I didn’t stay up last Thursday night to watch Joe Biden debate Donald Trump, which aired sometime after 2am South African time. I love myself far too much to do that. All the same, I’ve been hearing and thinking about it a lot in the days after.
And to all the South Africans who have asked me, with bemused expressions, whether Donald Trump has a shot in 2024 – you’d better strap in, because one of the greatest political comebacks of the 21st century seems nearly inevitable at this point.
It’s been a strange contrast, contemplating America’s march towards MAGA-dadigheid with the mood in South Africa, which remains difficult to parse. Yes, Jacob Zuma and his MK party have been pulling tricks right out of the 6 January playbook, with their insistence that the elections were rigged and their pale evocations of the armed Struggle. But because of South Africa’s multiparty system, outside of KwaZulu-Natal these antics are unlikely to pose a serious threat, at least in the short term.
Obviously political nerds like me were impatient to hear the announcement of the Cabinet, but the sense I get among most people I’ve talked to is cautious optimism. None of this has happened before, and in the absence of an actual Cabinet no one has had anything to be seriously angry about yet. The vibe is calm and even hopeful – certainly compared with the rhetoric coming out of the US, which has stayed more or less at DEFCON 1 since Barack Obama’s second term.
The past 15 years have been particularly psychologically damaging to my tribe, as someone who grew up in the liberal, privileged and cosmopolitan suburbs of Washington DC. A little like Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994, in 2008 American Democrats came to believe that by electing a black president, America had inaugurated a new dispensation.
Highly educated and cosmopolitan people like ourselves were finally able to rule with a free hand. American liberals had visions of bullet trains, carbon taxes and universal healthcare dancing in their heads – even as they maintained a strong insistence on America’s duty to police the world through military interventions like Obama’s ill-fated adventures in Libya and Syria.
It wouldn’t take long for someone growing up outside that echo chamber to see that this fantasy was fundamentally deluded. Mandela alone was never going to solve racism or inequality in South Africa, and neither was Obama single-handedly going to turn America into Sweden.
The right wing had its vengeance in 2010, and then in 2016, and each time came back more crude and vulgar than before. And now America is saddled with its bleakest choice of presidential candidates yet: a crass, flamboyant cheerleader for genocide on the one hand, and a decrepit, dithering accomplice to genocide on the other.
I think what South Africans might not immediately understand about this is how personal it all is. In the context of social media and weakening social ties, one of the worst things about living through the past 15 years as an American is the extent to which politics has become a totalising identity, threatening the social fabric at the grassroots as well as the top.
The fact is, your partisan identity in the US is increasingly analogous to your racial identity in South Africa. It determines not only the way you vote, but the career path you pursue, the businesses you patronise, the people you date and the place you live.
Indeed, for a lot of people I know, it’s important to consult the voting history of a neighbourhood before deciding to move there, even if you don’t intend socialising in that neighbourhood – or at all – in person.
Inevitably, this rejection of the legitimacy of alternative political identities has resulted in a broader rejection of free speech principles. We see this most recently in legislative crackdowns on pro-Palestine speech in Congress, where efforts have been afoot not only to ban criticism of Israel, but also to ban the government from citing Gaza Health Ministry statistics on the death toll in the ongoing war – statistics that many commentators already believe are a serious undercount.
At the institution where I taught during the last academic year, students started an encampment to protest against the awarding of an honorary degree to this year’s graduation speaker, a TV and radio pundit with impeccable anti-Trump credentials, but a history of appalling Islamophobic statements.
The students were lucky in the sense that the administration tolerated their protest and eventually acceded to their demands (it helped that a solid majority of the faculty, who had the ability to rescind the degree by majority vote, stood in solidarity with the encampment).
But what about the students at Columbia University, the University of California-Los Angeles, and elsewhere, who faced unprecedented brutality and retaliation in the pursuit of similar goals?
Read more in Daily Maverick: The Biden/Trump Debate 2024 – A battle between two political dinosaurs
Most importantly, what happens when people take to the streets to protest for abortion rights, racial justice or the rights of LGBT people in the context of a second Trump administration? Surely the hammer will come down even harder on them, given what the Biden administration has tolerated.
But enough about my problems. The idea for this essay actually started as a reflection on the 50th National Arts Festival (NAF) in Makhanda last week.
I was present at the last, pre-pandemic NAF in 2019, and unlike a lot of people, I went to both the 2022 and 2023 editions. I enjoyed myself immensely at both, but as I wrote elsewhere back then, I encountered a lot of jittery energy. The crowds were small and the programming was sparse.
In 2022, the organisers weren’t prepared at all for the intensification of load shedding, and more than a few comedians I knew had to perform in the dark by the light of people’s phones.
On cold, rainy Makhanda days at the Red Café or the Pothole and Donkey, you heard a lot of conversations about decline. Would there even be a festival next year? Would it move to Cape Town? The water situation and the potholes were making things untenable. Just like everything else in South Africa, the inevitability of decline was never too far from people’s minds.
This year the mood was palpably different. The 50th anniversary programme was modest – I heard someone describe it as “thin” – but the shows I saw packed a massive punch regardless.
I have never been knocked on my backside so quickly at NAF as I was when I saw Andi Colombo’s 32 Lavender Close the night I arrived – a hilarious and searingly poignant play about two Cape Town flatmates set entirely in a bathroom.
Aldo Brincat’s “The Moon Looks Delicious From Here,” about growing up in 1970s Durban as the son of white immigrants from Egypt and Mauritius, respectively, had the same impact – the group I was part of stood staring at the ground in the lobby for about 10 minutes after it ended, quite literally unable to articulate our thoughts.
And “Text Me When You Arrive” – created and performed by Aaliyah Matintela, Sibahle Mangena and Thuli Nduvane – was one of the sharpest and most physically demanding satirical spectacles I’ve ever seen at the festival. We laughed until we cried in a packed St Andrew’s Hall as the ensemble moved one by one through more than a dozen “Rules for Not Getting Raped in South Africa”, and then afterwards we felt like we’d been collectively punched in the gut.
The through-line in all three shows was an insistence on finding transcendence in the familiar, on swerving unexpectedly – even violently – towards hope in a world of quiet misery and thwarted expectations.
And such is the mood – at least my take on the mood – in South Africa. Nothing has actually tangibly improved yet. South Africa’s bond rating is still at junk status and load shedding could return at any time. In Makhanda the roads are still crumbling and the water remains undrinkable as ever.
But for the first time since the pandemic, this year people weren’t fretting about the future of the festival itself, but rather on what they saw and liked or didn’t like.
It’s a moment of unexpected serenity and optimism – one that might not feel entirely earned.
As an American, all I can say is, enjoy it while it lasts. I’d give anything for a chance to catch my breath. DM
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