Note: This is an un-published essay by Heinrich Bohmke in which he comes clean: he actually does work for the police. Somehow, he thinks he can get away with using 'radical' analysis to delegitimise the activism of others (such as those who protested against COP17). Yet, Bohmke himself is the biggest hypocrite of all. He himself "talks left and walks right". What revolutionary 'autonomist' activist would ever consider working for the police while at the same time lambasting 'reformist activists' and 'neoliberal social movements' for daring to protest on issues such as climate change or housing? This article, which perhaps he never wanted published, proves to anyone who still thinks Mr. Bohmke is an honest and fair writer, that he is anything but that. Mr. Bohmke can't play both sides (who knows if he even realises his own hypocrisy!!!). He can't be police / impimpi and a revolutionary autonomist at the same time. In other words, never trust a COP.
Every two years or so this really nice training gig comes up. I grab two boxes of files and some branded pens, get on two planes and head up to Kimberley in the Northern Cape. I’m hired to train a unit within the South African Police Service how to fire those within their ranks who contravene Regulation 20 (z) of their disciplinary procedure.
Regulation 20 (z) is reserved for murderers, armed robbers, rapists, fraudsters and, above all, extortionists. Owing to a useful quirk in our law of evidence, it is easier and faster to fire cops who commit criminal offences than it is to put them behind bars; the latter mostly never following the former. The idea behind Regulation 20 (z) is, for example, that even if a rogue cop demanding R300 from an illegal immigrant is not convicted of this crime, he will at least lose his badge. I should quickly admit that contributing to this high-minded mission is not why I enjoy the SAPS training so much. Mine are sad and perverse reasons. I get a thrill out of being picked up at the airport in a marked car by crisply uniformed lads, whisked from a guesthouse to the Galeshewe Cluster Headquarters every morning and then, once within this nerve centre, to not only move around freely among the top brass, but to have my every word taken in by 45 of the most earnest and impressive among them.
Every two years or so this really nice training gig comes up. I grab two boxes of files and some branded pens, get on two planes and head up to Kimberley in the Northern Cape. I’m hired to train a unit within the South African Police Service how to fire those within their ranks who contravene Regulation 20 (z) of their disciplinary procedure.
Regulation 20 (z) is reserved for murderers, armed robbers, rapists, fraudsters and, above all, extortionists. Owing to a useful quirk in our law of evidence, it is easier and faster to fire cops who commit criminal offences than it is to put them behind bars; the latter mostly never following the former. The idea behind Regulation 20 (z) is, for example, that even if a rogue cop demanding R300 from an illegal immigrant is not convicted of this crime, he will at least lose his badge. I should quickly admit that contributing to this high-minded mission is not why I enjoy the SAPS training so much. Mine are sad and perverse reasons. I get a thrill out of being picked up at the airport in a marked car by crisply uniformed lads, whisked from a guesthouse to the Galeshewe Cluster Headquarters every morning and then, once within this nerve centre, to not only move around freely among the top brass, but to have my every word taken in by 45 of the most earnest and impressive among them.
Not anyone can come to the course, mind you. The police are very rank conscious and this firing business falls only to colonels and above. One must moreover apply to be in this task team so it tends to attract a sort of cop so zealous in the application of law that he is prepared to consort with whores, criminals and lowlifes.
They are frequently cherished witnesses as he, treacherously, prosecutes an otherwise upstanding fellow officer for shaking these whores, criminals and lowlifes down.
It’s an odd picture: me lecturing a hoary squad of 45 – 55 year-old, career law-enforcement agents, dripping in moustaches and bristling with mission. As someone whose identity and presentation was, for most of my adult life, shaped so much in reference to the ‘repression’ meted out by this arm of the ‘state apparatus’, a secret irony constantly enlivens this new encounter. What is a leftie doing here? And yet, at another level, there is no irony at all. There are few as cynical about the police force as those ‘internal affairs’ characters who daily delve into the corrupt and violent dealings of their brethren in blue. I guess I regard the half ironic, half logical relationship with ‘internal affairs’ as cover. I am spared the final denouncement of working directly for the police because, can’t you see, I am helping sex workers, those forced into crime and the underclass too!
Over the years I have grown fond of some of these cops. They phone me with a query or case. Theirs is an unenviable job. It’s dangerous. Mostly the hearing venues have to be secured by a tactical response squad, all R5’s and earpieces. Witnesses in these hearings are often in protection and the accused officer always comes with a pernickety attorney. This is because when cops go bad, they go very bad, in a way that no other employee does. A fired factory worker goes to the CCMA. A fired professor goes to the press. Occasionally, a postman goes postal. A bad cop, however, is far worse. In a recent case in Kuruman, a cop was summoned to appear on charges of corruption. While his big city advocate tried to stall the thing, the cop’s cronies in a diamond smuggling syndicate took out a contract on the life of the prosecutor in the hearing. They missed.
