Until Julius Comes: Adventures in the Political Jungle

UNTIL

JULIUS

COMES

ADVENTURES IN THE

POLITICAL JUNGLE

RICHARD POPLAK

Tafelberg

History is written as we speak, its borders are mapped long before any of us open our mouths, and written history, which makes the common knowledge out of which our newspapers report the events of the day, creates its own refugees, displaced persons, men and women without a country, cast out of time, the living dead: are you still alive, really?

— Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History

They searched and investigated and finished but they did not find anything. What I am saying is that this case does not even exist.

— President Jacob Zuma

FOREWORD

‘We beat you,’ said Malusi Gigaba to the media. ‘You cam­paigned hard against the African National Congress and we defeated you!’

It was Sunday 11 May, and the ANC’s chief campaign strategist was crowing about the outcome of general election 2014, in which his party had scored yet another crushing victory. This was not the result most journalists had anticipated. They had portrayed South Africa as a nation in crisis. They saw a big realignment coming as the ANC foundered under the weight of ten thousand corruption scandals and service-delivery protests, not to mention e-tolls and Nkandla and Marikana. Or schools with no textbooks and hospitals with no medicines. 

Considered collectively, these factors were almost certain to slash the ANC’s dominance as voters turned to the opposition for salvation. That’s how journalists saw it. They were wrong. The mighty ANC conceded only three percentage points to its cocky opponents and went home (again!) with 62 per cent of the vote. Elsewhere in the world, this would be termed a landslide. ‘We beat you,’ cried Malusi to the media. And Malusi was dead right.

But did he beat Richard Poplak too?

For those who don’t know him, Mr Poplak is a Joburg boykie whose parents dragged him off to Canada in his teens. Canada was a sensible country where sensible people could build a future without worrying about apartheid and revolution, and all the other shit that kept South Africans awake at night. But it did not really agree with young Poplak, who soon left to pursue a gonzoid dream of blitzing the planet with scorching non-fiction prose-poetry. He wound up in the Islamic world, researching The Sheikh’s Batmobile, a wonderful book about rappers and heavy metal heads trying to live a sex, drugs and rock-’n’-roll fantasy under the eyes of religious police whose intolerance made apartheid Calvinists seem effete. He also wrote a book about growing up in South Africa and another, about Africa, is coming soon to a bookshop near you. Book four is the one you hold in your hand – a collection of stories about South Africa’s 2014 election.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who made up that old saw about how the point of travel is to return at last to the place where you started and see it clearly for the first time. In this respect, Poplak’s sojourns in Toronto, Tehran and Cairo have served to sharpen the bloodshot eye hugely as it gazes upon his old home turf. Poplak is an insider, and yet not. He understands the slang and knows the roads, but notices all manner of things that have become invisible to South Africans, because we’ve blinded ourselves. We do this because we must; because the unfiltered omens, contradictions and anomalies that lie in wait at every turn would otherwise drive us insane. Actually, seeing is almost unbearable. Check it out – by the time the 2014 campaign was done, Poplak’s hold on reason had become tenuous.

But he is laughing, give him that. This is a very funny book, profound at times, and always cutting and clever. But infuriating, too. For instance, I spent election day monitoring a ballot booth on behalf of the Democratic Alliance, a moderate party whose sensible nostrums seem to offer the best way out of our presently grim predicament. I was not pleased to crack these covers and find my leader and my beliefs viciously pilloried, but as I ploughed onwards, there was much to soothe my ire. In this book, everyone gets mauled. Helen Zille is imagined as a Celtic warrior queen, ‘head shaved, face smeared with blood and war paint’, guiding troops into battle. Jessie Duarte is a tired old bullshitter. And, in the aftermath of her traumatic divorce from the DA, Mamphela Ramphele looks ‘shaved to the bone, raw; the only thing keeping her from dissipating into dust is her make-up’.

As his title suggests, Poplak believes that the real winner of the 2014 election was Julius Malema, Commander-in-Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters and harbinger of what Poplak calls the ‘Age of Idiocy’. It is true that the odds against Juju were almost insuperable and that, under the circumstances, winning 25 seats in Parliament imparts a momentum that might yet propel the fat boy into the state presidency. It could equally be that five years hence, this prediction will look spectacularly stupid. (Not that Poplak actually makes it: he’s too clever for that. But, between the lines, that’s where he thinks we’re going.)

Does it matter?

