Nathi Mthethwa might be doing his best to destroy the arts in SA, but this critic has to give him five stars for his latest piece of political theatre: the renaming of various places in the Eastern Cape.
To be clear, I entirely support the principle involved when a formerly colonised people decide to erase colonial names and replace them with pre-colonial or, simply, different ones.
I also don’t subscribe to the “history” argument, which insists one shouldn’t try to erase or deny history by replacing names, as if history isn’t one long catalogue of names that have been changed, often by violence and conquest. If people on the receiving end of that violence want to erase some of its scars, peacefully and legally, why should anyone object?
Still, I understand some of the dissent, not least from those who wondered why Port Elizabeth was being renamed Gqeberha when it had already been renamed iBhayi by the majority of the people who live there.
Others rolled out the old argument about cost. This was a pretty good criticism once, back before we found out about the Zuptas and learnt what real money was. These days, however, any government plan that happens inside a decade and costs less than a billion feels like best practice.
No wonder he has lunged with such eagerness for the low-hanging fruit of name changes and drawn a bold ministerial line under a process that has dragged on since 2016.
Yes, the critics are angry, and some with good reason. But even the most vocal would have to admit that this was a big, big win for Mthethwa.
It’s been a rough few months for the minister of sport, arts and culture, or at least as rough as things can get inside the warm, custard-filled cocoon of sheltered employment we call government.
His intervention in South African cricket seems to bearing fruit, or at least producing gnarled little protuberances which might turn into something resembling fruit, but his handling of the arts scene during lockdown, when he sleepwalked between apathy and contempt, was utterly shameful.
No wonder he has lunged with such eagerness for the low-hanging fruit of name changes and drawn a bold ministerial line under a process that has dragged on since 2016. See, he has told his colleagues in cabinet: I’m a real boy and not just a wooden puppet paid R200,000 a month for gazing out of the window.
The real beauty of this news, however, is its timing, less than 10 months from an election.
Removing colonial names in the Eastern Cape is a fairly clean and honest vote-winner. It is based on solid principles and is, at least in theory, the right thing to do.
But what elevates it into pure political brilliance is that in SA, the renaming of places has a built-in amplifier, a guaranteed trigger that turns it from a small act of redress into a performance of pure revolution.
That trigger is the inevitable backlash.
This, of course, comes from across the political spectrum: on my Facebook page on Wednesday I saw well-argued criticisms from left-leaning academics, good-natured eye-rolling from black residents of the Eastern Cape and whiny denunciations from far-right podcasters and grievance-collectors, each convinced this is all part of the ANC’s plan to enforce communism and “reverse apartheid”, which, apparently, involve expecting white people to be able to pronounce five words in Xhosa.
The first two sorts of critic have no value to the ANC: it cares about the opinion of liberal academics almost as little as it cares about the opinions of people in the Eastern Cape.
But that third group, made up of sulking, raging and sometimes overtly racist reactionaries, is pure gold right now.
Because the louder it howls and the more petulantly it stamps its feet, the more plausibly the ANC can turn to its exhausted voters and say: “See? There they still are, these unrepentant, untransformed racists who want to drag you back into a colonial nightmare.
“Yes, we lie. Yes, we steal. Yes, we’ve neglected you. Yes, you’re sick to death of us. But if your choice is us, the EFF or whichever party those colonialists want to use to bring back the past, well, that’s not really a choice, is it?”
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