The first time I saw Magnolia, I didn’t understand it. I felt that it was powerful, and that some strange logic tied all the characters together despite their mutual distrust and unfinished grudges, but I could never put my finger on it. Now, having seen it a few times, several years apart, I think I can see the thread running through, something that, as a South African, brings me back to our long list of national questions. Like many of the characters in Magnolia, we rested on our laurels and let our sins blossom, forgetting the crimes of yesterday, ignorant of the waiting moment when fate would ask, “what can be forgiven?” My first political thought came when I was no more than 8, when it was announced that Nelson Mandela would be handing over the presidency to Thabo Mbeki. I was vaguely indignant. Who is this “Mbeki” guy? Mandela is my president! In an odd sort of way, he still is. Something has certainly felt different about the world after Mandela. As the refrain of the film says, “we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us”.
The return of armed white separatists and black nationalists to the southern landscape is almost too stark a reminder of that. So many of my peers show a hatred of the past, a spite towards what they disdainfully call “rainbowism”. They, of course, are far too enlightened to believe in non-racialism. They “understand” that scores must be settled; Cain had nothing to learn from Abel, he had something to teach. Perhaps Johnny Clegg and his band didn’t get the message.
It’s hard to be nostalgic in an untroubled way when you’re white. But if you grew up in South Africa, and you witnessed the change from the old regime to the new, nothing of the world you grew up in remains, in any way shape or form. While many an ignorant young black radical or “enlightened” university graduate will insist despite all recorded evidence that “nothing has changed”, anybody who has seen more than a decade of world-conscious life pass before them can recognise that canard for what it is.
Regardless of the contemporary moral imperative to despise ones roots, one’s culture and one’s fellow race, it is a transparent lie to say that we do not miss the past. This is not, as many black South Africans or Europeans might assume, purely a product of faded privilege. It is something deeper – the smell and consistency, the golden morning light of childhood, glowing with all the untouched virginity of a world before sin, hatred and racial consciousness. Even those of us who have passed through the thorny mutilations of the sins of the adult world, scarred by the traumatic encounter with full-grown wrath and greed, the dreamlike kaleidoscope with which a child looks at the world will always find a golden shard which fascinates the memory for the rest of their life. Nelson Mandela himself opens his autobiography with such a recollection, as do the heroes of even the most downtrodden times.
I was blessed with an even more idyllic childhood, a free-roaming young boy in a small town in the midst of the Hawekwa mountains, faded blue in the day, blazing fiery gold and pink in the evening. Storms blew cold rain in the winter, and the summers grew so hot the tar melted, and stuck to our bare feet as we danced home like skinks, desperate to keep our feet from touching the heat. We caught crabs by the river, drew koki-pen tapestries and wandered in the winelands. Our families had cousins in the farms, centuries old farmsteads, full of the sound of creaking floorboards and grandfather clocks, the chink of old fashioned tea sets and flaring matches to light old men’s pipes. We greeted adults we passed in the street and everybody went to church.
All of it is gone now. The world is hung everywhere with despair and anxiety, an existential dread of the future too deep and wild to bear contemplating. Fear of the future only abates for those who indulge in escapism – drugs, sex, violence and drink. Some entertain the pretence of intellectual conversation. The looming grins of revolutionaries and thugs, the ever-increasing proximity of violence, and the daily erosion of security and prosperity, as the shadows of mortgages grow longer, and the price of bread rises, all feel like the dull roar of microcavitation as the kettle begins to boil. The law matters less and less every day, and crime is treated as a joke at the expense of the unrich and unconnected. Optimism now seems to require superhuman strength.
Much of this spiritual malaise is simply the tragic awakening to reality which adulthood brings. Much of it is self-inflicted, the curse of the political obsessive. But some of it is a real, material loss. It is the loss of one’s roots. The last time I read news about my hometown, it was of a father shot to death in broad daylight in the main road in front of his son for R200. The last time I visited, the shops, which used to be staffed by local, Afrikaans-speaking coloured people, are now staffed by Xhosa people brought in from the Eastern Cape, who provide tax relief for companies through the national anti-minority discrimination policy. The real natives, the light-brown people dispossessed first of their language and history by whites, and now of their jobs and community by blacks, stare hollow-eyed from the side of the road. The roads are potholed, the levee on the river is crumbling, and Chinese stores sit on every street, staffed by Chinese, supplied by China, fully entitled to BEE status.
My childhood was spent in the 1990s. For anyone who remembers it, it is remembered the same way – a moment of transcendent optimism. The art, the music, the television of the time was soaked through with such a delightful sweetness and light, a seemingly unshakeable, divine hope for a future of brotherhood, liberty and prosperity. To listen to the hits of the time, their lyrics which spoke of burning, eternal passion, selfless love and celebration, not in the greedy and the carnal, but in the ephemeral, eternal flame of humanity. Even to watch politics was to witness a glorious ceremony of mutual respect and common endeavour. To contrast yesterday with today is nothing short of culture shock. Dammit, we were even good at soccer once.
