I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately. The young tech entrepreneurs and artists I met at Culture Shift. The 40-something filmmaker, writer and consultant I first encountered at an idea orgy (where ideas mate to produce new ideas). The marketing guru inspired by the potential for technology to inspire new social movements. The 25-year-old entrepreneur – yes, yes, say it, cougar tendencies – who let me accompany him on his regular walk around Westcliff (observation: passing motorists found the site of a big black guy in an ANC T-shirt and a very pale white chick walking together in the street utterly fascinating). The young Airbus pilot who wanted to talk to me about the disenchantment of black South Africans with politics at the Jolly Roger at 3am (I know what you’re assuming, so I’ll add that he was black). The Bangladeshi permanent resident who knows more about our political history than any South African I’ve met, and many more, mostly under the age of 30.
I’ve been sounding them out on an idea I’m afraid to utter out loud in a forum like this, because chances are it’ll be shot down. Thought Leader readers are a tough audience. But what the hell – ideas can only live if they can be replicated, so I’ll put this out there. (Disclaimer: I use the word “we” and “us” repeatedly, knowing that I cannot claim to speak on behalf of anyone but myself.)
Essentially, what I am arguing is this: South Africa needs a new national myth. Or myths; no single story can truly encompass the breadth and complexity of our reality. By national myth, I mean an overarching narrative that lends meaning and purpose to daily life. Uri Ram, drawing on the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, puts it succinctly: “Nationality is a narration, a story which people tell about themselves in order to lend meaning to their social world. The fact that nationality is a story does not challenge its reality, because myths are not mystifications.”
I use the term myth, but you can call it what you like: a vision, a story, a counter-narrative. It doesn’t matter what we name it; what matters is the idea itself.
Let me explain why. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the role of advertising in post-apartheid South African national identity. In exploring how Castle Lager and Vodacom influenced our sense of a national self, I identified a number of national myths that predominated in South Africa over the time. By national myth, I don’t mean a falsehood, but rather an overarching narrative which lends meaning and purpose to daily life. The power of myth becomes clear when you look at the history of South Africa. Prior to 1990, the landscape of the imagination was dominated by two myths: Afrikaner nationalism and The Struggle. Both were potent and they powered a great deal of action over decades. The presence of the myth ensured commitment to a cause that might otherwise have seemed quixotic.
FW de Klerk effectively named a new national myth when he announced on February 2 1990 that we were now living in a new South Africa. The Rainbow Nation appeared from around 1993 and lasted alongside the myth of Madiba magic until 1998, when Thabo Mbeki killed it off with his Two Nations speech and replaced it with the African renaissance. The African renaissance never really resonated and it was effectively replaced in the 2000s by what I call Brand South Africa, when the media focused on tourism and the performance of the Rand, and which culminated in the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Since then the nation has been wandering about without any real meaning or purpose. We’re fixated on divisions within the ruling party; political discourse has descended to the level of argument over the meaning of a stupid bloody word. No narrative about where we’re headed has come to dominate public discourse. It is Julius Malema who has effectively defined the national narrative with his call for economic freedom (an idea that at its heart is a good one, by the way). We know we need to achieve economic freedom, the fabled better life for all; it’s just the how that’s proving tricky.
When political analysts observe the potential for the entire national project to unravel, you know you have a problem. If you think about what dominates our national discourse, it’s overwhelmingly negative. Corruption, incompetence, lack of service delivery, crime, the increasing impatience of the masses who probably regard the constitution as slightly less useful than toilet paper, as Aubrey Matshiqi writes here (which is exactly why Media Monitoring Africa started We The People – to educate ordinary South Africans on why the Constitution is relevant to them and how it makes a difference in their lives – and why I’m frustrated that it didn’t get more support than it did). The jobless youth are restless.
It’s easy to give into hopelessness, and there are millions of South Africans who have done exactly that. Yet there’s so much good happening out there. Cheesekids, Greater Good, the SKA and many other NGOs, LeadSA (our national prefects), the National Research Foundation, FormulaSA and so many others from a whole range of fields. And yes, even in government: the story about Home Affairs is a good one, evidence that it is possible to turn a basket case into a functioning entity that actually delivers services to South Africa’s citizens efficiently.
