and halitosis, politics becomes highly specific – an indigenous art with its own native contours. In some countries, politics is an outgrowth of the state’s foundational virtues, however imperfectly expressed. Others practise the politics of veneration – of a monarch, of an autocrat, of an Idea. And others see politics as a means of getting things done, as the fuel for bureaucracy’s two-stroke motor.
In South Africa, we practise the politics of obfuscation. Our politicians are verbicidal – they slaughter sense, they murder meaning. Their intention has always been to hide the true reason for the state’s existence, which is to plunge mineshafts into the earth’s crust, and hose cash and commodities directly into the London Stock Exchange. In their countless acts of dissembling, our leaders have for centuries woven worlds, concepts and realities out of the vapours rising from their own bullshit. Theirs are utopian projects: the British civilisers; die Boerevolk; the Rainbow democrats. And so, stories compete, clash, erase each other, until someone mixes a Molotov cocktail and sends it arcing majestically into the night.
The German philosopher Hegel believed that madness had therapeutic qualities. Going crazy, he noted, was an effort to heal the ‘wounds of the spirit’, a means of regressing to a moment before the psyche was irrepressibly damaged by the lousiness of being alive. He described the place the mind retreated to in such times as ‘the life of feeling’ – the big, blousy German word is Gefühlsleben. Here, the language of wakefulness is replaced by an archaic language that describes dreams and fantasies, a phenomenon Hegel explained as ‘sinking back’, a separation of the mind from ‘contact with actuality’. Madness wasn’t an aberration or a chemical imbalance, but a necessary reaction to trauma.
South Africans are mad because we’ve been driven mad. When a country’s rulers rule not by leading, but by faking reality, the cheapest way for them to do so is to employ the grammar of the asylum. South Africa’s actual actuality, the one we are constantly encouraged to sink back from, is a very, very bad place, lovely scenery and good beef notwithstanding. The endlessly clanging mineshafts clang their way through the day and night, without respite.
It’s enough to drive you nuts.
Some context: I wrote everything collected in this volume very quickly. I wrote late at night and early in the morning. I often pressed ‘send’ in a hypnagogic fog, barely registering the whistle of a file tearing off into cyberspace before I passed out wearing stained track pants. I wrote in a sort of fever, lashed to history’s mast while one of democracy’s frequent shit storms raged around me.
Indeed, as anyone who has covered one will tell you, an election is the collective human project that most resembles a meteorological disaster. The observer can never anticipate in what direction the winds will blow next, whether hail will come down in spinning fist-sized knuckle balls, or whether the sun will break through the clouds and allow for a few moments of reflection. The sun, of course, never breaks through the clouds, and there is never any time for reflection.
You write to counter the spin, and they spin to counter the writing.
All of these pieces were posted to the news site Daily Maverick within hours, in some cases minutes, after they had been written. Has the news ever been in such a rush? As far as this book is concerned ‘new media’ has been reverse-engineered into ‘old media’, because the idea behind these essays, composed under the nom de plume Hannibal Elector, was to write the election, to offer stories as antidotes to the stories we were being sold.
There is, of course, a long tradition of literary non-fiction in this country. There is much solid investigative reportage and daring 140-character on-the-ground commentary. But there is also lots of crappy journalism, some of which falls suspiciously in line with the narrative that our leaders are peddling. The source of South African insanity is, and always has been, the power of Power’s narrative. With respect to Hegel, Hannibal Elector – a fake name referencing a fictional serial killer – seemed like the best way to stave off the madness, at least for a moment or two.
This is not a systematic breakdown of the 2014 election campaign. This is not a meticulous analysis of strategy or policy. It is a collection of moments, a bearing of witness. There was no planning, unless you consider having no plan a plan. The pieces have been edited only for clarity; their roughness and urgency is the whole point. They are all about madness, about unreality. They are a doormat in a doorway inscribed with the message:
Welcome to the Gefühlsleben.
PROLOGUE
15 DECEMBER 2013, JOHANNESBURG
In which we say goodbye to a father and brace for the future
Let’s summarise.
Actually, nah. Let’s not rate speeches. Let’s not square memorials off against funerals against spirited church singalongs. Let’s not question the wisdom of Woolworths commercials. Let’s just sit with our heads in our hands for a moment. Let’s just take a deep breath and allow the newness of it all to sink in.
By ‘newness’, I of course mean the sense of living in a South Africa in which Nelson Mandela is no longer a physical presence. But I’m also referring to this new sense of ourselves that developed over the course of the week or so after he died: this sense that we’re hurtling towards our destiny as contestants in a bad reality TV show, cameras constantly shoved in our faces, in which every last one of us is the comic relief.
The designated period of mourning was meant as a squaring away, as a time of remembrance. And for those of us with an almost ancient fortitude, for those of us able to ignore the industrial-grade noise-a-thon – the tumble of tweets, the slew of selfies, the unceasing bullshit factory that is the 24-hour news cycle – for those of us able to tune it all out, perhaps those ten days actually contained meaning, rather than its inverse.
When Madiba was pronounced dead and the Official Statement was catapulted into the techno ether, I could feel it before I knew it. I don’t mean ‘feel’ in the spiritual sense of the term, although I wish I did. Rather, I heard the news choppers above me, and I could feel the information hurtling through what remains of my soul into smartphones, iPads, TVs, computers, times a hundred thousand million billion. I had one brief moment in which to say goodbye, one unfettered nanosecond in which I wasn’t part of the clutter.
And then it began.
The machine powered to life, and we descended into a pornographic netherworld defined by close-ups, by close-ups of close-ups, each image stuffed with everything except content. As the machine churned forward, Madiba grew fainter. His light dimmed, and his face – projected onto countless screens, printed in countless newspapers, used by dozens of corporations to say ‘thank you and hamba kahle’ – ceased to be his face. His beatification, which had begun long ago, was an act of multiplication – he became more anodyne, more Bible-era saintly, with each duplication.
A photocopy of a photocopied photocopy, he no longer came from a particular time or place; he drifted further and further from historical context. He was used to buff up the flagging image of presidents from countries that had once wanted him to rot in jail; his memory was used to sell overpriced nectarines and (admittedly delicious) point-of-purchase candies; he was used as the cornerstone of Brand ANC. He, who ‘taught’ us about this value and that value, became an ever-smiling minstrel figure of no known race, because racial distinctions have no place in Madiba World.
Celebrities drank from his death like vampires at a vein. Men who played him in shitty movies sat at his funeral – inspired moments of cross branding. The rich got richer as they came closer to his corpse. They grew bored during the endless ceremonies, and who could blame them? Memorials and funerals are by nature boring, unless you happen to be Irish – and Madiba, by the way, wasn’t. The famous took pictures of themselves with other famous people, and the press took pictures of the picture-taking. Facial expressions