I recently went into the algorithmic passageways of YouTube, to discover the tunes from the radio I grew up with. From the cheesy international mimicry of Falling Mirror, Ballyhoo, McCully’s Workshop and Dennis East to the beloved imports like Rodriguez and Eddie Grant; from the lush, homegrown fruits of Hotstix Mabuse, Mafikizolo, Brenda Fassie, the unbeatable jams of Mandoza and Mango Groove, to even the tunes I hated, like the unbearably saccharine Laurika Rauch; all glowed with the same aura of an invincible smile. Even the television had the same quality. Who could possibly have failed to feel hopeful for South Africa after watching an episode of Velaphi, with black and white working together in isiXhosa under a black-owned roof. I even grew up thinking the Moomin were Tswana.
This vision began to fade as we relocated to Johannesburg, and I was told to stay out of the streets. Visiting required being driven by parents, and the outside world acquired a flavour of darkness and danger, leaving the house with friends or alone felt ever so slightly like a forbidden adventure. The natural feeling of limitlessness never came back. Growing up in South Africa, one gets and instinctive understanding where it is and is not safe to go. Having lived in the Netherlands, it feels almost unnaturally safe, like a giant bouncy castle soaked in hashish and sugar syrup. Children ride their bikes everywhere, or hang out in public unsupervised. I had a taste of that as a child. South Africans these days will never have known a safe world. I suppose that is my privilege, to have even known it at all.
The twisted lonesome desires of adolescence harmonised with the scandals of corruption that rocked the South African body politic, as Thabo Mbeki wrestled with the aftershocks of his crimes, and succumbed to the contest for power with his former friend Jacob Zuma. We experimented with drugs, casual sex, fireworks and petty theft, and the sunshine tunes of youth lost their flavour, as we plunged into metal, punk and gangster rap to find our the pearls that matched our emotional disposition. Fokofpolisiekar gave a voice to the young Afrikaners longing to be free from their heritage, stuffy with smoke and alcohol, guilt, Calvinism and middle-class normality. We smoke, drank and partied, and hoped the future would arrive soon, when all the troubles would be over. Friends died, whether taken by robbery, suicide, road accidents or drugs, and the world passed into shadow.
Perhaps, like most adults, we lost a taste for sweets. But I suspect the reality was that there was a worm at the heart of the apple. As it has been remarked, we may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with us. The ANC was a murderous, thieving operation from the moment they shook hands with Russia, financed and directed by the foreign superpower to displace the popular liberation movements of the time. As any student of history will be aware, the IFP and Black Consciousness were far more popular than the ANC in the 1970s. But as their protests were put down, the BC radicals were driven into exile, and the only source of board and lodging, employment and political funding came from the ANC, who demanded, upon pain of death, utter political conformity to the Soviet-backed ideology. Their campaign of terror suppressed almost all domestic opposition, and cemented their seat at the negotiating table with the tired segregationists, no longer spirited enough to fight for apartheid.
White-liberal South Africa is no less tainted. We imagined that the transition to democracy would be on our terms, and that the institutions of Liberal Democracy, informed by the British parliamentary model and a transatlantic Fukuyama-esque consensus would bring black South Africa into line with our “enlightened” liberal values, as we marched toward a future defined by the West European concept of Progress. This had failed before when Jan Smuts and Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr tried to sell it to the Afrikaners, and it would fail now as Mandela and the world’s liberal elite tried to sell it to blacks. Imagining we could waltz uninterrupted into a happy ballroom of forgiving smiles without paying a penalty was, in retrospect, a dream too feverish to maintain.
Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether believing in the myth was a mistake or not. But believing in its opposite, like the cynical anti-rainbowist black radicals, or the righteously enraged, but vengeful white separatists, offers nothing in its place but a deeper, more unfixable misery. So we dither, hoping to check our privilege at the door by denouncing ourselves, forgetting that white skin doesn’t rub off. Some keep their heads down, hoping if we are well behaved, we will be allowed to live normal lives. Some leave. But there is nothing normal in South Africa. For there to be a normal, there has to be two things – a norm, and a sense of normality. With no common heritage, and no peace or security, these come hard. Our shared history is a mutual suffering. Our home is in flames, and there are wolves at the door.
There is only one valuable thing we all have in common, if I reflect on it. It is a memory, perhaps a faded one, perhaps one seen through rose-tinted glasses, perhaps even a dream or a hallucination, some would say a fiction. But for anyone who remembers what it felt like to believe in it, it is as real as the touch of mother, or the glow of the winter sun on the stoep on an idle Saturday. The days of Mandela may be a dream, but I have seen the limbic taint in the eyes of those who refuse to believe in it, their souls awash with fire and blood, bile and ashes. We forgot that the promise of our Jerusalem rested on our labours, not a spontaneous act of divine providence. Until we are done with our pasts, the past isn’t through with us. And if we do not face this challenge, who will be there to forgive us?
The Eccentric Flock 