There are so many brilliant people out there who really are making a difference. (As tech entrepreneur Stafford Masie said at Culture Shift, “Why make money in America when you can make a difference in Africa?”) There is excellence, there is energy, and there is creativity. The reason these things are not making the kind of impact that they should be is that they don’t add up. They’re too scattered; there is no focused narrative. For ideas to be replicated, they must be simple and compelling. We need something that can be made as relevant to unemployed matriculants as it can to innovators and artists.
Here’s the thing. All of these tough conversations must happen. We need the honesty that Zama Ndlovu writes about. As she observes: “Until we are able to have a decent conversation, we cannot hope to get to make the compromises that are required to move our nation forward. We cannot hope to create a space that allows for innovative leadership and creative solutions.”
But if it’s only tough conversations, if it’s only peeling back the carpet to examine the dustbunnies and the dead cockroaches underneath, we’ll give up trying. We’ll become so overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge and the breadth of the divisions between us that we’ll abandon the conviction that we can make things better. We’ll lose the ability to create that space that allows for innovative leadership and creative solutions. Instead, we will become more insular, more focused on immediate gratification – perhaps drugs, or cars, or shoes – rather than holding out for the bigger picture. Because what’s the point when none of it means anything and we’re all screwed anyway? We’ll retreat to a Dainfern of the mind as so many already have done.
So we need a counter-narrative to the corruption/ division story, an alternative to the notion that nothing will ever really change, that we succeed or fail on the whim of politicians and that underneath all the politeness we actually can’t stand each other. None of the kumbaya bullshit of the Rainbow Nation: something that is honest about our differences and our challenges, and rooted in the dignity and equality stipulated in the constitution. But also – and this is important – something that inspires us. Something that reminds us of what we are capable of if only we put our minds to it. The American psychologist Rollo May once wrote of the need for myth and its role in national identity. “The outsider, the foreigner, the stranger,” he wrote, “is the one who does not share our myths, the one who steers by different stars, who worships different gods.”
And that’s what we need: a star to steer by. A fixed point in the sky to focus on when circumstances knock us off course. (http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/simonhartley/2012/03/27/embracing-irrelevance-is-a-bitter-thing/)
I don’t have the answers. I honestly don’t know how to tackle that thing in the air that Zama writes about. But we need … something. An icon, a meme, maybe even a slogan, though I don’t think something like “Inspiring new ideas” is going to inspire any actual new ideas. What form it might take, I don’t know. But find it we must – because without it we’ll just get even more lost in the wilderness than we already are.
The USA, the best mythologisers ever, used Hollywood. What medium (media) should we use to create our myths?
Brand our currency!
Having a common goal and purpose is absolutely essential for any human being. South Africa definitely needs a new national myth and a common objective. I agree with and support your initiative Sarah!
Good article, Sarah, that raises all the right questions and also points to many of the weaknesses in our national discourse. I fully agree with you about the need to grow up and leave the ‘Rainbow Nation’ myth behind and I think that we’re finally doing so. Two points:
1. Our greatest single challenge is creating shared nationhood. Apartheid was designed to perpetuate the myth of a country of many different separate nations. We are still recovering and discovering ourselves to be South African. An illustration: in England, my birth country, when forced to choose one identity option 91% of people choose English or British. According to the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) when asked the same ‘forced identity’ question, only 13% of people see themselves primarily as South African whereas a cumulative 57% choose racial or racially linked identities (language, ethnicity and race). This is not surprising but is our single greatest challenge.
2. We should go easy on ourselves. The question of national identity formation is common to most of the ex-colony countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America and we have only recently emerged from colonialism. South Africans tend to be insular and pessimistic as well as thinking that our issues are uniquely difficult. They’re not and most emerging countries have similar issues. That’s not a call for complacency but for both realism and a realisation that this is a ‘long haul’ issue that will require generations…
I’m not sure that nations generally have manufactured myths in the way companies do. And the myths they have are often stronger for not being articulated. If it’s true it just is; if it isn’t then rabbiting on about it won’t make it so. This is why concepts such as, say, Englishness can partly be understood in a reflective sense but cannot easily be turned into a marketing prescription.
