In 1963 James Baldwin prefaced and ended The Fire Next Time, two essays on race
in America, with a lyric from a song composed by Africans enslaved in America:
‘God gave Noah the rainbow
sign, no more water but fire next time!’
In the Christian reading of Genesis God
‘set the rainbow in the cloud’ as a sign of a divine covenant that the elect,
chosen to survive the flood that had cleansed the world of human evil, would
never again have to confront the rising waters. But those who turned from the
path of righteousness would, in a moment of final reckoning, perish in fire.
Today there is a clear sense in
our society that the time of the rainbow, presented as a moment of grace releasing
us all from a brutal history, is over. The horrors of outright war were averted
under the sign of the rainbow but the grace bestowed on the oppressors has not
been extended to the oppressed. This is not solely a matter of who is still
rich and who is still poor. The
oppressed continue to be governed by routine recourse to violence. This
violence continues to be sanctioned, implicitly and explicitly, by much of
elite society.
When racism has been appeased
rather than confronted it has held its ground. Jonathan Jansen, perhaps the
last public figure who continues to hold to a version of the original
rainbowism, now stands in the ruins of his hubris. More than a century after
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black
Folk it still appears that on the rugby field and in the residences of the
university in Bloemfontein the ‘police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone,
and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police’.
Those who affirm the Constitution
as living proof of the rainbow covenant have to reckon with the weight of the
point made by Aimé Césaire in 1956: ‘equality refuses to remain abstract’. And
while the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court has often been progressive
the language of rights is a terrain of contestation on which those with most
power often make their case most stridently. Afriforum can line up young white
men in preparation for combat and simultaneously make its claims to privilege in
the language of rights.
Under Mandela and Mbeki many people took the
view that, despite the degradations of the present, time was on the side of
justice. But nobody buys the idea that Zuma’s ANC is steadily shepherding us to a
just future, a future that will redeem the rainbow covenant. Unsurprisingly
there are those who ascribe the final end of the era of optimism to Zuma’s
disastrous term in office. But for many others Zuma’s leadership, execrable as
it is, doesn’t disguise the salience of the evident fact that, as Sisonke
Msimang has recently written, ‘the decision to focus on peace as the
founding principle of our new democracy was taken at the expense of
justice’.
In the first essay in Baldwin’s
book, a letter to his nephew, he takes up the crime of his country, and its
people: ‘that they have destroyed and are destroying
hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know
it’. He concludes that one must strive
for some sort of philosophical detachment from this horror. But it is not, he
insists, ‘permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’.
In South
Africa the rainbow may have offered a way out of war – a war that would not
have been easily won – but the equivalence that it posed between oppressors and
the oppressed sanctioned a fantasy of innocence that has sustained the crime. Peace without justice means that
adequate measure has not been taken of the fact that we continue to destroy
millions of lives – that people must make their lives and raise their children against
fire, damp, shit and various kinds of men with guns in the shantytown. It means
that young people must live with the suffocating panic that comes with the realisation
that there is no viable path into a livelihood and adulthood. It means that
AfriForum can assume the right to police universities in Bloemfontein and
Pretoria. It means that African people are frequently taken as objects of
study, rather than subjects, as theorists and interlocutors, in much of our
liberal academy.
It is imperative that, to borrow a
phrase from a speech given by Baldwin 1986, we ‘liberate
ourselves from a vocabulary, which now cannot bear the weight of reality’. But
what comes next is not clear. The collapse in the authority of the African National
Congress has not just put an end to the teleological fantasies that often
functioned to legitimate many of the continuities in the deep structure of our
society before, during and after apartheid. It has also created the space for
all kinds of actors to stake their claims to what comes next. The cacophony of
contestation, some of it sincere and principled and some of it taking the form
of increasingly crass opportunism, ranges from white revanchism to the
predatory and authoritarian aspirations of the Zuma project, traditional
authority, ethnic entrepreneurs and religious hucksters to NUMSA, the EFF and people
who hope that an escalating economic crisis will enable a final affirmation of
the inviolable authority of the market.
In some quarters there is a
feeling – exhilarated, resigned or paranoid - that the time of fire, perhaps
even what Baldwin called ‘historical
vengeance, cosmic vengeance’ is coming. The fires, metaphorical and literal, that have
been burning in recent weeks are not new. Since the end of apartheid dissent –
usually followed by repression - has spiralled from the poorer and blacker
universities to the shantytowns, the mines and the factories and into the
richer and whiter universities. Now that the fires are burning in the zones of privilege
there is a sense that things can shift, that they must shift and that they will
shift.
The desire to, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘blast
open the continuum of history’, is an eminently rational response to what
Frantz Fanon called ‘a non-viable society, a society to
be replaced’. But the desire for a just society, or even the more modest goal
of a society that is merely viable, is not the same thing as a politics
adequate to a situation.
A recent statement from #FeesMustFall at WITS
declares that: ‘Violence will bring an end to the world as we know it
and cleanse all the evil, give rise to a completely new world where the only
race that matters is the human race.’ This is a millennial fantasy inflected with a sublimated religiosity. It appears to take no account
of the reality that the structure of our society is such that when politics
enters the terrain of violence the people most at risk are likely to be poor
and black. Andries Tatane was murdered in 2011. Striking workers were massacre
in 2012. Abahlali baseMjondolo activists were assassinated in 2013 and 2014. We
have not yet found a way, to return to Benjamin, to brush history against its
grain.
The idea of a coming
apocalypse, a redemptive apocalypse, has been around for a while. In some
instances it is a mirror image of the apocalyptic fears
that have always stalked the colonial imagination, entwined, in the deep structure
of its thought, with what it opposes. Until recently it has largely been alienated
from actually existing forms of struggle.
When broad mobilisations
give way to smaller groups taken with millennial ideas there is, across space
and time, often an attraction to ideas of purity and unanimity that makes sustained
popular politics impossible. It can also make constructing and maintaining
alliances very difficult. And when there is a collapse into an increasingly
paranoid sense of us, the exalted and enlightened ones who hold history in our
hands, and them, the weak and the fallen, free and open discussion becomes
difficult. Things can reach a point at which alternative views, and even minor
differences of opinion, are read as betrayal when they should be part of a
shared discussion within struggle. The commitment to immediacy makes strategic
thinking about the long haul very difficult. The result can be a smaller and
smaller group of people pushing each other into an increasingly constrained and
isolated space. In these conditions internal fractures, reckless actions and
broad sanction for repression are real risks.
The rainbow is over. ‘A bill’,
as Baldwin warned his compatriots in 1963, ‘is coming in’. What comes next is
yet to be determined. But one thing is certain - an emancipatory politics
adequate to our situation will have to take full measure our situation,
including the reach and power of international forces, build sustained alliances
across the zones of exclusion and exploitation and dig in for the long haul.