There’s lots of politics at play in hearings too. To give just one example: during his corrupt reign as head of the police, Jackie Selebi’s nephew, (also in SAPS and rapidly advancing), was charged with serious and repeated misconduct. The chairperson who handled his case was a crew-cut Afrikaner. Can you imagine the leaning on he had to take as the hearing unfolded? And he did take it. He fired Selebi junior. He did this in the name of an unbendingness, not to the rules the Selebi kid broke, but an unbendingness to being leaned upon.
I admire those qualities in a person. It reminds me of the best episodes of The Wire. If I had time and with all the stompies I’ve picked up, I’d script a South Africanized, copycat version, set in Kimberley called The Naaier. Cops in the disciplinary task team have a short shelf life. After a few years they are so hated, conflicted, threatened and stressed, that most clamour to return to their previous commands. And so, a new bunch come in, brimming with ideals, eager for skill. Hence the perennial need for training, which yours truly delights in profitably filling.
On the evening of the fourth day of the course this December, I organized a braai for the task team. It was the least I could do after yabbering on at them for a week. The venue was an el-cheapo game lodge on a dirt road just outside town called Night Breeze. The facilities consisted of a square building plonked in the middle of the veld, surrounded by a game fence twenty metres away on all sides. Inside was an ill-stocked cash bar with animal heads affixed to the face-brick wall. The pub is called O’Sullivan’s on account of an Irish couple having hosted their wedding reception there. Outside, some cement tables are arranged around a pit to make fire. One stands and eats at these tables, each accommodating eight or so people.
The car that brought me arrived a bit late and everyone was already there. I was determined to have a good time. A half moon glided through wispy clouds above the scrubby thorn trees just beyond the fence. The braaivleis coals glowed like a Cylon’s eyes. A murmur of chit-chat, punctuated by short laughs and shouts, wafted my way. Most of the members of the task team, brought in from the far-flung towns of the Northern Cape, did not know each other very well but I hoped that good food and alcohol would change that a little.
The effect of the furnishings went against my plan. Four distinct groups of cops formed, one each at a table. The general on the course and three brigadiers were sort of on their own, holding their pose. Then there was a table of black cops, most from outside the Cape, promoted in. Then a table of white and coloured cops jealously sharing a bottle of Richelieu. At the last table, sparsely populated, four or five random teetotalers sat.
I was disappointed to observe the usual South African social scene. In class, camaraderie and morale within the team seemed high but this cliquish arrangement was so typical and spoke of a conflicted and unhappy workplace. As the nominal host of the event, I moved between tables but I could see no way, other than by imposing myself embarrassingly, to integrate everyone. As the fire died down and bottles emptied, the mood changed. When I noticed again, the brandy table switched not only to Afrikaans but that flat, earthy dialect spoken by the coloureds of the province. Polite conversation gave way to guffaws. The general was in the thick of this group by now. So too were those Black guys from the Northern Cape who essentially abandoned the affirmative action imports from Limpopo or KZN who could not follow the hilarity among the doppers. It was that part of the evening when people begin reminiscing, telling jokes and biting each other.
So many things were said that night that struck me as profound and I assure you I was drinking only Coke.
One cop enquired about a certain Wollie in Springbok working at Standard Bank, who played keyboard.
‘No, old Wollie was then fired for assaulting a customer’, said a tall cop who lived in the little town.
‘Really what happened?’
‘You know about his younger brother?’
‘No, what about him?’
‘He’s got this nickname then, Growwe Nqu, and until today he totally loses
it if you call him by it.
The speaker paused to inform those of his listeners not familiar with the Nama langauge that Nqu is the word for balsak (balls), hence the name means rough or scaly balls.
‘But how do people know to call him this? Who can report on what his balsak looks likes?’ someone asked.
‘Fuck knows’, said the tall cop. ‘But if you call Wollie’s brother, Growwe Nqu, and you get away from him today, he’ll hit you in a week’s time when he finds you in the street. Which is exactly what happened. He got a suspended sentence for assault in 2010’.
‘But how did that get Wollie fired at the bank?’
‘Because the owner of the Shell garage, he called Growwe Nqu by his nickname. And so Wollie had then to moer him right outside the bank. Wollie told me it became his duty to do it, because with the sentence hanging over him, his boetie couldn’t rightly do it himself’.
Laughter followed this story, but quite a few appeals to Jesus too. A grey-haired cop with terrible problems with his knees, reminded everyone of the way a certain businessman was worked over in 2009 when he threatened an investigator in the task team. The working over sounded very much like a violation of Regulation 20 (z) and my heart soared. I envied these people their easy banter, their complicated connectedness to a common mission, even just their readiness to come out together of a night.
I was surprised these cops spoke so forthrightly about the undercurrents of their situation. To be a colonel you were probably a cop already during apartheid. Nowadays many coloured and black members have rapidly leapfrogged erstwhile white commanders in rank. Sometimes this is for equity reasons, sometimes on merit suddenly unleashed. People on both sides of this equation were at the braai and discussed this phenomenon with a level of openness at once tender and fraught. And yet, undercurrents and all, an important job had to be done. On this, eyes lit up. They cleared decks. And the most respected among them did not carry the most - but fired the most brass.
