THE LOWLY NEWSPAPERMAN: The ‘things were better under apartheid’ narrative is a cry for help

The Book of Exodus tells us that when the Israelites were wandering in the desert, with the Pharoah’s army in hot pursuit, despair got to such a boiling point that many yearned for a return to slavery and servitude in Egypt.

“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert,” they told their leader, Moses.

In case you are wondering why this Lowly Newspaperman is suddenly being stirred by the spirit of the scriptures it is not because he is being nostalgic for those long-gone years as an altar boy.

It is because of a nostalgia building in this country for our own version of biblical Egypt, namely apartheid. This nostalgia is nothing new. Since the early 2000s it has come and gone, depending on the frustration of a particular moment. At that time, as we were leading up to the celebration of the first decade of democracy, there was this feeling that more could have been done.

The RDP had delivered houses, piped water, electricity, community healthcare, better telecoms, roads, a much-improved social welfare net, labour protections and other basic needs that made freedom tangible. There were other freedoms too – movement, association and speech.

Things were pretty good then. Human nature, however, always demands more. And quicker.

This nostalgia for the National Party era has now been cranked up, especially in this election year. You are hearing more talk of how clean the streets were in those bad years, how much more effective the brutality of the old South African Police was in the fight against crime, how much sturdier the matchbox houses were compared with the RDP houses of the post-1994 period, how corruption was less rampant, how water flowed uninterrupted from the taps, how there were no electricity interruptions, how much better the education system was and how freely available jobs were.

Let’s not forget the ultimate clincher of this argument: how there were no foreign nationals pillaging our country’s resources. Most of this is fantasy, driven by deliberate amnesia. Very little of this paradise applied to blacks.

Former “citizens” of the fake TBVC states even go further, speaking of the glorious pasts living in those “independent republics”. You would swear that the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei were Singapore or South Korea. To a lesser extent the residents of the other Bantustans that didn’t take the faux independence also extol life under the puppet regimes that ruled their enclaves.

Worst among the “things were better in the Bantustans” brigade are the fans of the late Bophuthatswana strongman Lucas Mangope, who never tire of reminding us about his 1993 warning against handing over their “country” to mabantiti (ex-convicts). Those warnings are now regarded as prophetic by those who see betrayal of their dreams being committed by the party that was run by former political prisoners and returned exiles.

As offensive as the narrative is, the answer is not to lecture but to understand from whence it comes.

The only good thing we can say about the sentiment that South Africa was better run under apartheid is precisely that it is just a sentiment. While various surveys have shown that the overwhelming majority of South Africans – up to 80% in some instances – believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, none shows that there is a yearning for the past.

They want an improvement on the present. Disturbingly though, there is a significant decline in faith in our democracy and a growing belief that a more authoritarian political system would be a better option for South Africa. Couple this with the increasingly louder conversation about the Constitution’s human rights provisions (blamed for insecurity and uncontrolled migration) and the stubborn, racially defined economic inequality.

The political and intellectual establishment’s knee-jerk reaction to this sentiment is to reel out statistics that demonstrate how life HAS changed for the better since 1994. It is something you would ordinarily not be able to argue against because the material conditions of the majority are immensely better.

Except that those at the receiving end of the argument simply argue back and talk about their own lived experience. And a lived experience is something that is just too hard to fight.

What the establishment does not get is that this sentiment is a cry for help. No black person in their right mind would want to return to that evil era. However, they do want to shame the out-of-touch authorities into recognising the dire failures of the present. How better to do this than to laud the erstwhile oppressors?

It is about how they feel about their economic state, service delivery, quality of living and personal safety. As offensive as the narrative is, the answer is not to lecture but to understand from whence it comes.

Indictment

But the fact that the sentiment exists in the first place, whether or not one takes it literally, is an indictment of the former liberation movement that has been running democratic South Africa since 1994.

Having led the struggle against colonialism and its apartheid successor, the ANC should hang its head in shame that it has allowed this feeling to seep into our political discourse. In short, those who mouth these are basically saying that they would rather live in PW Botha’s South Africa than Cyril Ramaphosa’s.

This Lowly Newspaperman began this column by going biblical. There is another, more contemporary example of a yearning for a dark past and it comes from right next door. In 2004, when Robert Mugabe was running Zimbabwe into the ground, there was nostalgia for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia among black Zimbabweans.

Smith revelled in it, regularly reminding Mugabe that he was now more popular than the erstwhile liberation figure. So much so that he told cheering students that he was challenging the president for a walk through a black township – sans bodyguards.

“Only one of us will come out alive. I’m ready to put that to the test right now, but he is not,” Smith said.

In the case of Zimbabwe the nostalgia was quite widespread. And that is because living conditions had actually deteriorated. Nobody in South Africa explicitly misses PW Botha, except maybe Ernst Roets and his disciples.

They should not be given an excuse to. That is why the “things were better under apartheid” narrative has to be nipped in the bud. Not with patronising lectures but through making sure that the promises and fruits of freedom remain tangible and that democracy is seen and felt. DM