And these myths persist. They acquire their patina over centuries or millennia. In contrast, by your account, South Africa has had three in the past two decades: Rainbow Nation, African Renaissance and ‘Brand South Africa’. Do you now want another set of myths which will provide the one ring to bind them? This begins to sound a little like the quest for the unicorn. Possibly good for the vanity of the knight who is leading the quest (as the previous ones were) but unlikely to contribute to the sum of human happiness or knowledge.
You are dismissive of the ‘rainbow nation’ stuff. But I think that is the only concept that may have had legs. ‘We are variegated but diffractions of the same thing, we co-exist in harmony.’ And it was upbeat and could be clearly understood. This could have been built on.
The African Renaissance was always going to fail. And ‘Brand South Africa’ is surely, like ‘Incredible India’ or ‘Malaysia, truly Asia’ a tourism construct that only has resonance when viewed from the outside?
It’s clear that celebrating our ‘similarities’ has failed to work, or inspire. The rainbow nation is dead and buried.
I suggest the opposite. ‘We are all different’.
And celebrate our differences. Recognise our differences. Harness our differences. Understand our differences. Make our differences the reason why we help each other.
Break down the barriers between our differences – BEE, cadres, sycophancy, nepotism, corruption, incompetence, arrogance, tainted laws…
And build the bridges between our differences – education, civilisation, meritocracy, tolerance, cooperation, humility, transparency…
For our children.
Wow, you are clever. Your best post yet!
Australians have “The lucky country”. South Africa could be “Blessed, but grabbing, now growing and sharing the pie”. How about “Take once, give twice”.
Firstly, your obsession with skin color and race. Who cares what others think when you walk own the street with another human being? As Gandhi said, “Be the change”
Secondly, the “Rainbow Nation” was not a myth but a Mandela’s DREAM to prevent genocide. Similarly, Mbeki’s dream of an “African Renaissance” was to elevate the self worth of blacks after centuries of white supremacy. Remember, Martin Luther King did not say “I have a myth” but “I have a DREAM”. What you call “kumbaya bullshit” are our dreams of a better world.
Thirdly, MYTHS are propagated by mainstream media controlled by White Inc in which you, being in advertising, are a cheerleader. It a myth that SA is utterly corrupt, when international opinion states otherwise or that we have suddenly become crime ridden, when worse crime existed during apartheid, albeit confined to blacks ignored by the apartheid police state.
Words are important enough to go to court :
- ban struggle songs
- oppose street name changes
- risk national security using “public interest”
- oppose Constitutional amendments
However, words suddenly become UNIMPORTANT when:
- a word like “refugee” is used to marginalize blacks in the WCape
- racial classifications were used to confer wealth and privilege to whites for centuries
- debating who is really “African”
- what’s an African language
This kinds of hypocrisy is shameful.
No we don’t need a new myth, but a new dream of economic liberation…
We are all sick and tired of being defined by myths. A unifying myth is the last thing we need in my opinion. America has the War on Terror. We had Rainbow Nation. Two very different myths, but still – myths. Things that generate an insider/outsider binary. And it is this insider/outsider bullshit (whether of the apartheid variety, the war on terror type, or the rainbow nation one) that we are fed up with. People also have their “We Are a Christian Nation” myth to bolster their sense of identity. All these things are like predefined conceptual grids that are imposed from the outside onto the infinite complexity and contradictoriness of human existence. A grid that is imposed from the outside is always going to be oppressive and constraining and irritating and undesirable. The creation of a myth to unify us and bestow identity upon us is a by-product of the age of MARKETING and presumes that THOUGHT CONSTRUCTS come before ACTION, LIVING and DOING.
Our unifying story is already all around us in the taxis, hawkers, malls, beggars, townships, suburbs, sunlight, landscape, languages, accents, billboards, jacarandas, presidents, school kids, we experience every day. Within this plethora of complexity and contradiction is who we are. We don’t need some overarching narrative that can be applied to all of us, because – who is to be the one to invent this narrative? And why should that person/group get to be the one who defines everybody else?
A new myth? Nein danke.
Thought-provoking. But the Bulls are playing the Stormers this weekend. Why is your article relevant?
I’m gob-smacked! The Jolly Roger is still humming? Do they still have the world’s worst one-man-bands?
But to the moot.
