Holy Cows. Gareth van Onselen
‘We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.’
– Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
As with so many constitutional dispensations, South Africa’s democratic lexicon is largely defined by words that, historically and philosophically, flow from freedom – the greatest ideal of them all. Examples include accountability, transparency, excellence, responsibility, dignity and negotiation, as well as phrases like ‘separation of powers’, ‘office of the president’, ‘rule of law’ and so on.
In practice, though, these words and phrases often take on other, less traditional connotations. As political rhetoric is the centrifugal force around which public discourse revolves, it usually plays a determining role in shaping the meaning associated with those words. In South Africa, the influence of the ANC has been hegemonic in its depth and breadth.
The ANC’s formal political ideology is difficult to define. It is, in the grand sense, a racial nationalistic movement – that is, it places at the heart of its political philosophy group identity and the groups it uses to define these differences are racial in nature. In turn, it sees itself as the one true representative of the black majority.
But the problem with racial identity is that, to advocate its interests one must define it. And therein lies the ANC’s primary problem: it is prone to archetypes and stereotypes in equal measure because, in truth, no two people are alike and while race might influence an individual’s identity, it neither determines it nor does that influence manifest uniformly. It is experienced and interpreted differently by each person.
But there are informal influences on the ANC’s ideology too: patriarchy, collectivism and socialism, for example. And the party’s belief it alone knows and speaks ‘the truth’ can be so rigid as to be disturbing. President Zuma, speaking at a memorial for Moses Kotane in March 2015 said, ‘Moses Kotane had a scientific approach [to Marxism-Leninism] and if you take that approach, you never go wrong. We are dealing with science … knowledge obtained through observation critically tested and brought under one principle. So if you talk about Marxism-Leninism, you are talking about people who never go wrong because you are practising science and do not wake up every day to say here [there’s something wrong] ...’
That is the sentiment of a man who believes his party alone is able to claim ownership over right and wrong, one that is not just ideologically superior but morally too. That sort of fundamentalist thinking represents the gateway through which tyranny will quickly step. It also demonstrates that the ANC’s leadership is not in the business of debate or the contestation of ideas, but rather hegemonic control and the imposition of its will.
Zuma himself is a powerful influence on the ANC when it comes to traditional beliefs. He holds several religious and cultural convictions that often run contrary to the values and principles that define the Bill of Human Rights and the constitution, within which it resides. Examples are his many and varied statements that the ANC is sanctioned by God or that same-sex marriage is ‘a disgrace to the nation and to God’.
All of these things come together in a messy amalgam of political impulses that often act to influence South Africa’s democratic lexicon for the worse, subverting both meaning and consequence. As a result, the meaning of many constitutional principles and values that exist both on paper and in philosophical memory differs both subtly and fundamentally from their practical interpretation.
So, we generally live in an ongoing and profound contradiction, one that is unstated and unexamined. The assumption is that meaning is shared. The reality is that these words are often fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, and therefore much confusion follows.
This essay seeks to look at just one such word in some detail – the word ‘respect’ – and to examine how the different political and cultural influences it is subjected to mean that it holds in the South African mind a number of different and often contradictory meanings, generally resulting in much confusion.
Classically, this relationship between denotation and those other forces with a vested interest in meaning often results in a public contestation, one where words are debated and, over time, their meaning is refined and their fundamentals augmented in the public mind. Over many decades the natural by-product of debate is a generally accepted and common understanding.
South Africa, however, is different. The country has not enjoyed the benefit of this sort of long-standing democratic discussion and those forces at play are still locked in a war of attrition for meaning. Certainly, any discussion about them is rarely situated in a century-long historical debate about freedom and its various attributes. We live in something of a bubble where, if we aren’t discovering what democratic principles and values mean for the very first time, we debate their fundamental tenets as if they had only been discovered yesterday. The implication is that they are more negotiable than they really are.
Do not underestimate the magnitude of the power that flows from confused meaning. Culture alone can subvert the greatest constitutional imperative, simply by imposing on it its own interpretation.
There is another factor worth mentioning that also plays a significant role, and although not political in nature it is inextricably linked to culture: language itself. South Africa has 11 official languages and many more besides. But there has been little interrogation of the way in which meaning differs, sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly, across these numerous verbal codes. What is the exact word for ‘accountability’ in Xhosa? Does ‘transparency’, in the English understanding, translate exactly into a Zulu counterpart? Does ‘dignity’ mean the same thing in Venda as it does in Afrikaans? No doubt every language contains similar ideas but subtle differences in meaning can have serious implications when it comes to technicalities of the law and human-rights philosophy.
The same applies to connotation. Does ‘arrogance’, for example, carry the same force of weight across different languages? Words might share a similar meaning but, in a different cultural context, their effect might vary profoundly. Whereas one culture or language might experience a word as a lifeless and dispassionate description, another might experience it as emotionally charged and deeply expressive of some more primal impulse.
This is an area few academics have ventured into. It would be an interesting exercise indeed to map all the core constitutional principles and values in each of the 11 official languages, and to compare and contrast connotation and denotation in each case. As it would to compare them with the way in which those ideas have been described in Western democratic discourse – possibly the greatest philosophical influence on their broader contemporary form.
The word ‘respect’ is as important a part of the South African political vocabulary as any. Certainly it is omnipresent. The reason is that it is very closely linked to self-esteem, something in short supply given the country’s brutal and degrading history. Therefore, this interrogation is not esoteric. Respect appears in South African debate almost on a daily basis. It is a touchstone idea around which a great many ongoing conversations, ostensibly about mutual respect but in reality about self-worth, take place. And so it is useful to look at the notion of respect a little more closely.
The problem is that, if one suffers from low self-esteem, the idea of respect becomes disproportionately important. It becomes a euphemism for dignity. As a result, any agency inherent to the idea is stripped away from it. You no longer earn respect; rather, you demand it. It must be given to you as a gesture. You might be a serial killer but, as the common refrain goes, ‘everyone is entitled to respect’.
That is the ANC’s general interpretation of respect. It is an understandable impulse given how rife low self-esteem is in the country, and given the cruel and inhuman circumstances that gave rise to that situation, but the fact is, if that is the meaning insisted upon, it does more harm to dignity and self-worth than good.
What, then, is the alternative understanding of the idea?
The