At the end of last year, I received an unsolicited and unintentionally funny review of my latest book, presenting me with an inquisitorial list of my literary crimes and denouncing me as a shadow of the columnist I’d been back when I started writing for the Mail & Guardian in the early 2000s.
I’ve received some memorable criticism over my career. I will forever cherish being called a “dom drol” by Steve Hofmeyr. In this case, however, I wasn’t plunged into a long dark night of the soul, or even a short, faintly luminescent one. If you dish it out, you need to be able to take it, and besides, when someone takes 2,064 words (as this person did) to express their fury that you are no longer the insecure snob you were at 25, they’re saying more about themselves than about you.
Indeed, I would probably have forgotten all about the review and its accusation that I had shamefully matured as a person and a writer, but for a curious anniversary: this month I will have been a columnist for exactly 20 years, and that’s the sort of thing that gets one thinking about what it all means and what it’s all for.
Jack Kerouac once said he had “nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”. Without wanting to sound immodest, I can, as a writer in Cyril Ramaphosa’s SA, offer quite a lot more; not just confusion but also anxiety, wilful denial, an orphaned sort of hope that is, if not quite alive, certainly undead, and, most of all, a growing sense of embarrassment that, despite having so many clever and competent people in this country, we’re here, face down on the bathroom floor, gently snoring into a puddle of sick.
Still, without wanting to make any grand claims to knowing anything for sure, I have now been doing this for long enough to have developed an inkling about certain things, which, if I do this for another 20 years, might even become educated guesses.
The first is that politicians are rich and awful because we have tragically short memories. This isn’t our fault: it’s not healthy to hoard years’ worth of Sunday headlines inside one’s soul, and the few people who do, are to be avoided at all costs at dinner parties.
I suppose the ultimate goal is to reach an unshockable state of deep compassion for everyone, where you can read a press release from the Jacob Zuma Foundation and immediately see how hard Mzwanele Manyi’s inner child is trying to get what it needs.
It’s also not the media’s fault, at least not entirely. As much as I’d love every news report to provide a “Previously On”, where someone from the cast of Days Of Our Lives does a dramatic voice-over, reminding us that 2022 is happening because of that thing we got angry about in 2017, which happened because of those two things we’ve forgotten about from 2004 and 1983, there simply isn’t the time or space, and besides, I’m not convinced most readers care that much, what with having to cook supper before the power goes off.
Second, I’ve learnt that confirmation bias can turn normal, fairly functional brains entirely inside out. I will never forget the reader who wrote to me after I’d criticised the ANC for three consecutive weeks, telling me I was the most clear-eyed truth-teller in the land. The following week I criticised the DA for some or other misstep, and he wrote to me again, saying he’d been seeing a worrying decline in the quality of my writing.
Third, I have come to realise outrage is nothing but a temporary bruise. I’m sure it serves an important function in our mental health, perhaps as part of some healing process when our sense of justice and propriety has been injured, but it doesn’t change what caused the injury, any more than a bruise can turn aside the fist that first caused it.
To be clear: I’m not saying we shouldn’t be outraged. I suppose the ultimate goal is to reach an unshockable state of deep compassion for everyone, where you can read a press release from the Jacob Zuma Foundation and immediately see how hard Mzwanele Manyi’s inner child is trying to get what it needs. If, like me, though, you’re not there yet, then outrage — the bruise, the product of your body trying to move past an injury — is probably the next most healthy reaction. Just don’t mistake reaction for action.
Finally, I’ve understood where that peculiar, undead hope comes from that I mentioned earlier.
Every so often, when someone learns what I do for a living, they make a face and say: “Well, at least you’ve got an endless supply of material.”
I know what they mean, and of course they’re right in one sense. But over the years, as that endless mudslide of content has come my way, I’ve started to see more clearly the extraordinary people who are sending it downstream to be picked over: the whistle-blowers, the journalists, the honest auditors, the NGOs, and, most recently, the country’s chief justice.
They say democracy dies in darkness. Ours is constantly being exposed to the light.
Yes, what we see is often foul. But the very fact that we are seeing it, and can object to it so loudly, is proof of how hard some South Africans are fighting for us all, and how, despite everything, we still believe that we deserve better; that there is a better country waiting for all of us.
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