What is EAP?
No, it’s got nothing to do with employee wellness or so-called “employee assistance programmes”.
It’s a new field which I believe should be studied and understood, perhaps as a branch of social psychology.
I used to call it “the post-revolutionary blues”.
Over time, I have come to realise that this is more than just a trivial case of the blues. It is much more serious than that.
Perhaps I should backtrack a bit first and start at the beginning.
In the mid-90s, I was a firm believer in the potential of excellence in South Africa. I believed that, as a nation, black and white together, we had enough talent and courage to make this country work as a democracy in which everyone had equal access to opportunities. I still believe that. I see examples of South African excellence all around me every day.
For some reason, the one place where I don’t see it, the one place where I simply can’t find it no matter how hard I look for it, is in the ranks of the present-day ruling party.
The ANC seems to be an organisation utterly devoid of excellence. Most of them, if not all, are incompetent, lazy, dishonest and ineffectual.
If anyone had told me then what a mess this country would be in a quarter of a century later, I would not have believed it.
Back to the concept of EAP.
In order to explain it properly, I have to relate an incident that happened to me shortly after the first democratic elections, when, by pure chance, I met two ex-Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters in a bar in Johannesburg. We started talking.
I was very pleased when they told me, “We read about what you guys did in the papers. We know about the Voëlvry Tour. It was a great job you did, you and Dirk Uys and Johannes Kerkorrel.”
I wanted to befriend these guys, to find out more about their experiences in the Struggle. I was curious to find out what motivated them, and how they ended up taking such a brave stand way back then. So I wrote down their addresses.
During the next week, I visited the first one. He lived in a not-too-shabby outside room in Troyeville. When I arrived there, however, I was quite taken aback by what I saw.
As I walked in, I immediately realised that I was suddenly in the middle of a domestic dispute. This Struggle veteran was embroiled in a very nasty battle of words with what was obviously his girlfriend. I was shocked at the angry and disrespectful way he treated her. I was also taken aback by the state of his little apartment; dirt lying around everywhere, unwashed dishes, et cetera. The place was a mess.
His life was a mess.
In one second, this person went from hero to zero in my eyes. I removed myself from his life and never visited him again.
Years later, when my own life started falling apart in much the same way that his life had fallen apart, I still did not have any insight into what was happening to me.
I know now that this man, like many others, and also like me, was a helpless victim of what I call EAP.
Ex-Activist Psychosis.
Ex-Activist Psychosis is what happens to many people who, at some point in their lives, suddenly wake up to realise: “I have spent all my life up till now fighting for a cause. I sacrificed everything for this cause. I have never had the opportunity of leading a normal life.”
What happens next is nothing short of terrifying.
That’s when you start playing catch-up.
Victims of EAP all have certain traits in common. Though these traits are recognised by everyone around them as severe personality disorders, they themselves do not see it that way.
They have an acute sense of entitlement. They are crippled by feelings of revenge and hatred. In most cases, they hate people who are closest to them: friends, lovers, relatives, even ex-comrades.
It is as if once the enemy they had fought against is no longer there, they have to find another target for their aggression.
It happens in almost every revolutionary organisation. It happens to every group of people who set out to change society in a radical way. It happened to the ANC. It happened, on a smaller scale, to almost all of us who were members of the Vo֝ëlvry Tour. Fuck, come to think of it, the same thing happened to The Beatles!
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We all ended up hating one another, many of us became junkies, and I, for one, ended up treating women and groupies in a shameful way. We were grasping, desperate and traumatised. We wanted to have all the things we never had before, and we wanted to have them at once. It was payback time.
But instead of getting payback, we ended up sabotaging ourselves and everyone around us in an orgy of unfocused rage.
That, in a nutshell, is what happened to the comrades of the Struggle. I can see it so clearly now. They have an even worse case of EAP because they suffered infinitely more than we did. And for longer periods. They were imprisoned, they were tortured, and they lost loved ones in the Struggle.
Yet, the moment everything was over, the moment we held our first democratic elections, we expected them to deliver the goods. We looked up to them as the new leaders. We expected them to be examples of responsible leadership and political skill.
The problem is, they never had time to recover. There was no breathing space. No time for the scars to heal. They went straight from the war zone of the Struggle to the soft chairs of political power. The one moment they were surrounded by guns and death and pain, the next moment they were severely tempted by opulence.
They never stood a chance.
This is why I call it EAP.
