It may feel like a bit of a leap, but try, if you can, to pull yourself away from the here and now and instead imagine a scene of classic science fiction: a vast factory ship, half hidden in darkness, crawling through a sea of stars.
Try to see its immense hull, a looming darkness against the pinpricks of light. See it gleam in the dim, yellow rays of a distant sun, and see how battered and dented it is, scarred by the journeys of centuries. Imagine its wounded inner architecture where old, warped beams groan and creak.
Perhaps that was why its previous, demented crew tried to run it aground on a dying world. Perhaps, in their exhausted paranoia, they couldn’t imagine a way to start repairing it, and simply hoped to survive the crash and live out their days somewhere quiet under a faintly familiar sky.
The workers on the ship — millions of them, tightly segregated and accorded different rights and fates according to their different skin tones — understood that this was certain death; and so a new crew, formed in secret but soon growing bolder, marched on the bridge and showed the hollow-eyed officers that their only pragmatic choice was to hand over the ship.
The surrender was startlingly quick, but only just in time: parts of the ship had already started to smoulder in the thickening atmosphere of the white, toxic planet below; and as the ship turned, and began to fight its way free of those lethal forces, it was uncertain whether it would all stay together or break up and burn.
Not surprisingly, the passengers were adamant they would never again be beholden to the madness of despotic captains, and so they agreed to gather, every five years, to decide whether to appoint a new crew.
Inevitably, this clear vision and determination dominated the first few gatherings. Even when their first, beloved captain stopped to buy weapons they couldn’t afford, to be used against enemies that didn’t exist, and when their second, highly intelligent captain fell under the thrall of a charlatan peddler of garlic and beetroot, and allowed thousands of passengers to die from a treatable illness, they still gathered to affirm that they’d rather have the ship piloted poorly by flawed people who understood them than crashed with great efficiency by madmen who hated them.
Given his eagerness to resign two weeks ago, it’s difficult to know why First Mate Ramaphosa stepped in when he did. But he did, and here we are.
Almost 20 years into their voyage, however, the clarity of those early days began to blur, hastened by the discovery that the ship’s third post-catastrophe pilot had used passengers’ money to build himself a very large, very lavish cabin.
The trouble was, there was no clear replacement. At each of the five-year gatherings, small groups of passengers had put themselves forward as alternatives to the current crew, but, while they contributed to the running of the ship, and the largest group ran a very clean ship down in the Western Capsule, none was taken seriously as officer material by the majority, especially not a certain highly opportunistic stoker who started referring to himself as Captain Julius and insisting he represented a “crew-in-waiting”.
For many, the compromise seemed to be clear: better the pilferer you know than the pilot you don’t.
In 2017, however, a horrifying piece of news spread through the decks like poison gas.
The captain and crew weren’t just stealing money or trinkets from passengers.
They were selling bits of the ship itself; slicing through the plates of the hull and peeling them away to sell for scrap; siphoning off oxygen from the ship’s tanks to sell to passing traders.
It seemed too terrible to be true. Surely, many passengers asked, the crew understood that if they kept going, the ship would reach some catastrophic tipping point where it would explode or crumple, leaving everyone — including the crew — floating dead in the void?
But the crew simply shrugged and accused the journalists on board of telling lies.
Then the engines started failing, because nobody had bothered to maintain them, and because there are only so many small pieces you can unbolt from an engine to sell before it starts to sputter and flame out.
Given his eagerness to resign two weeks ago, it’s difficult to know why First Mate Ramaphosa stepped in when he did. But he did, and here we are.
I don’t need to tell you how it’s gone over the last five years. You’ve been here, watching the plates buckle, listening to the crew’s requests to breathe more shallowly to make the oxygen last longer.
But it seems I do need to tell the captain’s opponents why I and so many other people are hoping he survives the leadership conference, starting on Friday.
To them, this is a statement of support, even loyalty. It is neither. Instead, it is simply what happens when a sentient person identifies the pirate who is least likely to shoot a hole in the pressurised hull in the next two years.
If we can’t bring our next crew-choosing forward, perhaps because it might devolve into the chaos of a violent mutiny, then it can only be him, this weak, cautious captain, nudging his broken ship towards 2024.
And once we get there, we, the passengers can banish him and his rotten crew from the bridge, and slowly, carefully get to work welding this poor, battered hulk that is our world.
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