Sometimes it’s useful to take a step back, out of the blinding morass of media firecrackers detonating in our information space, and get some perspective about where we are as a country. In fact, not where we are — that is a familiar place of broken political promises and fractured hope — but why we are. How did we get here?
History has done a poor job of explaining that. As Italian writer Roberto Calasso put it in The Unnamable Present (2019), his gnomic musings on the condition of the world, "conspiracy is born with history".
As we move towards another day in history where we go to the ballot boxes to try, through a collective uptick of will, to impose order on the society we want to live in, let us not just step back from the roiling mass of politicised propaganda that self-interested parties (and I use "parties" in both the collective and singular meanings) foist upon us. Let’s step out of it, into a different kind of meaning — that of the novelist, trying to make sense of SA. To understand it, rather than trying to graft a crudely self-serving message on to it in the way politicians do when they’re trying to win your vote.
Two recently published novels, Mandla Langa’s The Lost Language of the Soul (2021) and Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021), manage to seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, weave powerful threads of political commentary into their respective stories.
I’m doing neither of these books any favours by highlighting this, as they’re about so much more. They’re powerful, intimate stories, and any reduction to only a political reading does them a disservice. But part of their power is that their characters exist in times and places that determine both their lived and imagined experiences, and those are a useful palimpsest on which to impose our current political realities.
Langa’s book, set during the beginnings of SA’s democracy, tells the story of 14-year-old Joseph Mabaso, the son of a Zambian mother and an SA freedom fighter, and his journey from Lusaka to SA in an attempt to find his missing parents.
Langa describes the novel’s genesis as arising from the xenophobic attacks of 2008, 2015 "and all the intervening periods".
Xenophobia is one of the political stratagems deployed by political parties in these elections, and you’ll find traces of its evolution in the tale of Joseph’s quest, which takes in crude anti-foreigner incidents on the streets of Joburg, as well as institutional examples, such as the internment facility for illegal immigrants, Camp Lesedi — "your halfway station to jail".
Joseph’s story is framed between a prologue and an epilogue, which finds him telling his story in meetings with Mrs Sonto Vabaza, "special adviser to the Commission on Migration". He is trying to get recognition of his status as a South African, and also a recognition of his father’s role as a guerrilla in the war against apartheid.
When you read Mrs Vabaza’s words about the problems of working out who is a legitimate freedom fighter and who is a chancer, you’ll be reminded of the recent drama staged by the Liberation Struggle War Veterans — the group that succeeded the disbanded Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) — when it took ministers Thandi Modise, Mondli Gungubele and Thabang Makwetla hostage at the St George Hotel outside Pretoria.
"You know, in the Movement, in exile, new recruits came with stories about how they had been part of the struggle etcetera. They were made to write their biographies with the help of recording officers. Six months later, they’d be required to write another biography. You’d be amazed at the discrepancy between the two versions. So, what I’m trying to do here, dear Joseph Mabaso, is help you with the truest version of your life."
Despite what political parties say, they’re not even close to addressing the problems of a decaying democracy
It’s tempting to see this as an origin story for where our current "war veterans" come from, especially when you read in the Daily Maverick that of the "53 self-professed military vets who held ministers hostage … 40 have criminal records", and that, according to African Defence Review’s Darren Olivier, "[the group] has questionable provenance, unclear membership with unrealistic claims, and appears to be a replacement for part of the factional political arm of the MKMVA rather than a legitimate veterans group".
But it’s our larger democratic landscape to which Langa’s book serves as interlocutor. Joseph’s quest for an identity in the confused and chaotic democracy that is SA is pretty much what South Africans are going through now, as we attempt to find, in the fulminations of our political "leaders", not just some sort of meaning, promise and sense of belonging, but also the truest version of our democracy.
Galgut’s The Promise has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, and the winner will be announced on November 3, around the same time as the results start to trickle in from our own little fiction contest, the local government elections taking place on November 1.
The novel is about four generations of a white family, the Swarts, and is spun together around a deathbed promise made by the mother, Rachel, to give a house on the family farm to their black servant, Salome. The promise, as a reviewer for The Guardian points out, is also a metaphor for the broken promises of our democratic dispensation.
"Over the years, as members of the family find reasons to deny or defer Salome’s inheritance, the moral promise — the potential, or expectation — of the next generation of South Africans, and of the nation itself, is shown to be just as compromised as that of their parents."
Ownership of land, and the benefits that accrue to it, both physical and psychological, is another of those emotive, loaded issues that drives the despair, and concomitant dismissal of our democracy, that many politicians exploit.
But as with most of the issues that might affect how we cast our vote, they’re presented crudely, without regard for the complexities that are preventing necessary redress happening in any swift and efficient way.
Both The Lost Language of the Soul and The Promise gently, evocatively, take the reader through the multifold webs of personal experiences that animate how South Africans experience our realities. It’s this nuanced understanding, with all its uncomfortable incompleteness, that we should bring to bear on the political questions confronting us.
Despite what political parties have to say, they’re not even close to solutions to address the problems of a decaying democracy. And despite what Gareth Cliff, the SA Institute of Race Relations and the gurning John Steenhuisen would have you believe, it is precisely the personal and the anecdotal that will bring positive change to our lives.
As one of the characters in The Promise muses, while recalling the bad experiences that have brought him to where he is now: "So what, who gives a shit? Others have suffered way, way more than you have, though that’s somehow true of every experience. In the end, all you can say is that you got through this far, far enough for things to change and become easier, no need to hide anymore. Holding on, holding out, an old SA solution."
It’s tempting to think of this as the coda to our democratic dream, as we yet again shuffle the misshapen, mangled jigsaw pieces of our faded democratic puzzle in the local elections.
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