Bongani Madondo responds to Benj DeMott’s correspondence posted at “Mad Love (& Hate) Pt. 2.”
January 10th 2016
Brother,
Quickly:
A) Not ambivalent on Madiba. I’m exasperated by the lies and non-commitment to the hard work of redress/redemption/reality preaching, rather than the feigned love and reconciliation circus. Problem is Mandela mistook his own inevitable love-affair with his captors (27 years with them, who wouldn’t?) as a template for how things should be, without preparing the country for the 15 years of cold-hard economic and other droughts ahead.
But that’s not even half of the truth. Mandela spent close to three decades in some of the cruelest dungeons known to man, all along refusing to negotiate with The Man if negotiations meant renouncing corrective violence (self-defense by blacks against a well-armed white populace and its army). For all that time, he could not be enticed to sell his people out. But after exercising so much resolve, after living with a stoic and radical dignity against the midnight marauders who maimed children, raped their mothers and cut their fathers into fleshes of mince, why did Mandela play goalkeeper of the status quo post-release? And not the creative midfielder all teams need to unhinge and dismantle the stiffest systems of power.
Weary and confused, the young generation asks in disbelief: how did it happen? Like I said: some of the young bucks have no lived experience to deal with heroic, epic tales. In their compressed rear-view, the bigger picture Mandela symbolized, is lost in a million pixelated agitation at lack of employment, lack of water, erratic electricity, sky-high tertiary education costs and so on.
And I must be honest, even a Mandela critic like me has to give it to him: grandpa tried and was woefully outplayed. The odds were stacked against him. He wished all his racially toned-different chirrun would get along just fine. No one should arrogantly look down on such selflessness, or the magic invested in that dream. It’s still a dream worth fighting for, together.
What really SADDENS me is that even a man who strove to study through distance university correspondence courses behind bars could not, once out, foresee the pitfalls of education deficit between black and white children. And that’s why we are still where we were before Madiba walked (out of prison) to assume the “throne.” (Mandela was raised in a royal family as the prince’s friend-guardian, and in his twilight years he colluded with his biographers who remolded him from what his captors called a “Commie” to an African monarchial figure, see Anthony Sampson’s hagiographical Long Walk to Freedom.) Do the math: that means 25 full years of education (all levels; kindergarten to tertiary) and schooling neglect, often featuring rogue characters such as the ANC-aligned teachers union, SADTU.
But also WhyTF did they not make education free? Or make inspired gestures to that effect, without losing face in case of failure? Or why didn’t they get the corporate class, who basically played behind-the-scenes kingmakers in our negotiated settlement, to give something in return—co-subsidizing, say, with the government, working class/underclass students who showed promise and endurance?
I am not an education expert, and maybe I’m talking through the back of my neck here. But trust me as someone who grew up in something close to the carefree air all children should have swirling about them, a kidult as they say, paying for his own schooling from Junior High to Tertiary, finally dropping out due to economic hurdles, the current student radicalism resonates deep within me. Every time I spy student-led and/or education-oriented uprisings in the media, I’m filled with regrets. Can’t help feeling how Mandela’s ANC (which, in real time and later succession battles became Thabo Mbeki’s and Jacob Zuma’s ANC) lost a golden opportunity to rewrite their grandchildren’s narratives.
Big B, your beloved St. Nelson’s primary concern, people will tell you in the townships, was to make white people feel groovy. To allay their fears and set alight their fellow blacks’ dreams of self-renewal, the key to which is access to affordable, quality education.
We get it: he’s one of the black middle class elders of his time…starts out radical, age mellows you and it don’t stop/can’t stop/won’t stop, goes down or turns right, right there.
I realize though, I carry so much psychological and spiritual bile with Mandela and his ANC. Continuing to write about him and them now just won’t be fair, especially since this is not an essay. I am wary of sounding like a mad man: ahistorical, cut adrift, unrealistic, a raging black ex-socialist loony. Thus, we’ll lay Madiba and his legacy to some kind of rest. I know, I’ll revisit him one day. How long’s Abe Lincoln been gone and ya’ll still wrestling with his complex heroic image?
