CHRIS ROPER: SA is a society poisoned by claustrophobic anger

Early on the morning of Thursday September 21, I was driving along Chapman’s Peak. My destination was a funeral parlour; someone close to me had died the previous day.

Hout Bay in bad weather is a grey, depressing place. Dirty grey sky, cold, steely water and gloomy clouds looming over everything. In the middle of the bay, dwarfed by the oppressive sky and dark cliffs, was the submarine SAS Manthatisi. It looked like it was meandering purposelessly, a black steel shape framed by windblown whitecaps. An anxious navy ship circled it like a dog that can sense distress in its owner, but doesn’t know how to make it better. 

The day before, the Manthatisi had lost three crew members, when seven were swept overboard in high seas off Kommetjie, Cape Town. The dead were master WO William Masela Mathipa, WO first class Mmokwapa Lucas Mojela and Lt-Cmdr Gillian Elizabeth Hector.

Looking down on the submarine, I almost felt as if I was hallucinating. If you’d just had three fatalities, why wouldn’t you be back at your base already?

It turns out that the surviving crew members had to spend Wednesday night on the submarine in Hout Bay because the captain was one of the injured, and had been flown by helicopter to Groote Schuur Hospital. No replacement captain was available to take the submarine back to Simon’s Town, and then the bad weather on Thursday delayed its journey even more. 

Can you imagine what that must be like. Stuck in a 62m steel hull, buffeted by the sea and mourning your dead.

There are so many fissures in our body politic that it seems we struggle, as a society, to grieve together for ... a loss such as this one, the death of people whose job is to serve us

I had spent Tuesday night in a hospital, and wandering the cold and empty corridors in the early hours of the morning had been a strange and lonely experience. One of the hospital walls was covered with a large picture of a sun-drenched harbour — it could have been Simon’s Town — with boats safely docked and basking in the blue light. As the hours ticked by, the picture started to look like a reproach, or a bad joke.

Perhaps this is why I felt such empathy with the people locked in that black cylinder far below in the bay. I took a video of the submarine and its attendant ship, and posted it on social media with expressions of sympathy. Encouragingly, many people shared messages of communal sadness. But there were many whose first impulse was to respond with attacks. The immediate thought for some was to apportion blame, with ill-founded accusations thrown around about lack of life jackets, inadequate training and the like.

There was even someone who suggested that the crew probably couldn’t swim, a racist trope if ever there was one.

One person, a fan of British naval fiction, one assumes, even suggested that we don’t train our naval personnel to swim because then they drown more quickly if they’re lost at sea. They tweeted: “Well its 1 priority is guess to ask them crew who can swim and who cant seeing its the navy I know the pirates did not went to learn how to swim in those days cause they didn’t want to float around at see after there boat was sank its saved them the torture of waiting for a rescue.”

Another said: “They should have dry run drills with US Navy Seals but instead moering around on east coast exercises with Russian fleet killers!”

And yet another managed to work a critique of cadre deployment in. “Proper training is key. The Army can never be used as an employment agency for any reason.”

It’s heartbreaking to think that this is the way some South Africans react to what should be a moment for communal sympathy, if not mourning. Three people, people whose job is to protect our democracy — and we can feel gratitude for this without succumbing to US-style valorisation of the military, or nationalist nonsense — have died, and some see this as an opportunity to push ideological agendas. It’s sad. 

To be clear, I’m not arguing that hard questions shouldn’t be asked of the navy. A City Press investigation has revealed that a combination of poor decision-making and inadequate training contributed to the disaster, and that the events were possibly a reflection of bad leadership. For example, according to the newspaper’s sources, Hector “was the only one attached to the submarine with a safety line, as required by safety protocols. The rest of the crew simply held onto the single rope over the hull.”

Hector was the first South African woman navy officer to work on a submarine, and the first woman in Africa to do so. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the Manthatisi is a Heroine-class submarine, and named after a famous woman warrior chief of the Batlokwa.

The navy is left with some explaining to do, and will be held to account, one hopes. But what I am lamenting is the fact that there are so many fissures in our body politic that it seems we struggle, as a society, to grieve together for a loss such as this one, the death of people whose job is to serve us.

Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by

—  Nick Cave

The long night I spent hunkered uncomfortably on a hospital chair, anchored to the dull bedlam of ICU machinery bleeping and wailing while waiting for a loved one to die, seems to echo what it must have been like enclosed in the hull of the Manthatisi after the death of its three crew members. I’m aware that this is a fanciful comparison, with no true basis of evidence, but what it does have is a reason for empathy. 

To try to pass the time during my vigil — what a strange phrase, when you are essentially bearing witness to the inevitable end of time — I was reading Nick Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage (co-authored with Seán O’Hagan). It’s essentially a series of conversations about such things as creativity, religious faith, art and loss. But one of the things underpinning it is how Cave responded to the loss of his 15-year-old son, who fell off a cliff in 2015.

I thought of this while standing on the cliffs above Hout Bay, looking down on the Manthatisi, and as I posted the video of the submarine. What I was hoping for, inchoately, was that people would respond in a way that assuaged the sadness and grief I was feeling while watching the submarine under the cold grey sky, and by extension the grief of others. 

Talking about how grief can transform you, Cave says: “I think if we can move beyond the anxiety and dread and despair, there is a promise of something shifting not just culturally, but spiritually, too. I feel that potential in the air, or maybe a sort of subterranean undertow of concern and connectivity, a radical and collective move towards a more empathetic and enhanced existence. I may be completely off the mark here, but it does seem possible — even against the criminal incompetence of our governments, the planet’s ailing health, the divisiveness that exists everywhere, the shocking lack of mercy and forgiveness, where so many people seem to harbour such an irreparable animosity towards the world and each other — even still, I have hope. Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe. I have a hope that, in time, we can come together, even though, right now, we could not be further apart.” 

It’s a long quote, I know, but it’s worth taking to heart. Can we use the collective grief that many South Africans feel about Marikana, Life Esidimeni, the Albert Street fire, the thousands of other tragedies of similar scale, and in some way use it to unify rather than splinter? Or are we doomed to just consider them as bitter inevitabilities marking our slowly accelerating march towards failed statehood and turmoil?

My relative who died on the same day as William Mathipa, Mmokwapa Mojela and Gillian Hector was someone who tended towards hope, like a sunbird to a flower. It strikes me that there’s a pollination metaphor in there somewhere, and that we shouldn’t let ourselves destroy our human empathy in the service of politicised anger.