It’s time we studied this syndrome. It’s time we understood it.
I’m not sure if at this time a general amnesty would be a good thing. Perhaps, in the light of what we are now beginning to understand, it might be seen as an option at some time in the future.
As for me, well, I was lucky. And some of my friends were lucky. Many of us are now reaching out to one another to make peace, to heal old rifts. Not all of us were so lucky. There have been suicides, tragic deaths, and overdoses along the way.
People who had not been in an intense struggle cannot understand the damage something like EAP can cause.
I myself feel as if I am waking up from a deep sleep, a sleep filled with nightmares, a tormented period in which my entire existence was a battle against brutal memories, against this ghastly past. It took me years and years to resolve the anarchy of my youth.
And hell, I was only a protest musician. I wasn’t in the real war. I never went to the border. And I wasn’t in jail. Well, not for very long.
I don’t like the ANC. I don’t like what they are doing to the country right now.
But at last, I think, I am starting to come to grips with their motivations, the root causes of many of their actions.
It’s EAP. It’s all EAP.
It will take lots of time to heal.
Problem is, we don’t have much time.
I have stated what I believe is the problem.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what the solution to this problem will entail.
Yet I think that understanding it, or at least accepting the reality of EAP, could be a very valuable first step. DM
Maybe you are right, and there is such a thing as EAP and some of the people fighting apartheid are impacted by it . Maybe however, and I think this is much more likely, many in the ANC are just bad people. The fact that even when the country is lying on the ground almost dying they still defend the indefensible just to remain on the gravy train pretty much proves that. We do not need to know the intense struggle of the past to understand that many of these people are thugs, thieves and murderers with zero interest in this country. People are dying because of these criminals. Everytime a kid falls in a pit latrine and drowns because the money for toilets has been eaten by a tenderpreneur, everytime a life saving medicine is no longer in-stock due to ineptitude and corruption, the fault can squarely be laid at ANCs feet. When the power fails yet again and another business goes under and the jobs with it, while crime spikes and the police has basically stopped functioning in some areas, its not apartheid that caused this, it was ANC cadres and 25 years of greed; the list goes on near infinitely it seems and is growing daily. No matter what they did in the past, this behavior should not be condoned or excused in any way. “General amnesty” for what , for whom and for how long?
I have to wonder if you actually read this article. Perhaps you could try again? Because you completely missed the point.
I agree with you Sue. Point missed. And I agree with Koos. This concept needs some study.
Why don’t you enlighten me. What I did see is another attempt at excusing certain behaviour.
Ja, Koos: sounds like it should be a song.
“I got them old ex-activist psychosis blues, mama….”
I was remembering how much at the time I enjoyed the Special AKA song, Free Nelson Mandela, 21 years in captivity. Now I’m just thinking I’ve been held captive by the ANC for the last 28 years!
28 years is a political wet dream and it is truly lamentable what we’ve received in return, for what I imagine, were most readers initial support.
Great analysis. I agree with all of it EXCEPT the phrase “women and groupies”. Are groupies lesser? Are they not entitled to also be called women? If the author means male and female, clarification is needed. If not, the comment should simply refer to “women”. This is not a small niggle. It’s important.
Thank you for sharing your experience Joe, much appreciated.
As a person who has been part of the struggle for more than half of my life I have been battling people who associate criminality, theft of public resources, arrogance and poor service delivery with the concept of the revolution. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about raiding the public purse for personal benefit and seeking gratification that is pure criminality. I have also rejected the notion of association of the revolution with violence and totalitarianism. These are misplaced views that one rejects with the contempt they deserve. A revolution means a change in the way we view the world and the future. It questions the existing practices and beliefs. It has nothing to do with the culture of entitlement but everything to do with the involvement of people in the actual transformation of their lives and the creation of a better society. It has to do with servant leadership not self – serving leadership. The discourse of seeking to find solutions to issues affecting the poor, unemployed and inequality is part of a revolution as we redefine spaces and create a new vision.
Indeed.
Wonderful, courageous piece. Thank you! I have witnessed first hand much of what you write about.
“I have no idea what the solution to the problem will entail ..” is not absolutely correct. Madiba had no illusions about it … when he said unapologetically and unambiguously … ‘if the ANC does to you what the apartheid regime did, you must do to it what you did to the apartheid regime’ . What he did not explain, is that what might replace it, could be as bad or even worse ! He had no problems in understanding the problem.