their death; The valiant never taste of death but once.” This is where he got his inspiration to carry on with the Struggle.

However, it is from his magnum opus, Long Walk to Freedom, that we get the privilege to take a mental walk with him, appreciate the difficult road he traversed and interact with his ideas.

Thabo Mbeki was a member of the South African Communist Party when it was still an intellectual centre of the left. But having read Marx’s Das Kapital more than once, Mbeki outgrew Marxist dogma and left the party. Mbeki imbibed literature outside his political ideology and this enabled him to be a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.

However, from Mbeki’s writings, it is clear that he is erudite. Most of Mbeki’s writings are punctuated by a quote from a poet, a philosopher or literary scholar, giving us a snapshot of the ideas that tickled his mind. From William B Yeats, David Hume, William Shakespeare to Pixley Seme etc, the South African audience was left with no doubt about Mbeki’s penchant for books.

But the old man owes South African readers a volume of his own philosophy and ideas. Those close to him suggest he may wish to publish his book posthumously because his hubris won’t stomach criticism while he is still alive.

Then enter contemporary politicians, and — do they read? They, too, must be judged by the books they have written, and the ideas they have propounded.

Of the three politicians — John Steenhuisen, Julius Malema and Herman Mashaba — we have mentioned earlier, only the ActionSA’s leader has bequeathed us with two books from which we can discern his mind. Mashaba’s Capitalist Crusader gives glimpses of a staunch capitalist.

Meanwhile, he derived the name of his hair products business from John Howard Griffin’s book titled Black Like Me — an account of race relations in America. Indeed, black consciousness was at its peak when Mashaba started his business in the 1980s and like a true businessman, he rode the wave of the moment.

Mashaba’s autobiography, Black Like You, is both a story of the triumph of tenacity over adversity and of someone who harbours a deep-seated black consciousness streak. However, one thing you will not miss from his two books is that Mashaba is a devoted and unashamed capitalist. While he, albeit seldom, shares what he is reading on social media platforms, it would leave a better impression if the intervals were shorter.

The leader of the EFF, Julius Malema, speaks more than he writes. If he is not haranguing the public with ANC gossip at his media briefings, Malema would rather be “howling gigantic curses” to everyone he disagrees with than reading a book. You have almost zero chance of meeting him at a book store rather than at Mekete shebeen in Polokwane or a pub in Vilakazi Street in Soweto.

Yet, it is from his speeches that we get an opportunity to engage with his ideas. While it is possible to find a sentence from Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral or Vladimir Lenin in some of Malema’s speeches, credit should go to his friend, Floyd Shivambu, who has taken the responsibility to give the EFF’s socialist-nationalistic rhetoric some intellectual flair.

The real Malema is not a man of the book; he is a gregarious individual who fancies a cult for himself. In 2019, South Africans were treated to a spectacle when EFF supporters knelt before Malema singing hymns and praises of him in a manner reminiscent of the cult of Adolf Hitler.

In the EFF, everyone must agree with the Commander-in-Chief or be pushed to the periphery. Ask Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Godrich Gardee or Musa Novela in the Joburg Council. Yet, it is the cult of personality combined with the violent rhetoric of Malema that is reminiscent of fascism that makes us wonder how much of Hitler’s Mein Kampf did the CIC consume?  

Meanwhile, there is no evidence to suggest that John Steenhuisen, the DA Leader, reads. Neither does he pretend to be an intellectual. His lack of a post-matric qualification may be his Achilles heel. Yet he remains one of the most eloquent and entertaining speakers in Parliament.

However, which ideas exactly influence his politics remains a guess; for other than a phrase or two from some of Helen Suzman’s famous statements, he hardly quotes from a book. While we may not know what he stands for, we know that the goddess of the DA — Helen Zille — is a proponent of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. And of course, the son must speak his mother’s tongue.

The question that we must ponder is what ideas will shape the future of South Africa? Put differently, in which society would you as a citizen like to live: Mashaba’s capitalism, Malema’s socialism, Steenhuisen’s open society or a combination of all of them? You decide. DM