And then came the joke about Paradise. In fact, it is so layered politically and philosophically it is more theology than comedy and it goes like this.
Het jy gehoor van die Boer, die Engelsman en die kleurling wat in ‘n bakkie ry wat omslaan? Toe hulle weer kyk is hulle vrek en hulle staan so by St. Peter voor die hekke van die Paradys. St Peter kyk hulle aan en se, ‘Manne, julle kannie in die hemel toegelaat word met daai vuil klere nie. Julle sal moet uitrek’.
Wel, niemand stry nie en later aan staat hulle kaalgat voor St. Peter. Hy wys so vir die Boer se piel en vra, ‘Ou boet, voor ek besluit of jy in of uit is, vertel bietjie wat jy met daardie tottie alles gemaak hey’. ‘Nee, Oom Peter, ek het niks verkeert gedoen nie. Met die piel het ek maar net gepis’.
St. Peter, stel toe die selle vraag aan die Engelsman. ‘Mister, what did you do with your penis when you were alive?’ ‘Nee, St. Peter, se hy, ek het ook niks gesondig met my penis nie. Ek het maar net met hom gepis.
‘En jy’, vra St Peter vir die kleurling, ‘kyk daai lang, vrot voel van jou. Wat het jy alles met hom gemaai?’ ‘Ek sallie vir Baas Peter jok nie’, se die kleurling. ‘Die piel was in baie ‘n genaaiery, dit het die kant toe gesteek, en daai kant toe gehoer. Dis ‘n feit. Daar issie ‘n kont of ‘n mont wat wou nie, wat nie van die piel gekry het nie.’
St. Peter knik sy kop en se vir die keurling. ‘Jy kan maar ingaan’. Maar vir die Boer en die Engelsman se hy hulle moet fokof.
Hulle kan dit nie glo nie. Hulle vra luid vir St Peter, ‘Maar hoekom kan die kleurling, na als wat hy met sy piel gedoen het, ingaan en nie ons nie’.
‘Luister kerels’, se St. Peter, ‘daar binne is dit Paradys, nie ‘n pisplek nie’.
At half past eleven, after the first cop asked the general for permission to leave the function, everyone made for their vehicles too. And so it was that I found myself moving in a posse of twenty government vehicles weaving along a dirt road late at night, and as the cars took their own direction at the T-junction, they briefly lit their blue lights, one by one, even the car I was in.
I started the night of the colonels in patronage. It ended in respect. The reason I was late for the braai is that one of the organizers of a ‘Climate Justice’ march taking place in my hometown, Durban, phoned for urgent advice. They’d launched a court application to be allowed to march along a certain route before handing over a memorandum to representatives of COP 17. Mike Sutcliffe, city manager, met with the organizers and they agreed to modify the route. They verbally agreed to ditch the court application. However, the lawyer running their case, insisted they should still go to court. Was this necessary? They expected trouble and tricks. We spoke about this and other things and it felt good reverting to my habitual, deprecatory use of the phrase, ‘the cops’. I returned to Durban on the day of the march. Once again I was late for the party and only got to see its culmination. South Africa’s Minister of International
Relations was given a platform. She accepted the memorandum of complaint and assured the crowd of about 5000 that their voices, as civil society, were an important and valued part of the conference. She would place their issues before the parties negotiating a climate treaty and she thanked them for coming. If the march was about celebrating diversity by assembling trade unionists, professional NGO workers, ‘members of the faith community’, a delegation of rural women, filmmakers, aspirant Occupiers, environmentalists, leftwing academics, dreadlocked white people and the overdue phenomena of topless women and clowns (formally declaring themselves as such), it was a moderate success.
The fact that demands were often contradictory and that behind the facades of most of the participating organisations lay trifling ‘grassroots’ constituencies should not matter. The thing the Left learnt well from post-modernism is that power does not vest in numbers but in subjectivity. And since there is no author too, I suppose it should not matter that the cellphone number appearing at the bottom of a press statement by the Rural Women’s Assembly, belongs to ex-Trotskyist and professional NGO funder, Mercia Andrews. She is, at least, a woman.
If the march was a measure, on the other hand, of the strength, support, stature and general strategic nous of those seeking to counter the hegemony of financial and corporate capitalists in their destruction of the planet, then it ran on empty. In fact, in terms of generating and communicating social antagonism, it seems that, in South Africa, peak protest levels were reached ten years ago at the WCAR and WSSD events.
From this modestly inspiring point, it has been a precipitous decline and narrowing of social subject. The working class gave way to the community, the community gave way to those without electricity and water within the community, the poorest of the poor. But soon they themselves were relatively too privileged. They lived in actual brick and mortar structures. More authentically poor still –and thus more apt to be right in what they said and did – were the shack-dwelling poor. But the urgent romance of mjondoloism has also come and gone. Surely no-one is more marginal and authentically oppressed than women, rural women. They don’t even live in shacks, but mud huts. The greater correctness of their politics is presaged by their even greater marginalisation. After all, rural female consciousness is untrammeled by the privilege of in situ upgrading which shack-dwellers enjoy. It is untrammeled by newspapers, formal education and employment. They are truly wretched. They are going to be a hard act to beat.
