XHANTI PAYI | We are not bereft orphans: on the heritage of Eusebius

President Obama, paying tribute to comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, remarked: “It's easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far — where now marriage is equal under the law — just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago. Just how important it was not just to the LGBTQ+ community, but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbour or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in common than we realise — push our country in the direction of justice.”

Eusebius McKaiser sprang into public life at a time when political and social commentary faced serious hostility. This was a time when public intellectuals were dismissed as “armchair critics”.

It was a time when the most sinister and cynical of public actors thought it was enough to dismiss, as if to dispel, criticism through personal attacks. Even in such an atmosphere, McKaiser was still bold and brave enough not just to position himself as the much maligned “armchair critic”, but as a gay man. And so postured, he doubled the friction he would have faced in public discourse. But he understood then, as we see now, that he had to enter the struggle in full.

As Obama further observed about DeGeneres: “What an incredible burden that was to bear. To risk your career like that. People don’t do that very often. And then to have the hopes of millions on your shoulders”. But McKaiser didn’t believe in part struggles and half measures. It was this courage that allowed him a bigger voice so that his speech had such power, and for so many.

Charles Sumner, commenting on the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, argues this way: “That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg ... and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act.” Importantly, Sumner goes on to contradict Lincoln when he said that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here”. Instead, Sumner insisted that, “The world at once noted what he [Lincoln] said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech. Ideas are always more [important] than battles.” Thus, Sumner, an activist for the abolition of slavery and a proponent for civil rights, understood, and confirmed, as did McKaiser, that what we say is important in the cause for the progress of a society.

In this sense, Eusebius used his freedom of speech to be subversive, and was proud of it. He believed in thorough engagement so that the values which informed our actions as individuals and a people were robust and sound. As such, poor ideals had to be toppled. And in this regard, for him there were no holy cows.

In 2016 Eusebius spoke at the eThekwini municipality's social cohesion conference. In his subversive and robust manner, he informed the gathering that “nonracialism is the enemy of justice. Nonracialism is a distraction from what we need to do to get an equitable society”.

In an audience largely expecting his assent about the accepted value of nonracialism, Eusebius went on to say: “I'm a sceptic about nonracialism. I think the concept belongs in the same linguistic dustbin as 'Rainbow Nation' — it makes us all feel warm and fuzzy when we're not thinking‚ like slipping into a hot bath in winter and then‚ before you know it‚ the water is ice-cold.” And he went on to conclude that, “It is not reality now‚ and it's not the ideal we should be striving towards.”

In this way, he did not hesitate to challenge what many believe is a settled idea on how South Africa should move forward — calling it the very enemy of justice. In challenging stable notions of how we should think and approach public life, he was demanding more from South Africans. He was insisting on critical thinking rather than acceptance of a warm bath as a sustainable solution to cold weather. He insisted the ideas and ideals we accept must be legitimate and lasting pathways to a better and just life for all.

In this regard, Eusebius’ view of the world is most elegantly expressed by American critic and magazine editor, Leon Wieseltier, when he made an important observation about a society such as ours, confirming the ways in which Eusebius thought about how we should approach public life. In an interview Wieseltier said: “We are a democracy, which is to say, we are a republic of opinion. We operate according to the opinion of our citizens.

“That being the case, one of the primary services that can be — needs to be — performed in such a society, is to attend to the quality of opinion, to the means for opinion formation. The more enlightened and sophisticated and historically informed and critically-minded opinion will be, the better our country will be. The more manipulable, the more short-attention spanned, the more distracted, the more disengaged from serious argument opinion will be, the less good our country is going to be. It is really that simple.”

Apartheid succeeded for as long as it did because it had the management of the majority of its chosen voters bound uncritically to its propaganda.

Observe. In Antjie Krog’s book A Change of Tongue, a mother speaks to her daughter of the time when Afrikaners took power in 1948. The Afrikaner receives such “ridicule, disdain and revile from the press that they had to find another way of doing things. Everything was worthy of ridicule, our language, our political leaders, our intellectuals, our newspapers, our universities, our music, our literature, or what we dared to think of as one, even our bodies — fat, coarse women and bearded, spitting men. Nothing we had was worthy of respect. We were simply lazier, more stupid, more over the jam,” her mother says of the time.

“Those English journalists were craft masters of humiliation. We stopped reading their newspapers — why should we expose ourselves to ridicule? We didn’t go to their universities; we didn’t listen to their radio programmes”.

A whole voting population had been manipulated, and distracted away from what was happening around them.

Eusebius’ intellectual genius was his ability to infuse in our public discourse “philosophy in action”. In his first book, There’s a Bantu in My Bathroom, he took a critical and philosophical look into our daily debates. What are the hallmarks of a coconut? Are they language, choice of music, self-confidence? Is there something wrong about being a coconut? Is it even a topic worth public debate, philosophical or moral considerations? Do maids rank lower than pets in South Africa's suburbia? In these questions, he led the difficult and bruising personal conflicts and shared debates about our identity as individuals and an emerging people. Whether you were Xhosa or Afrikaner, your number was up. The debates he raised applied to all our lives, whether about racism, sexuality, polygamy or just how we identify ourselves.

Since his passing, it has been tempting to raise the arguments one didn’t conclude with Eusebius.

September is “heritage month”. It’s a time in which we should not only remember, even though we must, the violations we suffered, but what we gained in that moment. Our heritage is being spent. But it doesn’t have to be that way if we choose so.

So this piece of writing is just one way in which we shall remember what Euby — as did our many heroes — left us with. So on this Heritage Day, faced with the challenges we have, we remember that in our national heritage are the values Eusebius left us with. And those values couldn’t be more needed as they are now. And so it is up to us to draw on that heritage, because it is ours, and for our benefit, especially at this time.