In order for a national ‘myth’ to grab more than air, it needs an element of truth or past resume to draw from. As Rhodes believed unwaveringly in the British way of life, so do the Greeks and Italians find profit from their cultural contributions to the world and past glories. These times may have all passed, but the whiff of superiority lingers on.
Unfortunately for South Africa, it has a rather dismal record of late. It’s contribution to the world seems to be nothing other than the usual African problems, as mild as they may be at present. You first need to establish pride in some ACTUAL achievements, before you can create or expand on an identity. The Scots have the period of Enlightenment. Americans their wealth and progressiveness. The French their romance. And many other nations draw from a scintilla of truth, in order to manufacture a new identity. You need a REAL new (and actually improved) South Africa. But first you need to actually improve, and not put the cart before the horse. You’re setting yourself up for failure (as evidenced) if you don’t.
What perturbs me is that although SA marked the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Union in 1910, the beginning of our life as a modern unitary nation state and the end of several centuries of primary colonial settlement, hardly a thing was said about this in the public sphere.
The ANC, just one of many political parties in a multiparty system albeit the largest, occupies a mass of public broadcaster space and time for its own subsequent centenary and seeks to claim the role of main protagonist, narrative director, dominant voice, within the national myth – and marks other players as adversaries. This, sadly, is our current national myth. I’m not of course speaking of social/historical myth but something closer to the idea of an efficacious (or otherwise) collective national psyche as you seem to be too, whether or not in this day and age such a concept is feasible or desirable.
Apart from the role of the ANC, all that we seem to have is a cliched social myth derived from business models: ‘Brand SA’, and ‘franchise’ meaning business opportunities rather than the vote, and government as a service provider and citizens as customers. This awful social myth or mytheme is destroying any real chance of a strong, visionary, healing alternative to the Big Elephant of the ANC and its own narrative within national consciousness.
Airy fairy arty farty nonsense.
Many South Africans have lost hope. It is that simple. The poor masses have realised that those that they trusted are little more than simpleton thieves. The ultra rich all have dual passports, and are milking the place dry till they ride off to their foreign sanctuaries. The middle earners are keeping the country going, all the while wishing for something different. I agree that the dream of a rainbow nation is dead.
Unfortunately this is a runaway train. There will be a new beginning only after it crashes and burns. 10 years or so.
I honestly think that you underestimate the gravity of our failings by suggesting an injection of feel good hype will reverse it. Honesty is needed as you correctly point out. I work in a public hospital where all I see is honest suffering without any hope. No Panado, no linen, no food sometimes, no nurses and no equipment. But the management parking lot is littered with German luxury sedans. Management got a doctor arrested this week for complaining too aggressively. There isn’t any myth or star to focus on than can change this.
Love or hate we all need each other.
@The real Tofolux
“Airy fairy arty farty nonsense. Many South Africans have lost hope. It is that simple.”
Well said. And that’s NO myth.
Graham, you’re on the money there. But may I offer, striving for the myth, that is Excellence as an alternative. We have become a nation steeped in mediocrity. look no further than our education system and the lowered pass marks that justify a Matric pass. And then we find students ill equipped for tertiary learning, yet they have a passport for it. Lets (re)focus on Excellence: Excellence in everything we do: as students, employees (Government officials included), parents, teachers, sons, daughters, spouses, lovers, managers, caregivers, helpers, etc. Basically lets shift our focus, nay shift our expectations and deliver Excellence. Once we raise the bar, we have redefined our expectations and even a modicum of introspection will allow us to challenge our beliefs and values. I can only imagine where we would go from there.
An “overarching narrative” based national myth is probably indispensable to the possibility of nationality.
Such a myth is, of course, not a myth at all, in that it needs to conform to the fundamental requirements of fact, truth and honesty.
To reach such a myth we therefore need to destroy many of the current national myths manufactured over the past 60 years or so, myths still enjoying huge popularity both in South Africa and internationally, since these myths are based on lies and deceit. It is also these myths that keep the ANC in government, and give credence to the utterances of Julius Malema.
As long as these myths still lend ‘meaning and purpose’ to the daily lives of a huge number of South Africans, the development of a truth based national myth is, frankly, beyond possibility.
the bloggers reinforce my point. everyone wants to take and gets excitd about the other takers.