But how did the conglomeration of all of the above - unions, environmentalists, shack dwellers, rural women - fare in the Climate Justice March? Since I was not in the march, the views of a protestor who spent a lot of time (and, he informs us, also money) organizing and branding ‘climate justice’ is a better source. In a post to debate headed, ‘Never Trust A Cop”, Patrick Bond says:
The march yesterday, though of a respectable size (my guess is around 8000) and exuding a really great vibe at times, certainly suffered from some curious features, including talk-left walk-right speakers (two COP17 leaders – Figueres and Nkoana-Mashabane) who bizarrely were given a free pass; very weak turnout from Durban communities and Cosatu; a failure to take advantage of the US consulate en route; extraordinary shenanigans at the start of the march by Zumite infiltrators (with “100% COP17” placards) from the municipality; often banal messaging; a failed ending (no concert as had been advertised) and inability to reach the beach for what we’d hoped would be a ‘going away party’ by virtue of nonsensical municipal orders; a wasted afternoon follow-up; and numerous other flaws. Luckily there was cloud cover and some water points so no cases of exhaustion on the 4km trek from Botha’s statue via City Hall to the ICC and Tech Fields.
Other critical views. As Ashwin Desai remarked, “This was a march organized in part by a self-liquidating left, delivering a constituency and legitimacy to the COP17 on a silver platter.” It was, Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Justice Alliance put it, a “policed march, not a people’s march – and those green-suited guys were just state cops” (referring to the city ‘volunteers’). As for the overall politics, Jos Marten of Rosa Lux concluded, “repressive tolerance”, as the establishment can sleep easy. Ashwin called it a “tame set-piece predictable show”.
Other groups – as you see below in Rehad Desai’s letter, including the Democratic Left Front and Rural Women’s Assembly – felt that there were unacceptable policing moves, once fisticuffs between red and green shirts began.
And aesthetically, my own complaint: having financed 250 vuvuzelas from my savings account, I was surprised that we didn’t achieve a wall of sound at the US consulate (a block west of City Hall) or the IEC. Best tee-shirt was probably Earthlife’s: “Never trust a cop”... and you’ll see many more displays of militancy and Climate Justice at Orin Langelle’s lovely slideshow: climatevoices.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/photo-essay-global-day-of-action-against-un-conference-of-polluters-cop-in-durban/
This march is exemplary of the state of the extra-Parliamentary Left in South Africa. I would go so far as to say that the way Left politics is styled in South Africa at the moment, there is no single part of what it does or says that is not only self-liquidating’ but wholly necessary to ‘the system’.
Capitalism shifts, absorbs and displaces its contradictions. In this, the Left have a new world-historical role. They are collaborators in the useful illusion of social change, through their strivings for democracy and human rights. In fighting for these hollowed out trinkets, the Left participates in the great lie that allows current power relations to be endlessly reproduced. The lie is that reform is possible. However much their memoranda, affidavits, press releases and websites may rail against government and capitalism in content, but in the form of their politics, when they exercise power in South Africa, it is a procession, structurally, of impimpis.
To put it in terms that Bond may understand, when you Walk Left you are part of a larger choreography that positively Dances Right. ( Walk Left, Dance Right © )
For it to be otherwise there would have been just a hint of a gesture in the march, that intelligent persons inside the ICC would fear enough to cause them to think about changing course. But there was never going to be such a gesture. This is not hindsight. I told Bond months ago that Durban and the poors generally would not pitch up in sufficient numbers or passion to give any credibility to the point marchers, as marchers, would like to make. The only way around this reality would be to bus poor people in like he does for the Harold Wolpe lectures, with a spread laid on at the end to make up for the fact that the event has nothing to do with them.
The true measure of an effective politics is the ever increasing escalation of alarm and animus it generates within society and among the enemy. This is not the distinction between reformist and revolutionary demands. It is simply about not being a patsy and, if one is a patsy, then not exposing that fact.
A retort to this is that it is in the process of struggle that we begin to prefigure the society we want to have in future. We don’t have to be taken seriously by anyone outside. It’s about what happens inside the organizational spaces we create. There we shall let trill the subaltern’s voice and let blossom worker / grassroots / indigenous subjectivities. While we walk, we ask questions. This process, the argument goes, slowly forms a sort of social dynamite.
This is taken seriously only by those who have no inkling of mass psychology, that is to say, by those who believe people can mentally pull themselves up by their own unsocialised bootstraps, that they can escape the disciplinary regulation of their own compromised yesterdays while preparing for other people’s glorious tomorrows.
In revolutionary theory, we have lost rear bases in the forests, but apparently we can retreat to places of dignity and identity within the city walls, fifth columnists of the coming revolt. While this teleological thinking has rightly been rejected in a reading of history, it can apparently be imposed in the intentional making of a local politics.
While the politics of armed propaganda and spectacle is rightly damned, apparently democratic processes among ourselves will create an exploding bomb of humanism that will win over the rest of society.
