The “Rhode” to redemption: Cees Bruggemans talks about SA’s foundations

By Cees Bruggemans 

It has certainly been an interesting week for South Africans with the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue from UCT’s campus.  With two more statues in Kwa-Zulu Natal being defaced in recent days, the vandalising of statues across the country has yet to stop, spurring on more argument about the presence of SA’s colonial statues. Social media has been flaming with opinions of all sorts on this highly contentious (and flammable) issue. Cees Bruggemans, one of our regular Biznews columnists, shares his thoughts on statues, SA’s history and the foundation of a country rooted in many different cultures. – Tracey Ruff

Every human life has a “foundation”, a period which critically shapes it. This tends to differ between individuals, and certainly between generations, often making for the deepest of misunderstandings, not using the same markers and references.

Countries, societies, nations also have foundation periods fundamentally shaping them. Only they often don’t overlap with the average human lifetime, working on quite different timescales and much greater complexities, and this disconnect potentially storing up trouble of the most imaginative kind.

For do we ever really understand the societal situation we find ourselves in?

I have a vivid sense of the decade that personally shaped me. I can’t quite say the same for South Africa. Indeed, I have spent many years trying to define it, yet its precise demarcations keep defying me. For each time I thought I recognised the glimmer of an outline, yet deeper complexities beckoned, inviting more digging.

For a long time I sensed the 1990s decade, its Rainbow Nation concept and its negotiated Constitution to represent the Foundation bedrock of the modern South Africa. But “things” kept interfering.

And since then, ever bigger the chasm between my own formative foundation and this elusive societal one, for their mismatch means we may keep missing each other. Indeed, the distance between us can only grow?

The past month saw the maturing of yet another onion layer being peeled away. I say maturing, for the underlying messaging had been going on for years, indeed for decades, if not longer. Yet it took time to come fully into focus, despite the signaling of eons.

Those not fully sharing in the economy’s output, or otherwise feeling frustrated about those that do, had yet another outburst of anger, this time directed at statues not representative of their own perceived historic cultural identity.

It quickly mushroomed, drawing in ever more historic symbols.

Which raises the not uninteresting point of whether we are talking only about removing upsetting statue symbols from a disinherited past, or whether we include in this wide reaction whole peoples associated with such symbolism as well.

For if we do expand the spectrum of expressed frustration in this manner, something yet deeper tends to come into focus. Not just intolerance of symbols, but of whole population groups.

Does this reasoning suggest we are supposed to go back in time prior to the arrival of the White (and Indian), and in the process of most of the forebears of the modern Coloured population as well, except to the extent the latter can trace their origin to the Khoi?

Is that our true foundation, pre-foreign? Was that a simpler, kinder time which should be taken as the foundation stone of our modernity, rather than the many post-1652 conflicts that shaped so much, extremely painfully too?

In the case of KwaZulu-Natal that might not be a bad observation, provided it is pre-Shaka (1819), as the region has been observed as having been up to that time a land of milk and honey for a 1000 years.

This also predates the Zulu nation, today the single largest SA population entity.

As for the Khoi of that pre-modern period, there exist renditions which suggest it wasn’t all peaceful. This in contrast with the milk & honey story of the valleys of ten thousand hills described earlier.

Of course, if one insists on proceeding in this manner in seeking out SA’s true foundation period, shaping it for all time, and identifying foreign elements as disruptive, disturbing intruders and their pestilential influences to be excluded, not unlike what modern militant Islam does in its heimat, it has to be allowed that Bantu migration southwards some 2000 years ago wasn’t entirely peaceful either, displacing and selectively absorbing the Khoi it encountered on its way south.

So the true foundation phase of this entire southern region may well reside even further back in distant mists of time, far earlier that mostly all of us moderns alive today can trace back? What would be left would be pure animal kingdom, so to speak, devoid of human inroads, except for a few dispersed environment-friendly Khoi bands?

Realism suggests we were shaped by more active, fundamental change processes. My own foundation decade was preceded by the biggest world war ever waged, clearing up a few fundamental issues, clearing the decks most thoroughly so to speak. The foundation decade itself was actively marked by rapidly reviving and spreading prosperity and preparations for a fundamental breakout from historic social rigidities of centuries. It offered social transformation with a difference.

Doesn’t get more exciting than that, I am sure, except perhaps the aftermath of global nuclear war where only the humble cockroach stands a chance.

We may not like many things from the past, but they shaped us. We don’t need to honour their memories, if they are foreign to us. But are we supposed to also jump the fence and declare all things historic out of bounds, potentially including in this (intentionally or otherwise) all those today who trace their historic roots thus?

If we were to do so, would it define “the” foundation bedrock, or simply create endless divisions, in which we might miss our critical foundation period?

Instead, we need to get the shaping foundation right, and then build.

But that still raises more questions than answers. For would it be inclusive, including the many foreign elements and their descendants in our midst? Or would it all be purity driven, creating divisive preoccupations far worse than seen so far, and preventing any new build phase getting quickly underway?

We remain preoccupied, many seeking foundations that may radically differ from each other, in the process keeping us stagnantly adrift.

This may reflect our complex history and its many incomplete features, but it doesn’t allow us to get on with the future, even as the victorious scuppering of old statutes suggests just that.

The bigger arguments are far more intractable than a few statues. Baying crowds will not solve them so easily, unless the country were to become engulfed. Is that the real intention, the real fear? In which case talking about economic recovery, and structural change coming through economic renewal, is a tad premature.