Until Julius Comes. Richard Poplak
I woke up one morning recently with no idea how to pronounce my own name. While there’s no trick to my given name, at least not as far as an English-speaker is concerned, when it comes to my surname, all bets are off. This realisation triggered one of those downward spirals that ends in a bout of Wittgensteinian gloom, and a loss of a sense of self that will not easily be regained.
What brought about this existential ague? South Africa has recently learnt that there are infinite ways to pronounce ‘Mamphela Ramphele’ – few of them phonetic, none of them intuitive. Every morning, Ramphele apparently wakes up and tweaks her identity – renews herself, cleanses her chi – by changing how she pronounces her first and last names. In keeping with the steadfastness for which she has become known and loved, she expects those who encounter her to anticipate what she is calling herself before revealing it to the rest of the world. Because her name contains six syllables, there are dozens of possible permutations. So much so that she has, I’m told, become a drinking game: play a YouTube clip of Ramphele in an interview, and guess where she’s going to put the accent. Get it wrong – chug!
In a country with 11 official languages and a hundred-odd ethnicities, you’d figure we’d make it easy on each other by at least being consistent regarding the pronunciation of our own names. But nah.
Keep the people on their toes.
And so, Ramphele (in my head, I’m thinking ‘Ramfeeler’, because you never know) has once again proved herself to be a vast liability for those foolish enough to place their trust in her. Over the course of one heady South African news week, Ramphele merged her Agang Party with the Democratic Alliance, sealed it with a now-famous lip-to-lip kiss with Helen Zille, and then de-merged. She split. She unkissed.
This is the sort of thing Ramphele does, and yet moneyed white males still think she’s the possible protagonist in Long Walk to Freedom II. She has solid struggle credentials, being the mother of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko’s children. She suffered at the hands of the bad guys, no question. She is a medical doctor, certainly. But she almost ran the University of Cape Town into oblivion as its worst-ever vice chancellor. And she was thrown out of the World Bank as one of its lousiest-ever managing directors. It’s hard to think of a person in her circle who she hasn’t screwed over, the carnage smeared across the Great Neo-Liberal Highway like a 74-car pile-up in a Johannesburg hailstorm.
Now, she has ruined politics. Recall the February 2013 inauguration of her Agang SA party, when Ramfeeler promised to fertilise a scorched and weather-worn South African political landscape so that it would once again sprout verdant Madiba-ish shoots? Very few commentators bothered with any due diligence on the dowager-in-waiting’s recent career moves, which left her with a résumé that looked like Freddy Krueger’s childhood doodles. Nonetheless, such was the desperation that her faults were dressed up as virtues, and her enablers nudged her towards the place she was least qualified to be.
This, then, is the personage the DA chose to lead them into the coming election.
Here’s an excellent example of bad political strategy: merge first, ask questions later. I guess this was the logic regarding the DA absorbing/acquiring/coalition-ing/inhaling/endlessly-talking-with Agang. For all the rumours and insiders’ reports of a lengthy discussion process, the happy couple appeared to have forgotten the five key maxims to a mildly healthy marriage:
First, sign the prenup before getting hitched.
Second, it helps to establish who’s going to be wearing the pants around the household.
Third, marry for love, not money.
Fourth, when eloping, it’s best to anticipate much Montague/Capulet hate from the respective families.
Fifth, marry for love, not colour.
It’s this last maxim that makes the DAgang nonsense so upsetting. The Democratic Alliance, for all its manifold faults and shortcomings, is a functioning political entity, with thousands of committed employees and volunteers working together to provide an alternative to a ruling party that has all but forfeited its right to govern.
As for Ramphele, after having been so lustily courted over the course of a year and then having spurned her suitor with such chutzpah, it’s worth wondering if she wasn’t an ANC plant, expertly wielded to make the official opposition look like a high-school band in the throes of a break-up. The tragedy is, of course, that in order to court the Black Vote, Zille believed that she needed a black leader with lots of liberal bona fides. Maybe she did. But maybe she didn’t. The fact remains that this kind of thinking is a vast insult to the intelligence of her own base – a number of whom aren’t white – and a sad indictment on how far we’ve come, which isn’t very far at all.
Was the DA ever really going to run this country? Hell, no. Could they have provided principled opposition to the kleptocrats for decades to come? Certainly.
It’s not sexy work. But it pays well. And it’s a job.
As for the rest of us baffled souls, we were left alone in the mess of an unfolding election drama, wondering whether the names we’d used for our entire lives are indeed our names, or if we’d messed up the grammar of our own identities.
South Africa: a country where one builds the self, and a political brand, on quicksand. And watches it all sink into oblivion, sealed with a kiss.
HOUSE PROUD
4 FEBRUARY 2014, JOHANNESBURG CBD
In which the Democratic Alliance promises to march to Luthuli House, to present a demand, wrapped inside a proposal, for 6 million ‘real jobs’ to the ruling party. And then doesn’t show up.
They never came. They said they would come, a big blue army armed with a document demanding jobs, jobs, jobs. But they didn’t arrive. They had other things to worry about. Divorce, you see, is a bitch.
In many respects, this non-delivery of a fatuous document filled with funny maths encapsulated the travails of a die-hard ANC supporter: always waiting for something; nothing comes. In this case, absent was a phalanx of blue T-shirts and blue banners, worn and carried by Helen Zille’s last remaining faithful.
One could almost imagine the DA legions walking up Johannesburg’s Sauer Street towards the brutalist concrete high rise that is the ANC’s lair, all set to exercise their constitutional right to freedom of speech. According to the DA press people, the march was not cancelled, but rescheduled. If it got nasty, as it was likely to, Zille and her henchfolk would be spirited back to Rosebank, while the rank and file duked it out in the streets. At least during the infamous Marriage, no DA member took an actual bottle to the head. Young people do dumb things, and they would do dumb things were the DA to arrive at Luthuli House.
A thought the DA may want to consider: just because it’s a constitutional right to eat ice cream for breakfast every morning doesn’t make it a smart lifestyle choice.
Anyway, the anti-march non-rally rally kicked off around 9 a.m., with a few hundred chanting faithful waving the usual ANC banners, wearing the usual T-shirts, my favourite of which read ‘Decade of the Cadre’ (I’ll say). I was also sorry to note the slow creep of red berets intermingling with the standard ANC design language, and while I understand that the South African Communist Party has been sporting red since the palaeolithic age, it very simply ruins the green, black and yellow colour palette, an observation that serves as my final fashion criticism of the election cycle, hopefully.
Shortly after arriving, I fell into chatting with an SACP member named Zweli.
‘So what’s the deal here this morning?’ I asked, after showing him an email of the press release that promised, in lieu of the non-march rally, an ANC ‘blitzing campaign’ in the Johannesburg CBD. He looked confused. ‘We’re here to protect the revolutionary house,’ he told me.
‘But