Published in Business Day.

The Rot Exceeds the Question of Corruption

Richard Pithouse

Day after day, and year after year, the news in South Africa carries reports of people declaring that they are not animals. A migrant at the fundamentally corrupt and abusive ‘reception centre’ in Marabastad, Pretoria, says that “They treat us like a dog, they don’t do right. They just want money.” A report on an even more abusive prison in Bloemfontein notes that a leaked video shows an inmate shouting “No! I am not a donkey” before being injected with anti-psychotic drugs. People making their lives in shacks repeatedly declare that they are ‘living like pigs in the mud’, or that ‘we live like rats’. When the police open fire on a road blockade, or hurl teargas into a shack settlement, people are often say that they have been treated ‘like dogs’.

These kinds of statements are as common in Cape Town as they are in Durban or Johannesburg, and one is just as likely to hear them in Afrikaans as in seSotho or isisZulu. They were common in popular protests at the turn of the century and they remain just as common today. They are not unique to South Africa. From Bolivia to Haiti and Morocco eerily familiar phrases appear in accounts of the politics of impoverished people – people without waged work, scrapping a living together in the mud and fire of the urban peripheries and, when they decide to strike, blockading roads with burning tyres. But in South Africa it is clear that these ways of speaking are primarily a form of expression common to the revolt of the most oppressed and dishonoured people in our society – the prisoner, the migrant, the impoverished person living on a scrap of wasteland in a desperately precarious home made of bits of the detritus of a city.

Our Constitution awards rights to all citizens, including, along with the basic means to life such as water and food, a perhaps ineffable commitment to dignity.  And while non-citizens are in a legally more vulnerable position they are not entirely without rights. But, in the main, these are what Aimé Césaire called ‘abstract rights’. When, as with the right to housing, there is a commitment to ‘progressive realisation’ the passing of time is not always redemptive and patience is not always rewarded. As the years roll by more and more people live in shacks.

For many people the lived experience of the state is often an encounter with contempt, sometimes in the form of disregard or neglect, and sometimes in the form of active exploitation, or even outright sadism. The suggestion that other actors, like NGOs and universities, can behave in a similar fashion used to be taken as heresy or lunacy. The horror of the Life Esidimeni scandal has put that naiveté to rest.

Discourse professionals in the universities, NGOs and media frequently impose their own meaning onto popular forms of making meaning, striving, organisation and revolt. We see this when, for instance, every protest organised by certain kinds of people in certain kinds of spaces is assumed, a priori, to be a ‘service delivery protest’. This imposition of meaning often operates in a way that reinforces the appeal of technocratic expert driven solutions – be they in law, policy or administration – to deep social wounds. This can accumulate into a systemically anti-democratic paternalism.

The sense that some people are, in practice, excluded from the count of the human was, and remains, central to the logic of colonialism. In 1961 Frantz Fanon, writing his last book in a race against leukaemia in a flat in Tunis, observed that when colonial ideology reaches its logical conclusion it “dehumanizes the colonized, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms.”

Colonialism is not the only synthesis of force and ideas to have imposed a distortion in the count of the human. But, initially via the ideological mediation of Christianity, and then liberalism, it has been the most decisive force in the shaping of the modern world. Colonial logic is fundamentally organised around the separation of a single humanity into different categories that are accorded different moral weight. Some people can be subject to murder, enslavement, dispossession, impoverishment, exploitation, torture, rape and humiliation in a way that others cannot.

The ideas that legitimate colonial violence and humiliation have, for a long time, been more secular than religious but they continue to take the form of a sublimated distinction between the sacred and the profane. Some lives, inhabiting the world in some bodies, in some places, and mediated through some forms of cultural expression, are accorded value while others are, implicitly or explicitly, deemed expendable. Some people are damned. This comes to be taken as common sense.

The long insurgency against this common sense, the modes of material accumulation that have undergirded it, the forms of religion, philosophy and science that have legitimated it, and the kinds of violence that have sustained it, has frequently taken the form of an affirmation of the universal, or what Césaire described as “a true humanism — a humanism made to the measure of the world”. An arc can be drawn from Toussaint L’overture, the first leader of the Haitian Revolution against slavery, who, in 1792, denounced that institution ‘in the eyes of humanity’, to the more recent radical humanism of Fanon, Steve Biko’s commitment to ‘a true humanity’, and Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s commitment to a politics of the future that she terms a ‘revindication’ and ‘reconstruction’ of the idea of the human – “A new mode of experiencing ourselves in which every mode of being human . . . is a part of us”.

But, as thinkers like Fanon, and Wynter too, were well aware anti-colonial nationalism can be captured by an elite that, while speaking in the name of the people as a whole, and often in the name of the most dispossessed, acts, in practice, to contest elite space, while sustaining spaces of dishonour and neglect that are subject to rule by decree and violence rather than participatory consent.

In 2001 Achille Mbembe, drawing, in particular, on the grim reality of post-independence Cameroon, wrote that in the postcolony “power . . . grips its subjects by the throat and squeezes them to the point of breaking their bones, making their eyes pop out of their sockets, making them weep blood.” The language here reaches beyond ordinary somatic realities and into the realm of horror. But in South Africa in 2018 the sadism it describes is not entirely unrecognisable to the prisoner, the migrant or the resident of a shack under attack from one of the many formal or informal sources of armed force available to local power brokers.

In 2001 Mbembe was sceptical about attempts to pose a counter-humanism, or a genuinely universal humanism, against the colonial reduction of the human to a certain category of people. He wrote that “both the asserted denial and the reaffirmation of that humanity now look like the two sterile sides of the same coin”. But ten years later, now writing from Johannesburg, he concluded that, in South Africa, “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and ‘the human’ from a history of waste”.

Dealing with the putrefaction of the Zuma years certainly requires that we strive to undo the ways in which the state has been turned into an instrument for private accumulation at the expense of any possibility for a social or even national project. But the rot in our state exceeds the question of corruption.

We cannot move out of the tightening gyre of history, and set an independent course towards something better, if we don’t find a way to address, in practice rather than on paper, the question of the human. Fanon’s conclusion in this regard – ‘that a prospect is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein’ – retains its elegant authority more than fifty years after it was first committed to print.

If we really want to set our society on a fundamentally new course we need, of course, to restore the basic fiduciary integrity of the state. We need, also, to think seriously about the materiality of building a fairer society, one in which ordinary people’s lives can become viable. Mass racialised impoverishment is as unjust as it is unsustainable. There is no way out of our crisis without a significant democratisation of our economy, along with the countryside and the cities.

But we also need to take the insurgent humanism from below seriously, to build a democracy in which respect for a shared and universal human dignity is a starting point for action, a basic obligation for the everyday functioning of the state, and not an increasingly distant aspiration for a future always yet to come.