I understand if you didn’t watch last week’s state of the nation address. There was other, more interesting programming on offer, such as infomercials for antifungal foot cream. Besides, it’s all starting to feel faintly undignified, like watching some once-majestic creature of the deep, washed up by a freak weather event, quietly explode on a beach.
Still, there was one part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech that captured the public imagination, or at least shot it with a dart and threw a tarp over it: the brief tale of a young woman called Tintswalo.
In the past few years consultants have discovered what children have known for a million years — nothing penetrates a tired brain like a story. Accordingly, dry PowerPoint presentations have been replaced by an army of mediocre Hans Christian Andersens or at least by a sort of fungible corporate storytelling machine — HansChristianAndersen Pty Ltd, if you will, dedicated to conjuring up little mermaids before selling them to a fishmonger.
It’s cynical, of course, and very dishonest, this business of wrapping crude sales pitches in a veneer of creativity and childhood magic. But for Ramaphosa’s speechwriters, inventing Tintswalo was, I have to admit, an elegant way of taking his audience back 30 years and reminding it of the gigantic steps the ANC took in dragging Mlungustan back from the bloody cusp of war to true democracy, statehood and the first threads of a social safety net.
Having breathed life into Tintswalo, however, Dr Frankenwhine promptly abandoned his creation and wandered away. Granted, it was perfectly in keeping with the ANC’s penchant for caring about the proletariat only as long as it is politically useful, but still, I’d got interested and was sorry to see her go.
So much so that over the weekend I found myself thinking of all those parts of her life we didn’t hear about, such as the afternoon in 1998, just as little Tintswalo was settling down for a nap in her granny’s new RDP house, when the ministry of minerals and energy published a white paper stating “Eskom’s present generation capacity surplus will be fully used by about 2007”.
Ramaphosa didn’t tell us what Tintswalo thought of the ANC Women’s League dancing outside Zuma’s trial or of the revelation that Zuma was building himself a compound at taxpayers’ expense.
Tintswalo didn’t know what that meant because she was four years old. I don’t know what excuse the rest of the ANC had, but here we are.
The president also didn’t have time to paint a more complete picture of Tintswalo’s years at school.
We weren’t told, for example, about her happy first year in 2001 when she learnt to spell “Tintswalo” and we learnt to spell “Joe Modise” and “Saab Gripen” and “orgy of corruption”.
I imagine grade 2 was even more exciting as Tintswalo learnt sometimes words have two meanings, such as “date” or “bark” or “quiet diplomacy”, which means doing diplomacy quietly also means rubber-stamping a stolen election and then sitting on the Khampepe report for 12 years until the Mail&Guardian forces you to make it public.
Of course, change is relentless and as Tintswalo entered high school it was in a country with a new cast of characters.
Yes, there was the happy childhood nostalgia of Thabo Mbeki watching Robert Mugabe steal another election and explaining how letting 300,000 South Africans die of HIV/Aids was anti-racist, but now there was also Julius Malema, the new head of the ANC Youth League, a position once held by Nelson Mandela, explaining Jacob Zuma couldn’t have raped “Kwezi" because she’d stayed for breakfast and clearly “had a nice time”.
Ramaphosa didn’t tell us what Tintswalo thought of the ANC Women’s League dancing outside Zuma’s trial or of the revelation that Zuma was building himself a compound at taxpayers’ expense. He certainly didn’t tell us what Tintswalo thought of the horror unleashed at Marikana just as she was preparing for her matric exams.
He did, however, tell us her next step was to register and study at a TVET college, presumably because not everybody can be like Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, a defence minister who watched the Guptas land at Waterkloof air force base that same year, didn’t resign, wasn’t fired, kept her job for another nine years and is now the speaker of the National Assembly. No, when Tintswalo saw the newspaper posters on her way to college she knew in the real world people have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
A good and focused student, Tintswalo graduated the same year Zuma appointed Des van Rooyen as finance minister and got something increasingly rare in South Africa: a job.
After that? I know that in 2019 Ramaphosa told her to “watch this space”, and, like the rest of us, she’s watched nothing but space since then. It’s possible she’s stayed in the decent, BEE-backed job Ramaphosa outlined. It’s possible she’s lost it, and four others, as one business after another was crushed by load-shedding born four years after she was.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter, because Tintswalo isn’t real. She is nobody, conjured by a nothing burger of a president in defence of a party that simply isn’t there any more.
The only stories that matter now are the ones inside the heads of ANC voters and non-voters and whether those old stories still satisfy them or whether it’s time to close the book once and for all.
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