What then? If it is not while walking left with a mass of the most authentically poor where the tasks of change are formulated, then where is it? I’d say around a braaivleis fire (with soya sausages too) together with bras. The effective ingredient in politics is friendship within the context of a team.
Membership of such a team is not open to all who have grievances, or need voice. Nor does it require, even a posteriori, a ‘correct’ Left perspective to found the required action. Reasons are a person’s own business. Whatever the driving demon, the basis for common action is simply an affinity (or joy) in the perversity of the goal. And an unbendingness in achieving it. And if the goal is not achieved, at least many pleasing hours are to be spent with people one likes and admires.
On that inevitably personal note, we are brought to braskap, the condition for the effective group formations I have in mind. I have a friend active in Left organizing who gets none of it, braskap, from his comrades, not really even, I suspect, from me. The drunken gangsters, hustlers and panel beaters of his pub in Clare Estate are, whatever their deficits in progressive thinking, more apt to team up with him when it comes to political action than any comrade. When the chips are down, they share a code. ‘A man needs a code’, Omar Little once said and it extends not only to what one does, but what one does not do.
While in Kimberley, a good friend and comrade contacted me to say they were in Durban, we should meet up when I returned. How shall I put it? They were staying with the Shell garage owner.
It was said lightly. In a certain world and in a certain light, it would be perfectly okay, a thing perfectly conducive to us still being brothers or sisters in arms. In fact, it might even be a show of strength and subtlety for me to be nonchalant about their imprecise loyalties.
But, I have realized, it is not my way. I do not enter Paradise, mutually, with pricks like that.
They are frequently cherished witnesses as he, treacherously, prosecutes an otherwise upstanding fellow officer for shaking these whores, criminals and lowlifes down.
It’s an odd picture: me lecturing a hoary squad of 45 – 55 year-old, career law-enforcement agents, dripping in moustaches and bristling with mission. As someone whose identity and presentation was, for most of my adult life, shaped so much in reference to the ‘repression’ meted out by this arm of the ‘state apparatus’, a secret irony constantly enlivens this new encounter. What is a leftie doing here? And yet, at another level, there is no irony at all. There are few as cynical about the police force as those ‘internal affairs’ characters who daily delve into the corrupt and violent dealings of their brethren in blue. I guess I regard the half ironic, half logical relationship with ‘internal affairs’ as cover. I am spared the final denouncement of working directly for the police because, can’t you see, I am helping sex workers, those forced into crime and the underclass too!
Over the years I have grown fond of some of these cops. They phone me with a query or case. Theirs is an unenviable job. It’s dangerous. Mostly the hearing venues have to be secured by a tactical response squad, all R5’s and earpieces. Witnesses in these hearings are often in protection and the accused officer always comes with a pernickety attorney. This is because when cops go bad, they go very bad, in a way that no other employee does. A fired factory worker goes to the CCMA. A fired professor goes to the press. Occasionally, a postman goes postal. A bad cop, however, is far worse. In a recent case in Kuruman, a cop was summoned to appear on charges of corruption. While his big city advocate tried to stall the thing, the cop’s cronies in a diamond smuggling syndicate took out a contract on the life of the prosecutor in the hearing. They missed.
There’s lots of politics at play in hearings too. To give just one example: during his corrupt reign as head of the police, Jackie Selebi’s nephew, (also in SAPS and rapidly advancing), was charged with serious and repeated misconduct. The chairperson who handled his case was a crew-cut Afrikaner. Can you imagine the leaning on he had to take as the hearing unfolded? And he did take it. He fired Selebi junior. He did this in the name of an unbendingness, not to the rules the Selebi kid broke, but an unbendingness to being leaned upon.
I admire those qualities in a person. It reminds me of the best episodes of The Wire. If I had time and with all the stompies I’ve picked up, I’d script a South Africanized, copycat version, set in Kimberley called The Naaier. Cops in the disciplinary task team have a short shelf life. After a few years they are so hated, conflicted, threatened and stressed, that most clamour to return to their previous commands. And so, a new bunch come in, brimming with ideals, eager for skill. Hence the perennial need for training, which yours truly delights in profitably filling.
On the evening of the fourth day of the course this December, I organized a braai for the task team. It was the least I could do after yabbering on at them for a week. The venue was an el-cheapo game lodge on a dirt road just outside town called Night Breeze. The facilities consisted of a square building plonked in the middle of the veld, surrounded by a game fence twenty metres away on all sides. Inside was an ill-stocked cash bar with animal heads affixed to the face-brick wall. The pub is called O’Sullivan’s on account of an Irish couple having hosted their wedding reception there. Outside, some cement tables are arranged around a pit to make fire. One stands and eats at these tables, each accommodating eight or so people.
The car that brought me arrived a bit late and everyone was already there. I was determined to have a good time. A half moon glided through wispy clouds above the scrubby thorn trees just beyond the fence. The braaivleis coals glowed like a Cylon’s eyes. A murmur of chit-chat, punctuated by short laughs and shouts, wafted my way. Most of the members of the task team, brought in from the far-flung towns of the Northern Cape, did not know each other very well but I hoped that good food and alcohol would change that a little.
