Two youthful giants leave South Africa the poorer. One through emigration and the other by sudden and untimely death. The sudden and untimely death of gifted journalist and author Eusebius McKaiser and his last words on Twitter about Musa Motha have dried our palates for life. His demise and the life of Musa Motha, now in the UK, capture the double jeopardy and Gwara Gwara life of the continuously reverse-orphaned South Africa. Reverse-orphaned because South Africa has its most productive population leaving its shores or dying unnecessarily, leaving parents behind.
His tweet reads: “STOP what you’re doing. Right now. You need to watch this. Wow. I ... am speechless & ran out of tears. Also retweet so Musa Motha becomes a household name in SA and not just a star on a UK show. This is the inspiration you needed for this week.”
I would certainly not have seen what Musa Motha had just done in the UK, had it not been for McKaiser that evening — only to learn later that he had departed and left a crater in many. These giants were and are professionals in the fields of art and culture. McKaiser’s generosity did not end with his awe at Motha being the first ever to bag the group golden buzzer award on the Britain Has Talent show; McKaiser further tweeted: “The 5-minute doccie about the childhood of Musa Motha is worth watching too.” I found it that way too.
The rot in South Africa rejects and evicts those of McKaiser and Motha’s calibre.
The contributions of Motha and McKaiser raise deep questions about the lessons of mainstream economics. Linguist George Zipf developed the gold standard for the theory of urban spatial economy. While the spatial economy reflects this law of hierarchies, as Zipf discovered, the question asked often by heterodoxy is, are these hierarchies god-given models or is there something else beyond the invisible hand of Adam Smith — the power of markets on steroids? For instance, a Korean leader approached the World Bank for assistance and his plea was to connect Seoul and Busan through a 600km rail line. The World Bank found the proposal ridiculous and not worthy of funding. The Korean leader mobilised domestic resources and connected the two nodes and bonded the cultural economic geography of Korea to a marvel of the world well into the 21st century. Korea was a basket case after Japanese invasion. It was just like Singapore in the 60s. It had no rail line when South Africa had at least almost a century of rail since the first 6km rail from The Point in Durban was constructed in 1860s. South Africa had an automatic signalling rail system by the 1940s, all done through the genius of the Jan Smuts-Hendrik van der Bijl duo. Sadly though, this was achieved through back-breaking unrewarded black labour, an important component of the cultural economic geography of dominance. Martin Legassick, Harold Wolpe and Bernard Magubane dealt with this topic thoroughly when they discussed the industrialisation of South Africa through exploitative migrant labour and preservation of cultural norms in an economic system that completely undermined them.
Is there something we can learn from these committed human beings, McKaiser and Motha, whose work life tells us of Lenin’s message to the Bolsheviks in 1920? Lenin’s words: “To be able to outline our political tasks to the people, to be able to say to the masses what things we must strive for (and this is what we should be doing), we must understand that a higher cultural level of the masses is what is required. This higher level we must achieve, otherwise it will be impossible to solve our problems.”
The rot in South Africa rejects and evicts those of McKaiser and Motha’s calibre. They are the Lembedes of our time, who when they met in 1944 with the stalwarts of resistance and revolution, committed to freedom in our lifetime. Anton Lembede died aged thirty-three in 1947, three years after they convened. But all those who were with him then lived on to see freedom in their lifetimes. These were Ntate Dan Tloome (1919-1992), Ntate Oliver Tambo (1917-1993), Ntate Ashley P Mda (1916-1993), Ntate Jordan Kush Ngubane (1917-1995), Ntate Walter Sisulu (1912-2003), Ntate David Bopape (1915-2004), ‘M’e Ellen Kuzwayo (1914-2006), ‘M’e Albertina Sisulu (1918-2011) and Ntate Nelson Mandela (1918-2013). They were able to keep the credo of freedom alive. This is the credo McKaiser has passed on to Motha. Shall we join Motha in keeping it alive?
Unfortunately for us a week was too long. Just outside Maponya Mall, a symbol of black endeavour, taxis were torched and people were wounded. This followed a week of cholera deaths. More was to come with auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke despairing at municipal audits. The island of struggle has been left to decay, obliterating the culture of struggle through wanton greed. The Lembede breed planned in detail and achieved freedom in their lifetimes, lending space for economic freedom as the next terrain of struggle. Ours, however, has been to shamelessly sell the jewel of freedom for dirty water and cholera. Under such circumstances of dehumanisation culture ceases to be the instrument of struggle, which McKaiser and Motha remind us of in their telepathic communication. So disgusting has been the edifice that former president Thabo Mbeki in an interview last week said he had to reconsider campaigning for the ANC in the upcoming election.
Since the Indlulamithi scenarios launched in 2018, we have only witnessed the woeful Gwara Gwara state and can hardly envision the Nayi le Walk that Motha did so well in the UK and left South Africans in tears. Motha and McKaiser make us reflect on the cultural problem as a core feature of economics that neoliberal policies have ignored, to our detriment.
Vladimir Lenin advises us: “A cultural problem cannot be solved as quickly as political and military problems. It must be understood that conditions for further progress are no longer what they were. In a period of acute crisis, it is possible to achieve a political victory within a few weeks. It is possible to obtain victory in war in a few months. But it is impossible to achieve a cultural victory in such a short time. By its very nature it requires a longer period; and we must adapt ourselves to this longer period, plan our work accordingly, and display the maximum of perseverance, persistence, and method. Without these qualities it is impossible even to start on the work of political education. And the only criterion of the results of political education is the improvement achieved in industry and agriculture. We must not only abolish illiteracy and the bribery which persists on the soil of illiteracy, but we must get the people really to accept our propaganda, our guidance and our pamphlets, so that the result may be an improvement in the national economy. Those are the functions of the political education departments in connection with the New Economic Policy, and I hope this congress will help us to achieve greater success in this field.”
As we lay Eusebius McKaiser to rest and think of Musa Motha’s rise to fame in foreign lands, let us remember that the neoliberal tenets undergirding the district development model and the economic reconstruction and recovery plan remain devoid of unorthodox expression in the cultural economic geography. Ignoring a maverick approach is to not heed the voice of Eusebius McKaiser when he said let Motha not be famous only in his land of adoption but in South Africa too. Not heeding him and the indomitable Motha can only perpetuate neocolonial economic aberrations. Theirs is etched in the science of Anton Lembede, Bernard Magubane, Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe.
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