“profit once, invest twice”
“learn once, teach twice”
“be loved once, love twice”
“eat once, feed twice”
“laugh once, amuse twice”
“receive once, help twice”
harris…international opinion states were utterly corrupt…are you referencing one of your posts again to back up your own argument?
Results from the Afrobarometer survey conducted in October and November 2011 have the following responses to a question about identity. Do you feel just (the ethnolinguistic group you have just mentioned): 2%. Do you feel more (group) than South African: 5%. Do you feel equally (group) and South African: 20%. Do you feel more South African than (group): 8%. Do you feel only South African: 56%. These numbers are consistent over the years the Afrobarometer has been operating. Individuals feel South African. They do not however feel equal in rights, dignity or economic well being.
Lots of clever responses to Sarah’s well written article.
For many Americans their homeland is the place of the “can do” people, “the shining light on the hill” of Reagan, the “land of the free, home of the brave”.
I have a soft spot for “South Africa, Rainbow Nation” – it’s succinct, evocative and deserves better. It has a history, a relevance, a focus; there is no reason why it should not be our pole star. After all we already have one of the most colourful and attractive national flags.Let us be the Rainbow Nation. I can’t think of a nicer description of what we want to become.
SA thrives on myths…don’t we already have enough? I suspect the reason ‘love your constitution’ received so little support is because it is a myth in itself: the words are there but, in the wrong hands, they mean little. As would any other myth. Myths are not necessarily based on reality. What we need is something we can all believe in and there really is very little of that around, it seems.
The sooner we see our own little slice of the past against the background of the whole 200,000-year story of our species, the more clearly we will understand that none of us and none of our histories is exceptional. Conquest, colonialism genocide, heroism, love, sacrifice … all societies down the ages have been capable of these.
The problems we are now facing are unprecedented and global and we are all going to have to work together to find the best way forward.
We don’t need nationalism or tribalism or myths and we don’t need leaders who can do nothing but squabble over power and money little kids over toys.
We all need to grow up and face the fact that our current course is unsustainable, economically and ecologically.
South Africa could be leading the world in alternative energy, conservation agriculture and sustainable housing, but we spent all our money things like the arms deal, the ill-conceived pebble bed nuclear reactor and the world cup.
We will pay dearly.
Pre 1994 blacks had a common identity and pride in their culture. You might have thought they were poor, but they were all in it together, and the ones I knew did not think of themselves as either inferior or poor.
Now some are stinking rich, and some are dirt poor, and there is no justice in who is poor and who is rich – none of it is the result of hard work.
Seeing their leaders drink expensive booze and party with Sushi and drive expensive cars does NOT make them feel better.
Watching over and over again SOME people get RDP houses on TV does NOT make them content – the VAST majority who do not have these houses get more and more discontented.
No country in the world, even the rich ones, can build free houses for all its people.
Now the ANC is trying to divert job hunger to land hunger – it won’t work.
There are already a number of myths, which don’t work very well\:
- SA is a democracy
- The ANC is a governing body
- Dave Harris makes sense
- That one can have a dream while you are awake
- etc.
It is, of course, a myth that myths exist…
We need a reality.
The myth you are looking for is one which unites.
Who needs unity though, disunity might make South Africa stronger?
After all the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is full of disunity, Northerners hate Southerners and vica versa, Catholics and Prods have different football teams in cities like Liverpool, and heaven will not help you if you choose the wrong seat..
It is this very disunity which made the Brits so fed up with each other they went out an conquered the world.
A bit more disunity is just what is needed to put some dynamism back into the economy — for example if a motor tyre trader banana boy from KZN could really tell the hairyback from Joburg what he thought of him, the customer might not have to wait six weeks for a wheel to be changed.
Instead of submitting to the “Jawellnofine, we are all doing our best bulldust we have to put up with.
The biggest myth is that South Africa was a “black majority” country where the blacks were suppressed by colonisation.
From 1962, when Jan Van Riebeeck arrived, to the 1830s when the Voortrekkers trekked out of the Cape, the first 200 years, South Africa was a Brown majority country – the descendents of the Khoi and the Malay slaves.
So what gives the blacks the right to keep their “Homelands” white and brown free – yet bus their Xhosa into the Western Cape, like the Han Chinese into Tibet?
