adminExtreme insanity is a description that can fit the events and activities that have come to define the South African parliament, especially the annual State of the Nation Address by the President of the Republic.
The yelling, vulgar disruptions and high voltage cursing that take place in that August House can pass for a true theatre of the macabre, a series of bizarre and grotesque political performances. Even the age-old craft of political insult loses its art in the South African parliament and what remains is the science and performance of rudeness and celebrations of vulgarity. The languaging of political debate gets infected with sordid bile and venom where political actors literary choke up with anger and deep toxic emotions. Carefully looked at, the angry and hateful spectacles of the South African parliament have become, not only a dramatisation of the limits of colonial parliamentary democracy, but also a deep display of what has become symptomatic of African politics and politicking. The idea of the state, that of a parliament and the paradigm of parliamentary democracy are all part of the luggage of history that Africa and the Global South have from their encounters with Empire. The larger part of politics and politicking in Africa and the entire Global South involves a real tragedy of playing other people’s game, a game whose rules we don’t understand or that we must not even try to understand.
There are ways of negotiating power, jostling for it and even fighting over it besides what the enslavers and colonisers taught us. A close look at the theatre of the South African parliament easily betrays the cruel truth that all the noise, the kicking and screaming has really nothing much to do with the lives of ordinary drinkers of water and eaters of bread in the land. In truth, when a Julius Malema loudly screams out the story of a Baleka Mbete who went to her rural home to slaughter a cow in honour of her ancestors after she was promised the presidency of the country, something more than political opposition takes place. Something worse than political antagonism and enmity is at play; both Malema and Mbete exit the political stage naked, shorter than they came and indeed less of human beings.
Olympics of interpersonal and interparty humiliations and insults cannot be a performance of leadership in any developmental state, in any land where freedom and dignity are important. The African population gets robbed when elected leaders become captives of anger and hatred when there are laws to be made and policies to be fashioned that can navigate Africa from the abyss of the underdevelopment, backwardness and misery that coloniality has normalised. One would be forgiven to think that African politics has become a site where the anger of centuries, spiritual and psychological anger that has been banked up from conquest gets vented out by victim against victim. At the end of the day, fundamentally, who are Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema, if not representatives of two generations of miserable Africans looking for power and control in a white ruled colonial modernity that has contempt for black skins, black histories and black ideas. It is very easy for victims of coloniality to develop to be each other’s enemies and potential killers.
Enemies and Adversaries
In the scholarly narrative of “how victims become killers” Mahmood Mamdani demonstrates how the politics between the Hutu and the Tutsi of Rwanda degenerated to a genocide that shocked the world in 1994. The colonialists landed in Rwanda and created a world of conquerors and the conquered. It was a world of rulers and the ruled, victimisers and victims. When the colonisers physically left Rwanda, the world that they built did not leave nor did it die, the Tutsi became the new settlers in the eyes of the angry Hutus who saw themselves as the natives, eventually enmasse the Tutsi had to die. The world that enslavers and colonisers built is a world of enemies, victimisers and victims and we seem unable to get out of that world. We cannot extinguish the anger and hatred bequeathed us by conquest. In 2005, the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe theorised that the problem of our world and its politics is that all forms of political and economic opposition are allowed to decline to enmity, bitter enmity. Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, jointly and separately have argued that the true definition of democratic politics should be the ability of human beings to oppose each other even bitterly without becoming enemies, without wishing each other dead, or going on to plan and execute the killing of each other. Elections and votes were invented as substitutes for physical war where in truth the ballot was supposed to replace the bullet. The political opponent, where there is opposition but no enemity becomes an adversary and not an enemy, he or she is a legitimate citizen who can be defeated without having to be killed, his or her victory over us is not wanted but it is not feared, it can be tolerated and suffered. African politics, thanks to its colonial and slavish heritage, is hostage to hate and hatred where political opponents are enemies that must necessarily be destroyed.
A Crime of Passion
The political hatred that gets peoples and parties to kill each other, be it in identity politics or ideological conflicts, does not visit their hearts and minds as hatred, it comes dressed as love. We imagine ourselves to love our country so much that those who oppose us and contest our national and political ideologies can only be traitors, terrorists and low lives that must die. Hate does not call itself hate; it makes pretenses to love and invents the opponent as the enemy who must be eliminated. All genocides, holocausts and mass murders of the world have been started by individuals that claimed to love certain ideas and certain places so much that their love forced them to deal with certain opponents and enemies. When a total president of a political party like Julius Malema, a potential head of state screams out so loud in anger and pain he commits verbal suicide bombing, destroys his enemies with vitriol while killing himself as a dignified human being, a sober leader, leaving a shell of a caricature. That amount of anger and hatred for the other, for the opponent who is made into an enemy belies roots of physical violence, suicide bombing and mass murder. All hatred, especially political hatred, if charged with enough anger and injected with enough energy is potentially genocidal.
Beyond hate
There is no evidence that people are born and brought up to hate others. Hate is taught, learnt and cultivated. It is imagined first as love for our country, ourselves and our communities and then it degenerates to a passionate patriotism that says the opponent is an enemy and must die. Political hatred is an artefact of the imagination that morphs into a living ideology and toxic religion. We dramatise and perform anger and hatred until we are worked up enough to kill and be killed in the name of what we claim to love and to defend. The physical wall that Donald Trump dreams of building to block the dirty Mexicans from entering beloved America is actually an emotional and psychological mass grave that a bigot imagines and wishes for those that he hates. Trump’s hatred for Mexicans gives itself some respectability by publicly pretending to have deep love and patriotism for America, for the motherland. The demon of hate and hatred that possessed African politics and politicians is a murderous and genocidal demon that has its roots in the genocides of colonial conquest and must be exorcised. The performance of anger and hatred that is witnessed in the South African parliament is more than entertainment but a symptom of a deep African problem, a problem that the world has caused for Africa and that Africa must solve. Politics in Africa needs to be decolonialised of its hate and hatred.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
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