The ANC, which grows more divisions every day than panic buyers have toilet rolls in their garages, has of late become even further divided over words and their meanings.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said last week’s orchestrated spate of looting and vandalism was planned by those who “intended to provoke a popular insurrection”.
Defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula disagreed, saying: “If it’s an insurrection then the insurrection must have a face ... a coup will also have a face.”
She did, however, admit that there were “signs of a counter-revolution”.
A few days later she revised all this and stated: “The president has spoken, it was an attempted insurrection. I confined myself to counter-revolution. But remember any element of counter-revolution may lead to insurrection.”
(As an aside, I’m not sure why Mapisa-Nqakula would use “counter-revolution” instead of plain old revolution, which describes any uprising against government. Perhaps because this revolt largely took place over shop counters?)
Other commentators have employed the word “insurgency”, which comes from the same Latin root as “insurrection” but has a subtly different meaning.
In a debate on Quora over the difference between insurrection and insurgency, one of the top answers given defined insurrection as “a full-on attack or complete takeover” (in other words a successful coup) and insurgency as a “skirmish or gradual infiltration”. (The clue is in “surge”, I guess.)
Someone has to take the blame. In SA’s case, let us hope it is the real insurgents, or revolutionaries, or insurrectionists, or whatever you want to call them.
That definition would make what we experienced more of an insurgency than an insurrection, except the writer goes on to say: “An often subtle, insidious process, the insurgency may go unnoticed for some extended time, unlike an insurrection.”
There was nothing subtle about the carnage in KZN and Gauteng, and the whole world noticed it, so that takes us away from insurgency and back to insurrection.
According to a second Quora expert, however: “Insurrection is a rebellion per a very specific thing ... insurgency is used more of the rising to a state of rebellion in itself, and does not depend on reasoning why.”
So perhaps what we experienced was both insurrection and insurgency.
If they could discuss things peacefully and set their differences aside, both words would agree that they are synonyms for “revolution”.
So our defence minister’s initial attempt to lower the status of the mall-torching mobs by calling them revolutionaries instead of insurrectionists seems like an ill-considered attempt to split nanofibres.
As much as I love to talk about words, all this distracting and obfuscating arguing over semantics seems a bit like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Except Nero did not really fiddle while Rome burned. First of all, the fiddle had not been invented in 64AD, when a six-day fire destroyed well over half of the great city of Rome. Fiddles, banjos, violins and all their curvaceous cousins came into being only a thousand years later.
According to the History Channel’s website, a crude stringed instrument called the cithara was around in Nero’s day, but there is no evidence that he knew how to play it, and besides he was far away eating grapes at his holiday villa in Antium when the fire ravaged Rome.
Historians agree that when Nero returned to Rome he threw himself into relief measures, which he could hardly not do since 70% of his subjects had been rendered homeless. His other way of showing the citizenry that he had things in hand was to arrest and execute many members of an obscure religious sect who called themselves “Christians”, and who Nero said started the fire.
Someone has to take the blame. In SA’s case, let us hope it is the real insurgents, or revolutionaries, or insurrectionists, or whatever you want to call them. No matter what we call the cowardly hidden instigators of so much violence and pain and suffering, they are without question utterly revolting.
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