The effect of the furnishings went against my plan. Four distinct groups of cops formed, one each at a table. The general on the course and three brigadiers were sort of on their own, holding their pose. Then there was a table of black cops, most from outside the Cape, promoted in. Then a table of white and coloured cops jealously sharing a bottle of Richelieu. At the last table, sparsely populated, four or five random teetotalers sat.
I was disappointed to observe the usual South African social scene. In class, camaraderie and morale within the team seemed high but this cliquish arrangement was so typical and spoke of a conflicted and unhappy workplace. As the nominal host of the event, I moved between tables but I could see no way, other than by imposing myself embarrassingly, to integrate everyone. As the fire died down and bottles emptied, the mood changed. When I noticed again, the brandy table switched not only to Afrikaans but that flat, earthy dialect spoken by the coloureds of the province. Polite conversation gave way to guffaws. The general was in the thick of this group by now. So too were those Black guys from the Northern Cape who essentially abandoned the affirmative action imports from Limpopo or KZN who could not follow the hilarity among the doppers. It was that part of the evening when people begin reminiscing, telling jokes and biting each other.
So many things were said that night that struck me as profound and I assure you I was drinking only Coke.
One cop enquired about a certain Wollie in Springbok working at Standard Bank, who played keyboard.
‘No, old Wollie was then fired for assaulting a customer’, said a tall cop who lived in the little town.
‘Really what happened?’
‘You know about his younger brother?’
‘No, what about him?’
‘He’s got this nickname then, Growwe Nqu, and until today he totally loses
it if you call him by it.
The speaker paused to inform those of his listeners not familiar with the Nama langauge that Nqu is the word for balsak (balls), hence the name means rough or scaly balls.
‘But how do people know to call him this? Who can report on what his balsak looks likes?’ someone asked.
‘Fuck knows’, said the tall cop. ‘But if you call Wollie’s brother, Growwe Nqu, and you get away from him today, he’ll hit you in a week’s time when he finds you in the street. Which is exactly what happened. He got a suspended sentence for assault in 2010’.
‘But how did that get Wollie fired at the bank?’
‘Because the owner of the Shell garage, he called Growwe Nqu by his nickname. And so Wollie had then to moer him right outside the bank. Wollie told me it became his duty to do it, because with the sentence hanging over him, his boetie couldn’t rightly do it himself’.
Laughter followed this story, but quite a few appeals to Jesus too. A grey-haired cop with terrible problems with his knees, reminded everyone of the way a certain businessman was worked over in 2009 when he threatened an investigator in the task team. The working over sounded very much like a violation of Regulation 20 (z) and my heart soared. I envied these people their easy banter, their complicated connectedness to a common mission, even just their readiness to come out together of a night.
I was surprised these cops spoke so forthrightly about the undercurrents of their situation. To be a colonel you were probably a cop already during apartheid. Nowadays many coloured and black members have rapidly leapfrogged erstwhile white commanders in rank. Sometimes this is for equity reasons, sometimes on merit suddenly unleashed. People on both sides of this equation were at the braai and discussed this phenomenon with a level of openness at once tender and fraught. And yet, undercurrents and all, an important job had to be done. On this, eyes lit up. They cleared decks. And the most respected among them did not carry the most - but fired the most brass.
And then came the joke about Paradise. In fact, it is so layered politically and philosophically it is more theology than comedy and it goes like this.
Het jy gehoor van die Boer, die Engelsman en die kleurling wat in ‘n bakkie ry wat omslaan? Toe hulle weer kyk is hulle vrek en hulle staan so by St. Peter voor die hekke van die Paradys. St Peter kyk hulle aan en se, ‘Manne, julle kannie in die hemel toegelaat word met daai vuil klere nie. Julle sal moet uitrek’.
Wel, niemand stry nie en later aan staat hulle kaalgat voor St. Peter. Hy wys so vir die Boer se piel en vra, ‘Ou boet, voor ek besluit of jy in of uit is, vertel bietjie wat jy met daardie tottie alles gemaak hey’. ‘Nee, Oom Peter, ek het niks verkeert gedoen nie. Met die piel het ek maar net gepis’.
St. Peter, stel toe die selle vraag aan die Engelsman. ‘Mister, what did you do with your penis when you were alive?’ ‘Nee, St. Peter, se hy, ek het ook niks gesondig met my penis nie. Ek het maar net met hom gepis.
‘En jy’, vra St Peter vir die kleurling, ‘kyk daai lang, vrot voel van jou. Wat het jy alles met hom gemaai?’ ‘Ek sallie vir Baas Peter jok nie’, se die kleurling. ‘Die piel was in baie ‘n genaaiery, dit het die kant toe gesteek, en daai kant toe gehoer. Dis ‘n feit. Daar issie ‘n kont of ‘n mont wat wou nie, wat nie van die piel gekry het nie.’
