The risible demagogues

The Big Read: It really is a sorry state of affairs when a country that has produced so many remarkable people and movements is reduced to abandoning its national political stage to the spectacle of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and Julius Malema publicly undermining our democracy.The AWB is made up of racist, violent thugs drunk on their fragile fantasies of white supremacy. Their brandy-and-coke fascism was routed by the South African Police in Ventersdorp in 1991, and again by the Bophuthatswana Defence Force in Mmabtho in 1994.

They are not the Waffen-SS. But though they are too inept to pose a real threat to the state they are not simply buffoons. They are, like the Ku Klux Klan in some dismal Mississippi town, partisans of a brutal regime of white terror that, as Andile Mngxitama argues, has never released Ventersdorp from its grip. Mathatha Tsedu is quite right to insist that to reduce them to their buffoonery is to do a serious injustice to their victims.

Malema is a reckless and patently anti-democratic demagogue. He shows no evidence of any social vision beyond the sort of crude identification with money, fame and power that sent him to visit Molemo "Jub Jub" Maarohanye in the holding cells of the Protea police station instead of the families of the children Maaronhanye smashed into allegedly while racing his Mini Cooper at three in the afternoon.

Malema wants, in the exact style of the elites excoriated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, to lead the lumpen-bourgeoisie in preying on the people in the name of the people. Xolela Mangcu has noted the historical similarities between Malema's language and the language of fascism.

Malema's attack on the British journalist, delivered with all the elegance of spirit evident in the painstaking care with which SGL Engineering Projects builds its bridges, climaxed with a declaration on the state of the journalist's penis: "Rubbish is what you have covered in that trouser - that is the rubbish."

One can only assume that Malema prefers his journalists to have a better class of penis. Perhaps all this trouble could have been avoided if his security team had set up a penis-vetting system at the door to Luthuli House.

The penis made its unwelcome entry into our body politic with Jacob Zuma's rape trial. We had the return of Umshini Wam before Dubula Ibhunu. And the penis is going to be at the centre of our political theatre for the foreseeable future, given the speculation around the fact that Eugene Terre Blanche's body was found with his penis exposed. Already, Zanu-PF has seized on claims of a homosexual encounter with glee and AWB members are declaring that there must be a conspiracy.

Recent TV news bulletins have made it look as if we should be getting ready to throw the Constitution away, change the national anthem to Umshini Wam and let the big men work out some new deal. But, of course, neither the AWB nor Malema can claim any significant support base.

Malema's power within his own organisation is so tenuous that he has resorted to defending his position, in Limpopo, with a mixture of strategies that he seems to have picked up in Harare. They allegedly included whacking an ANC Youth League member on the head with a plastic chair and calling on the police, some of them Boers, to shoot rubber bullets at delegates to stop them from participating in a meeting in which they would have voted against his orders.

There was a time when many of our most important public debates were between the ANC and organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign and Cosatu. We need to think about why it is that we have, even if temporarily, abandoned the political stage to contesting big men who do not speak for a mass constituency or for any kind of democratic principle.

The obvious starting point is that our democracy has failed in a variety of respects, many of which come down to the fact that it has always been an elite deal that excludes the majority from substantive access to its political and economic benefits.

This kind of deep failure - a failure that results in, say, a million evictions, most of them unlawful, from farms since 1994 - can be managed for a while with the right spin and a little repression.

But it cannot be managed indefinitely. Something has to give.

The massive rate of popular protest is one sign that the time when an elite deal could be passed off as real democratisation will soon be up. Some of these protests are a demand for popular political empowerment. But there is also a turn towards a politics of xenophobia, homophobia and hypermasculinity, which are a turn away from democratic values, and towards a much narrower and more predatory conception of empowerment.

It is clear that we cannot continue to pass off the elite deal as real democracy and leave it at that. The response of Zuma's government has largely taken the form a shift towards social conservatism, with the militarisation of policing and a dramatic increase in the violent repression of the grassroots left. But it has not yet been enough to contain discontent.

The solution to the impasse in our democracy doesn't have to be conservative and repressive. It could also take the form of concrete commitment to substantive practices rooted in an immediate recognition of equality.

But if we don't find a way to move to the centre of our politics a serious and rational discussion of substantive equality we'll be left with the sorry spectacle of the politics of big men trying to rally their troops behind nothing but the promise of their protection on their turf.

We'll have even more dangerous idiots lining up with Julius Malema and Andre Visagie to enter the political stage from the right.

The way to avoid this fate is the patient work of democratising society from below by organising democratic alternatives, powerful and mass-based democratic alternatives, from the ground up. - © SACSISýPithouse teaches politics at Rhodes