B) No country has the equivalent of the USA’s Civil War and its raison d’etre, you say, for real?
Have you ever read about the Anglo-Boer War, especially alternative narratives?
If you dare put the two wars between the Boers and the Brits in S.A. (with blacks on both sides, more as support players), and later the ANC/PAC/BCMA Armed Struggle against the Boers in Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Swaziland and INSIDE South Africa itself…you might not know any country that has the USA-type Civil War in its back pages and I don’t know if S.A.’s (what was ours if not the most uncivil and longest protracted Civil War that even ate up our African neighbors?) had as many fatalities and casualties, physical and psychic wounds. But, hey, as I think on our Armed Struggle from 1959 to 1993, there’s no hierarchy of pain here is there?
C) The less I speak about Johnny Clegg the better. Look, I would be lying if his cultural black face is not an issue, and even that is unfair to the man…he grew up with Zulus on the farm, masters the language, gave his heart to the culture and learned from them…He’s Eminem’s precursor to this crossover you are talking about and I TRULY believe Mr. Mathers is hip hop, period! Here’s what: Mr. Clegg is a hit artist! Great African anthropological (that’s his academic field, btw) performer, but shit maskandi or mbaqanga artist…really bad…White people all over the world must fucking stop looking for easy Great White Hopes in times of culture wars.
Give me straight up white act with deep honesty and selflessness than try to make me sleep tight at night by badly imitating me or trying to be down, or whatever. Again, we can talk about Mr. Clegg later. The Queen gave him an OBE. What’s new? White colonial offspring making each other feel better: At least we tried, didn’t we? Fuck Queen Lizzie and her pseudo-le-Zoulou dancing mascot for hire, camera and smiles.
I bet if Miles Davis, Makeba, Nina, Johnny Cash, were alive Lizzie wouldn’t give a flying-blip! about giving them no OBE. Which would’ve been great for we know most prob’ly none of them would’ve bothered to turn up at all to receive it. God save the Queen and her Cleggs, indeed!
D) I feel Miss Biss big time.
E) Inspirational stuff you sent about Laura and what you call that book? Aw, man!
F) True, can’t get enough of Johnny C…but can we specify here? Not nit-picking but….
While I did the rest of his work before the mid-90s, my spiritual and artistic obsession with him can be put squarely on, SPECIFCALLY, the Rick Rubin produced American Recordings Series.
That’s what it is: Ain’t No Grave…aw, man!
But then again as a black magic believer and my grandpa’s son raised in the black church, it is also possible my intense reaction to Johnny C’s last recordings is quite personal, my reaction to…me— nostalgia for my late mom, grandpa, grandma, and like I said, the love for the earth and landscape which Mr. Cash’s weather and drugs beaten voice and the stripped down production (even when he goes industrial noise…i.e. Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt,” he managed the most redemptive minimalist conversation between the listener, this listener at least, and whoever is there when and if God takes a weekend leave)…my church past catches up with me.
Interestingly, Dylan’s religious/faith phase, feels, to me, a black boy in Africa, retrospectively, fake…or too dogmatic to be truly honest. For me, the secular is a space where God can not only be spoken with, but challenged, hugged, kissed, sung to and so on without having to declare any devotion to Him and Him not caring a fuck. Johnny Cash does that.
Or did.
His sins, I dig.
In his voice.
Him clearly clearing the path to his departure, was, for me, deep…Godly even….Just like Hitchens’ last ten essays on his cancer and dying…the one about losing speech and a writer’s voice…sometimes it’s the anti-religious atheist who evokes God, and whatever that means, the deepest. Dig?
I am far off the country? Ahh. Look, I’m working on an essay on Cash’s Black Consciousness, so will explore that further there.
Mad Love. B.