Recently Dr Mamphela Ramphele astutely observed that the problem with African leaders is their inability “to envision their roles as agents of fundamental transformation of their societies”. I want to extend her point to those in the business of manufacturing public opinion, in particular journalists and cartoonists.
Ramphele uses the example of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. For all his “anti-colonial” bluster, Mugabe has always had an unhealthy reverence for things British. He, like many other African leaders, craves the trappings of colonial power.
“Liberation heroes” ejected the colonial masters, just to adopt their tools and systems of power. Instead of working out models that redress power relations with due regard to the particularities of each post-colonial society, they merely modified the colonial state while barely disturbing its anti-democratic building blocks.
Ramphele puts it memorably: “Unfortunately, many of our leaders cast themselves in the roles of the very colonial masters they replaced. Their revolutionary fire for freedom from oppression has too often turned into a passion for emulating the same oppressors and their methods. Such emulation is both in symbolic and material terms.
“Just cast your mind to the installation of Robert Mugabe on (June 29 2008) after the sham election to see the symbolism of British colonialism writ large. Witness the stiff ceremony with white-wigged, red-robed and solemn judges adorning Mugabe with the same type of cross-band of office that was used by Governor-generals of the colonial era. It is a tragic indicator of the deep seated yearning to be the master just like the one he replaced – more British than the British,’’ she argues.
Ugandan scholar Prof Mahmood Mamdani has also written about the continuation of the colonial state in post-colonial Africa. This is done through the continued bifurcation of the state into civil and customary realms. In the former citizens have rights; in the latter they are subjects ruled over by despotic chiefs — still.
Mamdani also looks at the perpetuation of the colonial processes of racialisation and ethnicisation that were activated during the colonial period. This has led to the genocide in Rwanda, among others. I have argued elsewhere that this may lie at the heart of the recent public violence against black outsiders.
Similarly, Frantz Fanon in a scathing exposition in The Wretched of the Earth dissected the post-colonial national bourgeoisie’s ignorance and materialism while it props up extractive, non-productive capitalism on the periphery of the world order.
All of this confirms Ramphele’s point: the post-colonial story in Africa has been one in which inherited habits of power are reproduced while societies sink further into socio-economic misery.
These are the post-colonial patterns that South Africans are at risk of repeating. It seems we are mostly aware of this, especially recently due to the onslaught against constitutional institutions and values.
After the hiatus of rainbowism, fever-pitch contestation has erupted over the content of our democracy. Opinion-makers and journalists are compelled to decide whether they want to bolster inherited power configurations or transform them.
To make it relevant at this particular juncture: do the Zapiro cartoons that the Sunday Times and Mail & Guardian have published since September 7 challenge or affirm inherited power hierarchies? This blog is an elaboration of the previous one on this question.
The yardstick should be the Constitution because even “political satire” and “journalistic principles” (proffered by one reader in response to my last blog) are not above our founding social contract.
Based on constitutional values, Ramphele comes up with the following vision of transformation: “a radical shift in the frame of reference for social relationships … (I)t entails redefining power relationships from a zero-sum game to relationships that recognise the mutual benefits of empowerment of all to enable them to contribute their very best to their societies.
“Such social relationships would have no place for racism, sexism, authoritarianism or any other form of discrimination. Diversity would be celebrated not as a cliché but as an essential ingredient of success, peace and prosperity in an interconnected globalising world,” she concludes.
This vision of a “radical shift in the frame of reference for social relationships” is what is required if we are serious about not re-entrenching colonial and apartheid binary hierarchies. Zapiro’s cartoons during the past week fail this test despite their attempt to warn against the abuse of power.
The difficulty with the metaphor of rape in these cartoons is that this critique of the violation of rights is in itself a violation of rights.
Obscuring and minimising real-life women’s experiences of sexual violence through the use of Woman as object of representation is a violation. Using a depiction of the (imminent) violation of a woman’s body to protest against the (imminent) violation of the rule of law is a fundamental contradiction.
This could have been avoided if freedom of expression was not approached as an absolute right. It is not. It should be balanced with the other rights contained in the bill of rights.
To entrench democracy and human rights and to break with the former “oppressors and their methods”, “both in symbolic and material terms”, we need to radically (down to the root) transform social relations of power.
Radical transformation is impossible while we’re clinging to symbols designed to minimise real lives. Or to crass satire that infringes some rights in the name of protecting others. But this will obviously only be a concern if we as journalists regard ourselves as agents of fundamental transformation of all unequal social relations, including gender.
Why quote Dr Rampele and Prof Mamdani and not Moeletsi Mbeki who has said the same thing a long time ago, and in less flattering terms?
I think you miss the point. The colonial powers, Britain and France and Portugal and Belgium, all do have democracy today, and did leave the principles of democracy behind. African leaders reverted to tribalism and elite “chiefdoms”.
The reason Rwanda had civil war was BECAUSE democracy was introduced, giving the Hutu peasants the main say and not the Ttutsi chiefs, who had held control untill possibly as far back at the 12th century in a totally stable, although undemocratic, society.