St. Peter knik sy kop en se vir die keurling. ‘Jy kan maar ingaan’. Maar vir die Boer en die Engelsman se hy hulle moet fokof.
Hulle kan dit nie glo nie. Hulle vra luid vir St Peter, ‘Maar hoekom kan die kleurling, na als wat hy met sy piel gedoen het, ingaan en nie ons nie’.
‘Luister kerels’, se St. Peter, ‘daar binne is dit Paradys, nie ‘n pisplek nie’.
At half past eleven, after the first cop asked the general for permission to leave the function, everyone made for their vehicles too. And so it was that I found myself moving in a posse of twenty government vehicles weaving along a dirt road late at night, and as the cars took their own direction at the T-junction, they briefly lit their blue lights, one by one, even the car I was in.
I started the night of the colonels in patronage. It ended in respect. The reason I was late for the braai is that one of the organizers of a ‘Climate Justice’ march taking place in my hometown, Durban, phoned for urgent advice. They’d launched a court application to be allowed to march along a certain route before handing over a memorandum to representatives of COP 17. Mike Sutcliffe, city manager, met with the organizers and they agreed to modify the route. They verbally agreed to ditch the court application. However, the lawyer running their case, insisted they should still go to court. Was this necessary? They expected trouble and tricks. We spoke about this and other things and it felt good reverting to my habitual, deprecatory use of the phrase, ‘the cops’. I returned to Durban on the day of the march. Once again I was late for the party and only got to see its culmination. South Africa’s Minister of International
Relations was given a platform. She accepted the memorandum of complaint and assured the crowd of about 5000 that their voices, as civil society, were an important and valued part of the conference. She would place their issues before the parties negotiating a climate treaty and she thanked them for coming. If the march was about celebrating diversity by assembling trade unionists, professional NGO workers, ‘members of the faith community’, a delegation of rural women, filmmakers, aspirant Occupiers, environmentalists, leftwing academics, dreadlocked white people and the overdue phenomena of topless women and clowns (formally declaring themselves as such), it was a moderate success.
The fact that demands were often contradictory and that behind the facades of most of the participating organisations lay trifling ‘grassroots’ constituencies should not matter. The thing the Left learnt well from post-modernism is that power does not vest in numbers but in subjectivity. And since there is no author too, I suppose it should not matter that the cellphone number appearing at the bottom of a press statement by the Rural Women’s Assembly, belongs to ex-Trotskyist and professional NGO funder, Mercia Andrews. She is, at least, a woman.
If the march was a measure, on the other hand, of the strength, support, stature and general strategic nous of those seeking to counter the hegemony of financial and corporate capitalists in their destruction of the planet, then it ran on empty. In fact, in terms of generating and communicating social antagonism, it seems that, in South Africa, peak protest levels were reached ten years ago at the WCAR and WSSD events.
From this modestly inspiring point, it has been a precipitous decline and narrowing of social subject. The working class gave way to the community, the community gave way to those without electricity and water within the community, the poorest of the poor. But soon they themselves were relatively too privileged. They lived in actual brick and mortar structures. More authentically poor still –and thus more apt to be right in what they said and did – were the shack-dwelling poor. But the urgent romance of mjondoloism has also come and gone. Surely no-one is more marginal and authentically oppressed than women, rural women. They don’t even live in shacks, but mud huts. The greater correctness of their politics is presaged by their even greater marginalisation. After all, rural female consciousness is untrammeled by the privilege of in situ upgrading which shack-dwellers enjoy. It is untrammeled by newspapers, formal education and employment. They are truly wretched. They are going to be a hard act to beat.
But how did the conglomeration of all of the above - unions, environmentalists, shack dwellers, rural women - fare in the Climate Justice March? Since I was not in the march, the views of a protestor who spent a lot of time (and, he informs us, also money) organizing and branding ‘climate justice’ is a better source. In a post to debate headed, ‘Never Trust A Cop”, Patrick Bond says:
The march yesterday, though of a respectable size (my guess is around 8000) and exuding a really great vibe at times, certainly suffered from some curious features, including talk-left walk-right speakers (two COP17 leaders – Figueres and Nkoana-Mashabane) who bizarrely were given a free pass; very weak turnout from Durban communities and Cosatu; a failure to take advantage of the US consulate en route; extraordinary shenanigans at the start of the march by Zumite infiltrators (with “100% COP17” placards) from the municipality; often banal messaging; a failed ending (no concert as had been advertised) and inability to reach the beach for what we’d hoped would be a ‘going away party’ by virtue of nonsensical municipal orders; a wasted afternoon follow-up; and numerous other flaws. Luckily there was cloud cover and some water points so no cases of exhaustion on the 4km trek from Botha’s statue via City Hall to the ICC and Tech Fields.
Other critical views. As Ashwin Desai remarked, “This was a march organized in part by a self-liquidating left, delivering a constituency and legitimacy to the COP17 on a silver platter.” It was, Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Justice Alliance put it, a “policed march, not a people’s march – and those green-suited guys were just state cops” (referring to the city ‘volunteers’). As for the overall politics, Jos Marten of Rosa Lux concluded, “repressive tolerance”, as the establishment can sleep easy. Ashwin called it a “tame set-piece predictable show”.
