I have just read R.W. Johnson’s latest piece on The rise and decline of ANC hegemony and although I am broadly in agreement, I cannot help but think that he underplays the role of the English in engineering the whole South African revolution. Admittedly, he says that SA has been subject to three “nationalisms”, the first being English jingoism, followed by Afrikaner nationalism, in itself succeeded by the ANC’s black nationalism.
But seeing South African history as a succession of nationalisms obscures the real nature of the struggle for dominance or hegemony in this part of the world. Anyone with a remote understanding of the role played by the Anglican Church, the British Labour Party and, last but not least, the local English media and universities in creating, sustaining and glorifying the ANC prior to 1989, surely must understand that the ANC was not just a Soviet-style monster risen from the dead at precisely the moment when the Soviet Union itself was collapsing.
This is largely what I argued in my book, “The Scourge of the ANC”. But I did not go deeply enough into the “made in England” aspect of the ANC. The truth is that the local English elite, intellectuals, clergy, journalists, even the business people, have always held that the British model is superior to the Afrikaner model in all respects. Incidentally, I find it hard to refer to the SA English population. “English-speaking South Africans” sounds too long-winded and imprecise. After all, are not the local Indians “English-speaking South Africans” too? The term used by expats in Britain, “Saffas”, sounds a lot better. It boasts the added appeal of having received the approbation of the mother country and therefore should replace the largely redundant and verbose definition previously referred to.
The way I see it, and after South Africa became a republic in 1961 - to widespread Saffa consternation - an unholy alliance between even the conservative white English population in Natal and a British-based, inchoate revolutionary movement was forged. The ANC and SACP, supported by the Soviets, was also being kept plugged into the heart-lung machine by the British left, especially the Labour Party and the Anglican Church.
During the 1970s the self-styled Saffa revolutionaries became increasingly vocal and radical. Johnson also refers to the influence of the neo-Marxist “New Left Review” on British and Saffa campuses such as Wits and UCT, but somehow accuses the SACP of having been “Stalinist” at the time and indifferent to the more fashionable Euromarxism then en vogue. I remember as a student at Wits university in the late 70’s and early 80’s what a status symbol it was to display some of the over-priced, hardcover “New Left Books” on your bookshelf. It was enough for some leftist kugel or shiksa - yes there were left-wing Saffa shiksas too, a lot of them - to drop her panties right then and there.
Whether you were a Euromarxist or a more backward Stalinist back then, you still had a lot of beliefs in common. One was the necessity - nay, the inevitability - of a South African revolution. A social transformation that would sweep Afrikaners and those lower middle-class Saffa types aligned to them - in a word, “the whites” - from power and install Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and other “good”, quasi-communist blacks educated and indoctrinated by British/Saffa leftists in the Union Buildings. Of course, this is more or less precisely what happened, and now everybody is wondering why it is turning out to be such a calamity.
Apart from the Saffa belief in revolutionary determinism, South Africa was also seen as “just another African country” that “the whites had stolen from the blacks”. I have often heard this stated on the BBC by some smart-aleck, pompous presenter. Again, many a self-styled Marxist Saffa historian was busily writing history treatises to prove exactly that, white “land theft”, making use of “oral history”. One of the few sane people on the Wits campus in the 1970s, my Latin professor M.T.W. Arnheim, used to say: “First we had oral sex, now have oral history.”
Of course, very few Saffas outside Natal and perhaps the Eastern Cape had any interest in farming or owning land without underground minerals, so if all the Marxist professors had to spread the notion that “whites had stolen land from blacks”, what the heck, it could only come back to bite the Afrikaners who were the main problem in South Africa anyway.
The Saffa and British (Euro-)Marxist theory of the seventies and eighties predicted that after the revolution South Africa would become a classless, raceless utopia. This belief or faith, to use a more precise term, was even enshrined in the constitution, that South Africa was to become “one, sovereign, democratic state founded on the following values...”, inter alia, “non-racialism and non-sexism”.
Of course, since 1994, we have experienced this “non-racial, non-sexist” utopia in all its Orwellian irony, in the form of racial laws and regulations, racial quotas (even in sport), as well as the highest incidence of rape in the world. HIV-positive rapists have been spreading “non-sexism”, I suppose.
That the curent state of South Africa corresponds exactly to the predictions of those “dumb, Nazi, reactionary, racist, patriarchal, etc. Afrikaners” who, for most of the twentieth century, argued that a simple system of one man, one vote would turn this country into just another African nightmare, is now conveniently forgotten. The fact that many of those “dumb, Nazi, reactionary, racist, patriarchal, etc. Afrikaners” had Ph.D.’s in anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, often spoke African languages, and so on, did not count because their qualifications were mostly not attained at Saffa or British universities. Which were much more chic, “clever” and neo-Marxist, as we know.
Johnson writes about the ANC’s “assault on the universities” but I would be more inclined to think that most of the damage to Saffa universities was self-inflicted. Not that the Afrikaans universities in the recent past have been any different, as they too, with South Africa anglicising rapidly, have adopted the dominant political correctness. After all, appointing someone like Jonathan Jansen as the rector of the University of the Free State is just asking for trouble.
According to RW Johnson, UKZN was “the first of the old liberal universities to be reduced to tribal college status”. He also acknowledges that “such critical intellectuals as still existed had to live beyond the confines of the campus”. In fact, without the internet, South Africa would have become the ultimate Orwellian dystopia, a neo-Marxist, “non-racial, non-sexist” society where the Afro-Saxon ruling class and their supporters were free to rape, kill and pillage to their heart’s content. Someone like me would have been handing out samizdat photocopies on street corners, risking arrest by the Thought Police.
The amazing thing that has happened over the last year or two, however, is that somewhere in the heart of Empire, in the capital of London, the whole sick experiment of “the new South Africa” has finally become such an embarassment that even the progenitors of this social Frankenstein is all but disavowing their creation. As soon as articles critical of South Africa and the Zuma ANC started appearing in Fleet Street publications and the BBC aired a few “honest” documentaries about crime and mayhem in Johannesburg, the local Saffa media, with the conformist Naspers in tow, unleashed an hysterical wave of anti-ANC propaganda.
What for? I tend to ask myself. Are we not living our affirmative-action, land-reforming, BEE dream? Ultimately, most of the ANC’s policies, laws and ideology were not thought up by Julius Malema relaxing in the lounge of some five-star Sandton hotel, but by the same collective of Saffa academics, journalists and politicians. Even Helen Zille was one of them. She had supported the ANC until the early nineties when she made a career choice and switched to the then Democratic Party. Zille still proudly reminisces about the glorious days when she wrote propaganda for the ANC under the able guidance of Alistair Sparks at the former Rand Daily Mail.
The problem with South Africa is not ANC rule, but the fact that we have only partially decolonised, if at all. As long as England and English ideas, eagerly purveyed by Saffa sycophants, hold sway, there will be no hope for us. The ultimate goal of the “national democratic revolution” was not to create a better South Africa, but simply to get rid of Afrikaners, destroy their schools and universities, nationalise their farms, extirpate their language, including Afrikaans place names, and then all would be well. Even if by that time we all lived in a local version of Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Local is not lekker. But it could again become lekker, if only we could cast off the Afro-Saxon neo-colonial yoke, the alliance of the Saffa intellectual and business class with radical, detribalised, identity-seeking blacks treating our country like Ali Baba’s cave.