The vestage of democracy was super-imposed and paper thin in Africa and cracked on independence.
What you say is true but coming down to the ground level: if you were a talented cartoon drawer how would you portray, powerfully and meaningly, a powerful group messing with the constitution and the laws and that offended no one?
Ramphele’s wonderful vision of transformation: “a radical shift in the frame of reference for social relationships … (I)t entails redefining power relationships from a zero-sum game to relationships that recognise the mutual benefits of empowerment of all to enable them to contribute their very best to their societies etc – will never be realised whilst SA suffers under a voting system, proportionality, that put total power in the hands of a few party bosses
Brent
The difficulty with these ‘visions of transformation’ is that no one has been able to define what they involve in practical terms. They remain at worst a fruitless ‘anti-west’ polemic, at best a well-intentioned wish or hope that the human race becomes kinder to each other, an ideal no one could possibly argue with.
Well and good. But it is important meantime to attempt to do something, starting from where we find ourselves: to form a view of what may be wrong with our own beliefs and traditions, our own leaders, our own institutions – and to expose and, where necessary, criticise it vigorously.
To attribute the excesses of ‘the Mugabe’s’ of Africa (or of any other continent) to ‘inherited habits of power’ is unconvincing to anyone who has a minimum of time and inclination to look at history. The colonialists did not bring the greedy struggle for wealth and power to Africa; as with the British in India over a century earlier, they exploited for their own ends what they found here.
If, after years in power, ‘the Mugabe’s’ can justly blame the way they turned out on the example of their colonial masters, they can by now justly be blamed for refusing to take a better lesson from it – the imperative to work in future for freedom and social justice for all, a course equally there to be followed by any who chose to.
If the people of any country in the world today have achieved any life at all worthy of emulation, depend on it no outside power gifted it to them. Let us criticise. Let us also look and learn.
Brent asks: “What you say is true but coming down to the ground level: if you were a talented cartoon drawer how would you portray, powerfully and meaningly, a powerful group messing with the constitution and the laws and that offended no one?”
A different, but allied critique I might make of Zapiro’s cartoon is just that, that it is lazy: it doesn’t give one a new, fresh insight into the situation, but uses a cliché to make a pretty hackneyed point. The metaphor of Justitia being raped or somehow assailed is by no means new. Zapiro, it might be said, using Christi’s terminology, is not being particularly transformative, or radical. And, as much as I value the important role Zapiro plays in South African public discourse, I do quite often find his cartoons to be rather glib and superficial. They often lack the wryness or subtlety one might wish for. The post-Nicholson cartoon by Zapiro in which he says the controversial cartoon remains valid is a good example of a cartoon telling rather than showing.
Too often Zapiro does just this: he tells us how to think, rather than showing a complex, ambiguous picture which challenges the reader/viewer.
What is more, if one values the democracy that is South Africa, it is wrong to characterise Zuma’s using legal means to escape liability as being somehow wrong – as “messing with the constitution”. These are the safeguards that protect you and me too. Saying otherwise is like Sarah Palin making light of the procedural devices in place to protect all those accused of a crime in the U.S., terrorism suspects included.
To answer Brent’s question, if I were a talented cartoonist, which I’m not, I’d have made a different point in a different way.
Kudos Christi, for walking a very lonely road.
I do however struggle with your conception of a corollary between Zapiro’s “shooting through a crowd to break up a fight in the centre” and the Fanonian characterisation of the indigenous post-colonial despot who mirrors his erstwhile colonisers edict & manner. Tenuous…
I agree with Jean, i think Zapiro is better analysed and understood in the context of editorial policy, good taste and best-practise.
I do think that the bigger ‘transformative’ questions you pose are haunting…
Tired subject…*yawn* zzzZZZZ
Oh, for God’s sake, it’s a cartoon! How is using the metaphor of rape as a violent act any more objectionable than using the metaphor of murder? I haven’t read such politically correct garbage since Frank Spart retired. And what does this have to do with Mugabe anyway?
You’re flogging a dead horse Christie. We would never have any political cartoons at all if cartoonist were afraid of offending anyone who had once been a survivor/victim of some sort.
Hi Christi,
You got the whole thing wrong man. you don’t understand the whole concept of “freedom of expression” I THINK YOU NEED TO DO SOME SERIOUS RESEARCH ON THE TOPIC. I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START educating you.
“Zapiro and the Sunday Times owe South Africans an apology”
Why? Because of some convoluted claptrap is supposed to make South Africans aware of some great injustice perpetrated by Zap and the ST?
And what about the fact that the figures depicted (other than the rape victim, i.e. Justice) are woefully inadequate in combating rape and terribly misogynistic too boot.
Racial transformation (what is that anyway in the present SA?) may be indeed be impossible –but not for drawing cartoons as the one at hand.
A billion additional words written on this will not make your case stronger –total waste of time; find something real.
But perhaps Zap will now refrain from using the trite metaphor……