Other groups – as you see below in Rehad Desai’s letter, including the Democratic Left Front and Rural Women’s Assembly – felt that there were unacceptable policing moves, once fisticuffs between red and green shirts began.
And aesthetically, my own complaint: having financed 250 vuvuzelas from my savings account, I was surprised that we didn’t achieve a wall of sound at the US consulate (a block west of City Hall) or the IEC. Best tee-shirt was probably Earthlife’s: “Never trust a cop”... and you’ll see many more displays of militancy and Climate Justice at Orin Langelle’s lovely slideshow: climatevoices.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/photo-essay-global-day-of-action-against-un-conference-of-polluters-cop-in-durban/
This march is exemplary of the state of the extra-Parliamentary Left in South Africa. I would go so far as to say that the way Left politics is styled in South Africa at the moment, there is no single part of what it does or says that is not only self-liquidating’ but wholly necessary to ‘the system’.
Capitalism shifts, absorbs and displaces its contradictions. In this, the Left have a new world-historical role. They are collaborators in the useful illusion of social change, through their strivings for democracy and human rights. In fighting for these hollowed out trinkets, the Left participates in the great lie that allows current power relations to be endlessly reproduced. The lie is that reform is possible. However much their memoranda, affidavits, press releases and websites may rail against government and capitalism in content, but in the form of their politics, when they exercise power in South Africa, it is a procession, structurally, of impimpis.
To put it in terms that Bond may understand, when you Walk Left you are part of a larger choreography that positively Dances Right. ( Walk Left, Dance Right © )
For it to be otherwise there would have been just a hint of a gesture in the march, that intelligent persons inside the ICC would fear enough to cause them to think about changing course. But there was never going to be such a gesture. This is not hindsight. I told Bond months ago that Durban and the poors generally would not pitch up in sufficient numbers or passion to give any credibility to the point marchers, as marchers, would like to make. The only way around this reality would be to bus poor people in like he does for the Harold Wolpe lectures, with a spread laid on at the end to make up for the fact that the event has nothing to do with them.
The true measure of an effective politics is the ever increasing escalation of alarm and animus it generates within society and among the enemy. This is not the distinction between reformist and revolutionary demands. It is simply about not being a patsy and, if one is a patsy, then not exposing that fact.
A retort to this is that it is in the process of struggle that we begin to prefigure the society we want to have in future. We don’t have to be taken seriously by anyone outside. It’s about what happens inside the organizational spaces we create. There we shall let trill the subaltern’s voice and let blossom worker / grassroots / indigenous subjectivities. While we walk, we ask questions. This process, the argument goes, slowly forms a sort of social dynamite.
This is taken seriously only by those who have no inkling of mass psychology, that is to say, by those who believe people can mentally pull themselves up by their own unsocialised bootstraps, that they can escape the disciplinary regulation of their own compromised yesterdays while preparing for other people’s glorious tomorrows.
In revolutionary theory, we have lost rear bases in the forests, but apparently we can retreat to places of dignity and identity within the city walls, fifth columnists of the coming revolt. While this teleological thinking has rightly been rejected in a reading of history, it can apparently be imposed in the intentional making of a local politics.
While the politics of armed propaganda and spectacle is rightly damned, apparently democratic processes among ourselves will create an exploding bomb of humanism that will win over the rest of society.
What then? If it is not while walking left with a mass of the most authentically poor where the tasks of change are formulated, then where is it? I’d say around a braaivleis fire (with soya sausages too) together with bras. The effective ingredient in politics is friendship within the context of a team.
Membership of such a team is not open to all who have grievances, or need voice. Nor does it require, even a posteriori, a ‘correct’ Left perspective to found the required action. Reasons are a person’s own business. Whatever the driving demon, the basis for common action is simply an affinity (or joy) in the perversity of the goal. And an unbendingness in achieving it. And if the goal is not achieved, at least many pleasing hours are to be spent with people one likes and admires.
On that inevitably personal note, we are brought to braskap, the condition for the effective group formations I have in mind. I have a friend active in Left organizing who gets none of it, braskap, from his comrades, not really even, I suspect, from me. The drunken gangsters, hustlers and panel beaters of his pub in Clare Estate are, whatever their deficits in progressive thinking, more apt to team up with him when it comes to political action than any comrade. When the chips are down, they share a code. ‘A man needs a code’, Omar Little once said and it extends not only to what one does, but what one does not do.
While in Kimberley, a good friend and comrade contacted me to say they were in Durban, we should meet up when I returned. How shall I put it? They were staying with the Shell garage owner.
It was said lightly. In a certain world and in a certain light, it would be perfectly okay, a thing perfectly conducive to us still being brothers or sisters in arms. In fact, it might even be a show of strength and subtlety for me to be nonchalant about their imprecise loyalties.
But, I have realized, it is not my way. I do not enter Paradise, mutually, with pricks like that.