enthusiastic embrace between President Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), in Lesotho?
A key to answering this question lies in the “what can be read”… The verb ‘can’ is important because it leaves room for interpretation or analyses that are influenced by real-world conditions, states of affairs or more transcendental social and historical “shifts” that are present or under way, regardless of whether the images were made.
One of my favourite photographs of the last century is of Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of Germany (1969-1974), on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto monument in 1970. On the face of it, the photograph is simply a picture of a man on his knees. Once placed in social and historical contexts, the significance of the photograph takes on greater meaning.
Brandt’s kniefall was a powerful and poignant gesture of reconciliation by a German political leader, given the brutality of that country’s slaughter of millions of Jews during World War 2.
Commenting on the photograph more than two decades later, the Dutch writer Cees No0teboom said of Brandt’s knee fall: “It was obvious that every part of this body felt something that wanted to be expressed — about guilt, penance and an infinite pain.”
Guilt, penance and “an infinite pain” are not readily captured in a photograph. Without a good caption, or an understanding of the (transcendental and a priori) social and historical forces under way, the picture of Brandt on his knees may be quite meaningless. It is just as well that good journalism (unconstrained by political pressure) and a society that was generally attuned to the forces at work, made sure that the photograph was appropriately situated. It really depends on power relations — and especially on who presents or publishes the images.
Consider the scene captured in a photograph made in the Azores on the eve of the United States’ 2003 war against the Iraqi people. In the photograph, US President George W Bush, Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durão Barroso, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar held a press conference. Stripped of its historical contexts, from the moment the image is captured, to the editorial process, publication and reception (by the reader) is presented simply as an event, a precursor to a war that is presented as just.
By situating the picture in long-run contexts, and viewing more Critically (yes, with a capitalised “C” because, you know, Critical race theory…), you might reach the conclusion, as I did, that the image was of European leaders, in front of their national flags, who had a long history of war against Europe’s others and “people without a history” who were to be disciplined and punished.
Defanging Malema
What, then, can be read into the images of Ramaphosa and Malema’s embrace? First, we have to acknowledge the suggestion, the tradition (though not universally practised), that once abroad national politicians necessarily present a unified face.
That would be nice, if say, Malema or Ramaphosa would be similarly exuberant if or when they met any other South African politicians abroad.
Second, the embrace may simply have been one of “brothers” who once were comrades in the ANC. Part of this explanation would ride on the horse that we should not tell brothers how to behave. Which is fine, I guess.
Third, Ramaphosa faces a real challenge from more radical anti-democratic forces in his political party in next month’s electoral conference. He may simply be positioning himself for votes.
A fourth reading is startling and revelatory. It suggests a thawing of relations between the EFF and the ANC, and the ongoing defanging of Malema. The EFF leader is romanticised, valorised, and there seems to be an acceptance that any future political order necessarily goes through Malema.
There is also a general sense that Malema is untouchable. His blood-curdling cries, rhetoric laced with references to blood, killing, genocide and violence, rapine and revenge, are ignored. His non-violent rhetoric is infused with violence.
Malema has taken to the extreme Max Weber’s assertion that once you identify racial others, “you can prove or disprove anything you want”. Just call someone white or non-African, then wilfully attach an imaginary or actual crime to them, and you can do as you wish.
For instance, slap someone, or choke a journalist, just because you feel the urge and you can get away with it by calling the person racist.
As for Malema, for as long as the media, the public and the state-ANC nexus consider him as non-threatening, nothing will happen to him. When he asked his followers to be prepared for violence, he echoed Benito Mussolini’s expression that fascist violence was “heroism … [and] this is the violence of which I approve and which I exalt”.
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Independent news platforms, not to be mistaken with the Independent Group, have a duty to be more vigilant in the face of creeping authoritarianism. There cannot be a both-sides-need-to-be-heard approach; this would be like treating the slave and the slave owner the same; it would be like drawing a moral equivalence between killers and their victims.
The fact is that no dictator, authoritarian or despot campaigns on the basis of their actual intent. It is concealed in their rhetoric and the way they position themselves.
We can learn a lot from the way the most powerful media houses in the West generally treated Mussolini. The New York Times referred to Mussolini as the “hope of youth” as “Italy’s man of tomorrow” and “a leader without political precedent”. The US media, though in fairness not all journalists, downplayed Nazi violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens, and dismissed it as propaganda. We have any number of EFF apologists attacking independent and intellectually honest journalism as some kind of conspiratorial plot.
Journalists want to secure and protect access to politicians so they may “get the story”. Journalists in the US took this to the extreme. When, in the early 1930s, a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it out of fear of losing access to Hitler.
Similarly, when in 1933, the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum”, the Germans put pressure on the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who much later headed the Central Intelligence Agency, accused Mowrer of taking the Nazis too seriously.
Writing in National Geographic magazine in 1937, Douglas Chandler produced a loving paean to “Changing Berlin”. Another journalist, Dorothy Thompson, considered Adolf Hitler to be someone of “startling insignificance” in 1928. She would regret not taking the dictator seriously by 1935, when it was a bit late in the surge of Nazi power.
The veteran journalist Helen Thomas recorded Thompson’s regrets in the book Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public: “No people ever recognise their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of the Incorporated National Will.”
Extrapolating this to the United States, Thompson said: “When Americans think of dictators, they always think of some foreign model … when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
Thompson goes on to say “… you can bet that our dictators … will be a great democrat, through whose leadership alone democracy can be realised … [he will be greeted] with one great big, universal, democratic sheep-like bleat of ‘OK, Chief. Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh, kaaaay’.”
Herein lies the rub. Defanging and romanticising Malema, and embracing him as a brother, a fellow South African — notwithstanding the violence embedded in his rhetoric of non-violence — conceals a potentially violent and destructive danger to South Africa.
It is unfortunate that more and more political leaders within and outside the ANC are adopting positions that are congruent with those of Malema and the EFF. The best-developed example of these new political plays are the manoeuvres of the Radical Economic Transformation group — which has its base in the governing party with tentacles across society.
The fact that Ramaphosa so enthusiastically embraced Malema, and that there was no critical scrutiny of the images and the messages that they projected, is a greater lesson in history than is the axiom that we have learnt nothing from history.
It is not difficult to conclude that a future political order, political economy and polity will go through Malema. Given the disconnect between the ruling elite and the populace (this is what you get in a minimalist democracy), the media have a role to play in bringing to attention the dangers that lie in waiting in the embrace between Ramaphosa and Malema. DM