TOM EATON

Two years ago, when Lindiwe Sisulu accused the South African judiciary of being “house Negroes” who “lick the spittle of those who falsely claim superiority”, I thought it was a desperate lunge at fascistic populism by a politician watching the last floaters of her career circle the bowl. Now, however, I’m wondering if I misjudged her.

This question came to me this week as I read a short essay, published on this website, by a certain Mphumzi Mdekazi, who is apparently a PhD candidate.

Sporting the headline “To some Africans, selling out their fellow Africans is second nature”, the essay started with remarkable transparency.

“People don’t understand,” he wrote with the confident self-pity and egoism of the mediocre undergraduate who doesn’t understand why girls laugh at him, “how hard it is to speak the truth to a world full of people who don’t realise they are living a lie.”

It was morbidly fascinating, like watching a community theatre production of The Matrix where the red and blue pills are melting M&Ms, but at least the subtext was easy to understand: people disagree with Mr Mdekazi, a fact which upsets him, but he consoles himself with the knowledge that he is right, which means anyone who disagrees with him is either a “house Negro” or “the enemy”, terms he uses with relish in his essay.

Six paragraphs in, however, things suddenly got confusing, as Mdekazi warned allowing “the enemy” (the DA) into government “might even speed up the cessation objective they have planted”.

My thoughts and prayers go to his PhD supervisor.

I was perplexed. What was this diabolical cessation plan Mdekazi had revealed? What things were being ceased and what things would be ceased in ever greater numbers? I read on ...

“Should that happen,” continued Mdekazi, “the entire Atlantic flank of the country would be widely open, rendering the country vulnerable from a security point of view.”

Ah. So not “cessation”, then, but “secession”. My thoughts and prayers go to his PhD supervisor.

Of course it goes without saying he didn’t explain how, exactly, the DA would oversee the cessation, sorry, secession of the Western Cape from inside a government of national unity, given that such a step would require the approval of a majority of MPs.

Then again, why fool around with things such as coherent arguments when you can just denounce “one of our own” — an unnamed but firmly implied Cyril Ramaphosa — as “a Trojan horse of the imperialists, a committed slave, a sell-out and the enemy of African people”?

Again, I can’t reiterate how sorry I am for Mdekazi’s supervisor. My God, you must have done some horrible stuff in a past life.

Anyway. On and on it went; but as it went on and on, with its wonky logic and wild rhetoric, it seemed less like the work of someone who is academic-adjacent and more like something you’d expect from a B-grade politician. And so I Googled him and everything became clear.

Because Mdekazi is none other than one of the people who found brief media fame in 2022 as advisers to the spectacularly self-destructing Lindiwe Sisulu in her annus horribilis.

Indeed, one of the first things that came up was another op-ed, published by Daily Maverick that year, in which Mdekazi insisted the woman who had been an eager participant in Jacob Zuma’s 10 wasted years and who had just publicly called for the purging of the judiciary was — and I promise I’m not making this up — a strong contender to beat Ramaphosa at the ANC elective conference and take over the presidency.

All of which is to say I think I might owe Lindiwe Sisulu an apology.

You see, back in 2022 I assumed she was deliberately ignoring the sensible, intelligent advice of experts, or, given how few of those there are in the ANC, people who at least knew the difference between cessation and secession, or had a passing knowledge of the basic tenets of the constitution.

But I was wrong, and now I have to admit: if these were the sort of people advising Sisulu, she had a raw, raw deal.