Forty years have passed since Dr Hunter S. Thompson set forth to cover the 1972 American presidential election, but the resulting book – Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 – is still in print in the United States, and still taught in journalism schools everywhere. That’s because Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail annihilated the old style of political reportage and replaced it with something infinitely more exciting, albeit not necessarily factual. The drug-crazed Thompson repeatedly described Republican candidate Richard Nixon as a monster riddled with unspeakable perversions, bent on turning America into a fascist state. Thompson was wrong. Does it matter? Not at all. We don’t read Thompson for political analysis. We read him for the manic rush of his prose, for the sharpness of his insights and the savagery of his jokes.

Comparisons are odious, but Mr Poplak has clearly looked at Thompson’s craft and adapted aspects of it for his own devious purposes, which makes Until Julius Comes some sort of far-flung spawn of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail. Many are called to emulate the Thompson gonzo. Almost all fail. But Until Julius Comes can stand shoulder to shoulder with its illustrious ancestor and not feel in the least ashamed. Odds are therefore that it too will be read and remembered long after the details of who won what in 2014 are forgotten.

If I were Malusi Gigaba, I might just be a bit worried about that.

Rian Malan

GEFÜHLSLEBEN

AN INTRODUCTION

This is a book about madness.

Every word is made up – the words themselves are coined specifically for this undertaking. The incidents detailed herein did not happen; the world in which the essays are set does not exist. There are, of course, moments of clarity to be found within these pages, but they only serve to highlight just how compromised this volume’s version of truth happens to be. A slight correction: this is a work not about, but of madness.

Which is to say it’s a book about South African politics.

Specifically, the book details the 2014 general-election campaign, the fifth such endeavour in South African history. The elections announced the 20-year anniversary of the country’s democratic era, and it’s worth asking – what’s changed since the non-democratic era? Answer: everything. And nothing. South African politics exists in the gulf between those two contradictory positions, exerting its tidal pull on the South African psyche, yanking us from any moorings to sanity we might have had were we not long ago admitted to history’s loony bin.

‘Everything begins in mystery and ends in politics,’ said French essayist Charles Péguy. But imagine a country in which the reverse is true. When real human subjects start practising it, when we tamper with the machinery and soil it with hamburger grease and halitosis, politics becomes highly specific – an indigenous art with its own native contours. In some countries, politics is an outgrowth of the state’s foundational virtues, however imperfectly expressed. Others practise the politics of veneration – of a monarch, of an autocrat, of an Idea. And others see politics as a means of getting things done, as the fuel for bureaucracy’s two-stroke motor.

In South Africa, we practise the politics of obfuscation. Our politicians are verbicidal – they slaughter sense, they murder meaning. Their intention has always been to hide the true reason for the state’s existence, which is to plunge mineshafts into the earth’s crust, and hose cash and commodities directly into the London Stock Exchange. In their countless acts of dissembling, our leaders have for centuries woven worlds, concepts and realities out of the vapours rising from their own bullshit. Theirs are utopian projects: the British civilisers; die Boerevolk; the Rainbow democrats. And so, stories compete, clash, erase each other, until someone mixes a Molotov cocktail and sends it arcing majestically into the night.

The German philosopher Hegel believed that madness had therapeutic qualities. Going crazy, he noted, was an effort to heal the ‘wounds of the spirit’, a means of regressing to a moment before the psyche was irrepressibly damaged by the lousiness of being alive. He described the place the mind retreated to in such times as ‘the life of feeling’ – the big, blousy German word is Gefühlsleben. Here, the language of wakefulness is replaced by an archaic language that describes dreams and fantasies, a phenomenon Hegel explained as ‘sinking back’, a separation of the mind from ‘contact with actuality’. Madness wasn’t an aberration or a chemical imbalance, but a necessary reaction to trauma.

South Africans are mad because we’ve been driven mad. When a country’s rulers rule not by leading, but by faking reality, the cheapest way for them to do so is to employ the grammar of the asylum. South Africa’s actual actuality, the one we are constantly encouraged to sink back from, is a very, very bad place, lovely scenery and good beef notwithstanding. The endlessly clanging mineshafts clang their way through the day and night, without respite.

It’s enough to drive you nuts.

Some context: I wrote everything collected in this volume very quickly. I wrote late at night and early in the morning. I often pressed ‘send’ in a hypnagogic fog, barely registering the whistle of a file tearing off into cyberspace before I passed out wearing stained track pants. I wrote in a sort of fever, lashed to history’s mast while one of democracy’s frequent shit storms raged around me.

Indeed, as anyone who has covered one will tell you, an election is the collective human project that most resembles a meteorological disaster. The observer can never anticipate in what direction the winds will blow next, whether hail will come down in spinning fist-sized knuckle balls, or whether the sun will break through the clouds and allow for a few moments of reflection. The sun, of course, never breaks through the clouds, and there is never any time for reflection.

You write to counter the spin, and they spin to counter the writing.

