I used to think youth would be the answer to all of our problems in SA, bringing a new perspective to the stuff we old guys messed up so badly. That was until about three days ago, when I watched the SABC’s Vuyo Mvoko interview, if that is the correct term, the Dudula Movement’s sapling leader Nhlanhla Lux Dlamini. Now I’m still confident we can pass the baton of hopelessness and hubris to younger people, but maybe not just yet.
Napoleon Bonaparte apparently said a man sleeps for six hours, a woman for eight and a fool for nine. I spent the full nine in a fitful half-sleep, half-nightmare after watching this extraordinary exchange between Mvoko and Dlamini, who incidentally sleeps for only three hours a night. That’s how busy he is, leading what he says is a movement of young black South Africans (strictly nonracial too) retaking their townships from foreigners and criminals, or is it criminal foreigners, or foreign criminals — I can’t be certain. In any event, they say they’re doing what the government isn’t doing (surprise!), filling the gap in performing a duty that is done in the suburbs by private security, with few questions raised.
A more confident or less credulous person than I might scoff at Dlamini’s soaring homespun kasi rhetoric, with excitable excerpts in vernacular, aerobatics of gesticulation and the occasional expletive for emphasis. At one point a little red rectangle, with the warning “Strong Language’’, came up in the corner of the screen. Dlamini was spewing young-guy stuff with such vehemence that Mvoko’s eyes widened from mild condescension to astonished disbelief. At the same time, and by contrast, he looked almost grandfatherly, with his white polka dot burgundy bow-tie speaking of a different dress millennium to his studio guest.
He comes across as a Steve Biko of the TikTok age, lacking all of the serious-minded scholarliness of Biko, but nonetheless proclaiming a self-evident truth, that communities in townships have to look after themselves or perish.
Dlamini exhibited all the signs of a man who sleeps for only three hours a night. Camo peak hat, dark-blue windbreaker, skinny trousers and running shoes. He sat forward in the chair, impatient, testy, a proven ability to talk nonstop in a rapid-fire, in-your-face style. He comes across as a Steve Biko of the TikTok age, lacking all of the serious-minded scholarliness of Biko, but nonetheless proclaiming a self-evident truth, that communities in townships have to look after themselves or perish. The government that was meant to help them is too distracted by its own political pantomime, the elevation of form over substance, to worry much about the masses who, until recently, returned the ANC to power with dull routine. If Dlamini is to be believed, the days of resigned passivity are coming to an end.
This had all started earlier in the day when two competing moblets gathered in Dobsonville, Soweto. It seems Dlamini and some other young bucks had allegedly entered the property of a man who, they say, the community had complained about for selling drugs to youngsters. On SABC they interviewed a very measured and seemingly credible local man in a Barcelona shirt who said community members had been speaking to the alleged drug dealer about his activities for about nine months. Yet the police did nothing, except take bribes, it is alleged. Others said it couldn’t possibly be so.
Dudula members had gathered at the police station, where an EFF contingent (armed?) with traditional and other weapons had assembled to help the alleged drug dealer lay a charge against Lux Dlamini for breaking and entering. The SABC reporter, in her segment from outside the police station, said an “old man’’ lived at the property in question. I got the impression I was meant to think old guys often aren’t drug dealers, or that real drug dealers seldom survive to get old. Also, when a young person describes another as old, they normally mean someone aged about 40. Later, they called him “elderly’’.
In his interview that evening, Mvoko quite visibly tried to play the adult in the room, but there was no soft-soaping Lux, I mean Dlamini. To emphasise the canyon that separated these two in style, Mvoko very gingerly used the phrase “dabble in politics’’, which in the context seemed like an echo from a Pleistocene-era job interview, and to which Dlamini responded with such vehement rejection that it would have been easier to have asked him whether he peddled nyaope to infants. Surreally, we were treated to a file segment of that once-youthful firebrand himself, Julius Malema, now just another old barrel in the political cellar, mellowed, if not to perfection. More ferment than foment.
There are other signs that Malema and his EFF are becoming part of the established elite, moderates with menace. Here I refer to the popularisation of the severely misunderstood golf club as the new traditional weapon of choice of the fighters in red.
It was like a crossing over to an ancient oracle of wisdom, with Malema intoning gravely in pan-Africanist fashion and reasserting that confronting the white man (and not fellow Africans) indeed remains the central issue of political struggle in SA, which was reassuring in a distinctly South African sort of way. One can understand why Malema might feel threatened by Dlamini though, upstaged almost, and eager to claim the high ground on xenophobia as a distinct political offering, which in SA is a gamble to say the least.
There are other signs that Malema and his EFF are becoming part of the established elite, moderates with menace. Here I refer to the popularisation of the severely misunderstood golf club as the new traditional weapon of choice of the fighters in red. There can be no greater homage paid to the old-boy establishment, to the country-clubbing, gin-sipping, backslapping, joke-swapping, insider-trading status quo than the adoption of a four-iron as your principal weapon of revolutionary struggle. And when you’re playing out of the deep and depressing bunker of history, what better than having a perimeter-edged, double-machine grooved, regular-flex shaft sand iron in your carefully formed amandla grip? The SABC reporter was more correct than she knew in describing these as “items of potential violence”.
Oh to be young and reckless again, or even just reckless. To have the chutzpah exhibited by another of our bright young political things this week, and here I refer to the youthful premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Sihle Zikalala. He mused aloud, as young people do, that perhaps we should scrap the whole constitutional democracy we have going here in favour of what he called a parliamentary democracy. Relax, it’s not meant to be a serious idea, it’s just about putting it out there and testing the waters before the ANC’s elective conference later this year. It’s not the worst plan though, especially if the first step is to scrap the provinces and the duplicate and costly layer of leadership that mostly just promotes the interests of ambitious politicians.
Nonetheless, Zikalala’s premier-class hip-hoppery offered an interesting counterpoint to the conclusion suggested by Dlamini, even while it’s to be expected that an ANC leader would highlight a political solution to SA’s problems, perceived or otherwise. Dlamini’s view though, and it’s the outlook of those who think like him, is that formal politics in its entirety has failed in SA and let the people down. From his perspective, whether SA is ruled by a constitution or not is increasingly no longer the point.
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