AND the right to decree that blacks have the right to the most jobs and contracts in the Brown Western Cape?
The orignal case on AA/BEE was dismissed by the High Court as unconstitutional and racist.
The Constitutional Court over-ruled the High Court on the basis that AA/BEE was redressing the HISTORICAL imbalances of the past.
Based on WHAT history?
I suggest the Freedom Front and Afriforum apply to the Constitutional Court for the case to be re-opened based on ACCURATE historical facts.
Forget the DA – all they are interested in is fighting the ANC for the right to “The Mandela Legacy”!
Sorry -Jan van Riebeeck should be 1652, to the Great Trek which started in the 1830s.
If you want reality and not myth – South Africa is the ONLY country in Africa where the original browns were not killed off.
I have a realtively new myth for you
– if the 1% of the world, including here in SA where most if not all of the ANC elite now dwell, don’t catch a serious wake-up soon, they are going to find the other 99% (and that’s a horrific ratio for them to oppose) eating their children and planting mielies in their filled-in swimming pools. Unfortunately, here in SA it will be more than just the 1% that will be targetted, way more., but that’s the tragedy of perception vs. reality.
This is a crucial time in human history and the nature of human nature doesn’t bode well for a positive outcome. You can intellectualise all you want on forums like this, while the poor get poorer and grow in numbers and the Dave Harris’ of the world continue to play their fiddles, but if you can’t feel the mood the world is getting into you must be stupid or…..simply too wealthy to notice…
History, should we survive, will show how the current governments of the world have shunned their real responsibilities in favour of politics and brought us to this precipice. And history will not be kind at all to the ANC of this millenium once time has had its turn, not that this is any consolation….
Pack – and go where? Stay, and potentially go nowhere….
A myth is not a preset “we want to be seen as”. A myth is the summary of an existing picture of a nation.
None of the British ever decided to create the famous “stiff upperlip”.
None of the Africans ever decided to create the image of being “backward”
SA cannot create a myth, a myth is the result of a consistent positive or negative behavour pattern as seen by outsiders.
Benzo
It is now how outsiders see us, but how we see ourselves, that causes violence and disrupts social coherene..
As I have said before, blacks in the majority did not see themselves as either poor, or their cultures as inferior, before the ANC exiles started creating these myths like that their real culture had come from Egypt and tthat he Whites had stolen it
I discovered that we do have a national ‘myth’. We are a racist state. Race is our myth. We use it to pretend that some are different to [and therefore better than] others.
I wrote a story, Part 3 of a trilogy, called “The Jonker Memorandum”, and when i submitted the first two parts to a range of publishers: both here and in the domain of our [former?] colonial masters, they collectively told me it was no good because it didn’t deal with “RACE’, our national obsession.
So now i am slowly putting it on a podcast cyber- serial stage, as and when i have the time out from teaching a busy schedule, to record them; and when Ms Khumalo asked me one day in class whether my story was about RACE i said NO i have gone beyond race, The class cheered… they all hated the race obsessed prescribed texts they have to read, they said. [i do not teach that stuff]
I am, i said, writing about people, and my story is an Mzansian myth following an apocalypse. So far i have recorded 38 of a probable 96 episodes and uplifted 29 to my website: nicholasjakari.com, where it is being beta tested.
When i get to episode 60 i’ll start telling people more about it. Although i imagine most listeners will want the whole thing before they listen to any. In the meantime i am simply figuring out, in my technomoronic way, how to do it… But i do believe that i am creating a new myth and thought i would like to tell you that there are probably more like me out there with the same idea…
I watched the Michael Jackson life story on TV. He was convinced that the DA was targetting him because of racism. I disagree. I took one look at the man on TV with his short back and sides haircut of the little hair he had. My conclusion – he was a Christian fundamentalist fanatic – targetting Michael Jackson because of his songs and alternative lifestyle.
Everything is NOT about race!
I would like to see some history of Durant production in Canada. The factory was located in the town of Leaside, a former suburb of Toronto. When my father was young he said the new cars were driven along his street after coming off the assembly line. I have pictures of the factory taken in the 1920s.
A myth = feel-good narrative.
All well and good but it is a chimera, like the Santa Claus myth, or the Tooth Fairy myth. Fine as long as you believe it, but when the bubble bursts, it’s all over.