All of these pieces were posted to the news site Daily Maverick within hours, in some cases minutes, after they had been written. Has the news ever been in such a rush? As far as this book is concerned ‘new media’ has been reverse-engineered into ‘old media’, because the idea behind these essays, composed under the nom de plume Hannibal Elector, was to write the election, to offer stories as antidotes to the stories we were being sold.

There is, of course, a long tradition of literary non-fiction in this country. There is much solid investigative reportage and daring 140-character on-the-ground commentary. But there is also lots of crappy journalism, some of which falls suspiciously in line with the narrative that our leaders are peddling. The source of South African insanity is, and always has been, the power of Power’s narrative. With respect to Hegel, Hannibal Elector – a fake name referencing a fictional serial killer – seemed like the best way to stave off the madness, at least for a moment or two.

This is not a systematic breakdown of the 2014 election campaign. This is not a meticulous analysis of strategy or policy. It is a collection of moments, a bearing of witness. There was no planning, unless you consider having no plan a plan. The pieces have been edited only for clarity; their roughness and urgency is the whole point. They are all about madness, about unreality. They are a doormat in a doorway inscribed with the message:

Welcome to the Gefühlsleben.

PROLOGUE

15 DECEMBER 2013, JOHANNESBURG

In which we say goodbye to a father and brace for the future

Let’s summarise.

Actually, nah. Let’s not rate speeches. Let’s not square memorials off against funerals against spirited church singalongs. Let’s not question the wisdom of Woolworths commercials. Let’s just sit with our heads in our hands for a moment. Let’s just take a deep breath and allow the newness of it all to sink in.

By ‘newness’, I of course mean the sense of living in a South Africa in which Nelson Mandela is no longer a physical presence. But I’m also referring to this new sense of ourselves that developed over the course of the week or so after he died: this sense that we’re hurtling towards our destiny as contestants in a bad reality TV show, cameras constantly shoved in our faces, in which every last one of us is the comic relief.

The designated period of mourning was meant as a squaring away, as a time of remembrance. And for those of us with an almost ancient fortitude, for those of us able to ignore the industrial-grade noise-a-thon – the tumble of tweets, the slew of selfies, the unceasing bullshit factory that is the 24-hour news cycle – for those of us able to tune it all out, perhaps those ten days actually contained meaning, rather than its inverse.

When Madiba was pronounced dead and the Official Statement was catapulted into the techno ether, I could feel it before I knew it. I don’t mean ‘feel’ in the spiritual sense of the term, although I wish I did. Rather, I heard the news choppers above me, and I could feel the information hurtling through what remains of my soul into smartphones, iPads, TVs, computers, times a hundred thousand million billion. I had one brief moment in which to say goodbye, one unfettered nanosecond in which I wasn’t part of the clutter.

And then it began.

The machine powered to life, and we descended into a pornographic netherworld defined by close-ups, by close-ups of close-ups, each image stuffed with everything except content. As the machine churned forward, Madiba grew fainter. His light dimmed, and his face – projected onto countless screens, printed in countless newspapers, used by dozens of corporations to say ‘thank you and hamba kahle’ – ceased to be his face. His beatification, which had begun long ago, was an act of multiplication – he became more anodyne, more Bible-era saintly, with each duplication.

A photocopy of a photocopied photocopy, he no longer came from a particular time or place; he drifted further and further from historical context. He was used to buff up the flagging image of presidents from countries that had once wanted him to rot in jail; his memory was used to sell overpriced nectarines and (admittedly delicious) point-of-purchase candies; he was used as the cornerstone of Brand ANC. He, who ‘taught’ us about this value and that value, became an ever-smiling minstrel figure of no known race, because racial distinctions have no place in Madiba World.

Celebrities drank from his death like vampires at a vein. Men who played him in shitty movies sat at his funeral – inspired moments of cross branding. The rich got richer as they came closer to his corpse. They grew bored during the endless ceremonies, and who could blame them? Memorials and funerals are by nature boring, unless you happen to be Irish – and Madiba, by the way, wasn’t. The famous took pictures of themselves with other famous people, and the press took pictures of the picture-taking. Facial expressions were scrutinised closely and the selfie counted as discourse, because there was nothing else of substance on the table.

I have, of course, left out the beautiful moments, the fine words spoken from the heart by friends who were actually friends, the brief seconds of dignity that Mandela was afforded in all the mess – the genuine expressions of love and pain and grief that individual South Africans poured out after they learnt of his death. Yet these same South Africans were actors in a drama they didn’t write, playing roles they were assigned by impresarios from afar. Dance, cry, complain. Exeunt stage left.

There were times during this