TOM EATON | What next? We need to ask ourselves what sort of country we want to build

Shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and imprisoned by the Viet Cong, US fighter pilot Bob Shumaker spent eight years and one day building a house in his mind.

A psychologist might suggest that Shumaker was constructing a place in which he could escape the realities of life in the notorious prison known as the Hanoi Hilton. It would also have been a highly efficient way of keeping his faculties intact.

For Shumaker, however, the house was more than self-defence or mental exercise: it was a blueprint of a very real and precious future, when he would return to his wife and son and build them the home in his head.

And so he built it as carefully and with as much discipline as that future deserved, limiting his imagination to add only what he might realistically manage in an hour or day or week; measuring foundations; cutting and treating timber; laying each brick and pipe; nailing down each floorboard; plastering; painting; varnishing.

I’ve been thinking about Bob Shumaker’s dream house over the past few days, and especially now as Cyril Ramaphosa stirs the dust bunnies under his bed and calls it a cabinet reshuffle.

Certainly, an imaginary house is more real than any benefit this country might derive from sticking new name tags on office doors and plonking new buttocks on office chairs. I know we’ve been encouraged to believe that Ramaphosa’s game of musical chairs is a politically important moment, but I can’t help feeling that it long ago transformed into an elaborate form of self-mockery, or at least a darkly comic novella in which people trapped in limbo are all waiting for a moment (“long-awaited”, the press calls it) that will officially confirm that they are, in fact, trapped in limbo.

Shumaker’s house, however, offers us more than a punchline at the ANC’s expense because it reminds us that limbo sometimes ends, and when it does, having planned for that moment might be the difference between building our dream house and standing flat-footed in the wilderness.

I understand if this sounds unnecessarily alarmist. Many South Africans barely have the energy to engage with the political present, let alone the future. Surely, some might ask, we should first dump the ANC out of power before we start daydreaming about some abstract next step?

Surely, some might ask, we should first dump the ANC out of power before we start daydreaming about some abstract next step?

Again, I can sympathise. But I also know that all of us are vulnerable to a deep-rooted, anaesthetising belief that, once the monster falls face-first into the dust, the sun will come out and the birds will tweet and all will be well. It’s why nobody likes the second-last chapter of The Lord of the Rings where the heroic hobbits get home after chucking the ring into the volcano and find it still being run by the sort of people currently jamming screwdrivers into gearboxes at Eskom power stations.

Even now, despite our cynicism and world-weariness, many of us believe that if the ANC loses power next year, Luthuli House will implode on itself and all the deployed cadres will run screaming into them mountains, and the power stations will begin to whirr and purr, and Fikile Mbalula will have to get a job for the first time in his life.

Except none of that will happen. When the ANC loses power, or is forced to share it, it will make the last decade look like a Buddhist retreat. Even if the party’s more pragmatic factions and affiliates don’t engage in open insurrection and sabotage, the very fact that we are now seriously discussing the possibility of Julius Malema being deputy president confirms that we are careening towards a future of absurd possibilities and intense disappointment for the millions of people who had hoped for instant and tangible improvements.

We can’t even be sure that democracy will survive the ANC. Indeed, if young South Africans believed their eyes and ears, instead of the pretty words we’ve told them, they would be perfectly within their rights to believe that democracy, at least in the SA context, is a system in which criminals have better prospects than matriculants, and in which the unemployed stand in queues while the unemployable snooze in their parliamentary villages.

All of which is why I think it might be useful to spend this time of relative quiet to think about the home we want to build, not just in general terms but as something that will have to be constructed brick by brick, policy by policy, election by election. It is no longer enough to say “I don’t want this”. Now, we need to ask ourselves what we do want, right down to the foundations.

For example: do we still want economic justice for the victims of apartheid, or have we decided to let a (theoretically) growing economy take care of that, possibly generations hence? How many civil and political liberties are we willing to surrender if we can be guaranteed more security and better prospects? Are we a people that wants social democracy, or are we more inclined to capitalist oligarchy, or even paternalistic theocracy?

We won’t find consensus. But if we are to stand a chance against the professional gaslighters who profit by telling us what to believe and who to resent and fear, we must, at the very least, know our own minds.

And just so you know: Bob Shumaker went home in 1973 and built that house.