What’s happened is that we got rid of racial apartheid, only to end up with economic apartheid, which is less colour conscious.
In this, we join the rest of the Western world which is waking up to the fact that 1% of the world’s elite run the banks and foreign policies for the 99%.
The corporate media is embedded within the 1%, translating the 1% policies into ‘feel-good’ language for the 99% to absorb, in order to keep the machine ticking over.
So a myth will be a nice, happy story that is supposed to keep the dirt poor happily cleaning toilets and digging ditches while the elites still drink cappucino in Hyde Park and buy their clothes at TopShop, London.
A myth is a nice idea – but it’s a Band-Aid for a festering wound.
Apartheid or not – we are the most developed country in Africa with the best infrastructure. Read some travel books on Africa written recently and judge for yourselves.
Most of Africa uses pit latrines or the bush – yet we have hysterics about open toilets? In fact 2 generations ago the Karoo had no electricity and the bucket sytem. was used in most towns. The buckets were emptied onto a cart every morning and the “nightsoil” removed and used by the farmers as fertiliser.
The ANC just can’t plan or organise.
Nor can they seem to be able to get rid of tribalism – so vast amounts of tribal land are still undeveloped and unproductive.
If this new Bill goes through parliament 1/3 of the people of this country will be legally ruled by tribal chiefs under a feudal system.
So how is that being “disadvantaged by apartheid”?
Hmmmm, this is an interesting concept from an unexpected source. As you said, we the mob are tough. What if one viewed particular horror, indeed generation by generation, and in any scheme of things that was transformed into ‘almost anything’. How long the period of shock. Well, that is what has happened, and the shock is wearing off. What to do next, well the theme may seem to be idealism. Myth. How to transform that into practical reality, that on balance is notably positive. Your focus on Constitution may have come about a bit late (it seems now up to a relatively few). However. In fact, despite murder, drugs, corruption blah blah, the myth is that something is good. An a-racial genetic analysis of South Africans reveals significant pre-disposition to a self-rationalized ‘bright -side’ to any catastrophic daily event, as we all know they happen and are extreme. So. The SA Myth is that well- meaning but not hard hitting myths will not do, as mentioned above. The SA Myth is that it will get so bad that all will come together as one, find common language, and stake out a position in humanity, now, at this tipping point of environmental, resource, etc. catastrophe, catastrophe South Africans shrug off as we are like a clot, or a knot of scar tissue that comes together as the world bleeds or can no longer bend. Myth?
Not at all a bad article. However, for the founding myth of a nation to work, we first need a nation. We don’t really have that. What we need is some core project to work toward, which the majority can get involved in. The RDP might have provided that, but it faded into the background in the last decade.
The problem with most of the founding myths is that they were based on the false notion of unity. We don’t really need complete unity; we need to get the majority behind the idea that the nation is on their side. That’s not hard to do, objectively, but it means saying and doing things which might piss off rich people, especially rich whites.
Well written and thought provoking, thanks.
It’s only been 17 short years. South Africa’s story/myth is now in its teenager years, experimenting with identities and rebelling, blaming and knowing everything and it will take time for it to grow up and really know itself. I do have hope that it will; collectively we’ve come a long way.
The Rainbow Nation myth is an example of the worst kind of myths – not only is it highly untrue, but it serves only to lay bare our vast differences and inequalities. Read the comments on @news24.com on Facebook and you will see what I mean – these type of myths are the last thing we need.
What we need is to put our shoulders to the wheel and ensure that the land and wealth are shared more evenly and enjoyed by the poor majority as well as the minority who only sorted Themselves out for hundreds of years, helping themselves to the riches of the land and mineral resources as if they were back in Europe – thus, the national discourse need not be negative if the goals are good and understood by everyone. People who have lashed out at Malema have failed horribly to put forward an alternative drastic solution to nationalization which the country is crying out for, the majority that is.
The wealthy minority need to be part of the solution, yet, all one ever hears from them are complaints upon complaints, rejection of economic and land reform, etc instead of being honest about their privileged lives and working with Malema to bring about a better life for all.
Local adverts showing blacks, whites, Indians embracing and singing along at the pub or sports field are a total waste of time, we all know how far removed from reality all that is.
In short, the media needs to be more honest all round.
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