Comparing blacks and Chinese: SA’s leadership and Zimbabwe

I confess I felt like a Ryland Fisher when I wrote my previous blog Time for SA to invade and occupy Zimbabwe about SA invading Zimbabwe. I was testing the waters to see what the response would be. You know, to get out a referendum on the radical, perhaps impetuous idea of invading Zimbabwe.

While I agree with much of what came up in the commentary – for and against SA invading Zimbabwe – I was deeply saddened by the (understandable) cynicism about SA’s leadership and military force. As a nation we have come to this pass?

It’s hard not to agree with the skepticism of the commentators. The comments were generally carefully considered and intelligent. I am not being patronising and I appreciate it when the likes of Benzol, Brent, Kit, Alisdair et al comment on my blog – I read their comments elsewhere and they always have interesting, worthwhile perceptions, though I may not always agree with them.

But one thing that was thankfully missing from the commentary was those luminaries who froth and bubble “Viva ANC, long live Zuma Messiah” and so forth. And their absence was very telling. Judging from the response to the blog, and the other articles which appear on Thought Leadership, black South Africans, by and large, especially the Zuma celebrants, are not interested in the plight of Zimbabwe.

“Messiah”, “celebrant”… my use of the religious metaphor is not idle. The obvious problem with some religions, especially sects and cults from the Klu Klux Klan to the Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses is that you are required not to think, but to unquestioningly follow your head priest over the cliff or to drink the chalice of poison and die before the end of the world cometh.

This is why it was so easy for the Han Chinese – I emphasise the Han ethnic group, which is the majority ethnic group – to accept communism in China. And how it spread so easily and horrifically. I have lived in China for about four years now and the Han — again by and large — are unbelievably docile, unquestioning, and obedient.

Nearly four years ago, as a topic for practising English, I once asked a Chinese teenage class why it was so difficult – well nigh impossible – for mainland Chinese to get a passport to go to Hong Kong. The city is part of their own country and they should be able to come and go as they please, surely. There was an uncomfortable silence, followed by one 17-year-old saying, “that is none of our business,” and the rest murmured their agreement, not daring to look at me or at the others. They docilely stared at the floor, a sort of sheep-like group non-think tank. I have encountered this often, including adults.

I quickly learned not to bring up any potentially inflammatory topics as there are spies everywhere in China. That comment of mine on Hong Kong, I can solemnly assure you, would have gone down on record at the local police station with which I was then registered as a foreign worker. In this country you are your brother’s keeper.

The society the Chinese grew up in for centuries has trained most of them not to think. “Until the 1980s creativity and thinking in the behaviour for the average Chinese was practically taboo. One of the primary policies of successive governments during the long history of China was to maintain its status quo – to discourage and prevent changes that would make it possible for common people to make decisions on their own …” Boye Lafayette De Mente, The Chinese Have a Word for It.

This is definitely the case for the Chinese. They are loveable, friendly people, but I experience their daftness and lack of initiative on a daily basis. For example, read my “Upon entering abandon all reason”.

But the De Mente comment above on Chinese thinking is chillingly like the mindset of the masses in South Africa (sure, like “the masses” everywhere, to some extent, I suppose). Just mindlessly follow the Messiah with your offerings of machine guns and do not question.

We also have a situation in SA where the so-called leadership is also completely indecisive. This is the “wussiness” I was referring to in my comments in the commentary on “Time for SA to invade and occupy Zimbabwe”.

The wishy-washy nature of SA’s current leaders, including the recently deposed Mbeki, is so unlike FW de Klerk, a man who has balls. He understood the future scenarios for SA and boldly and decisively initiated moving SA into a new era of democracy.

As Brent said in the commentary on my last blog, “Vorster closed SA borders to Rhodesia and when Smith’s army had at most two weeks ammo left, he came to the negotiating table and the rest is history.” Vorster was decisive. So was PW Botha when he gave the thick, boer finger to the world and allowed SA to fall into virtually complete isolation. Those men, largely of dour, stubborn Dutch stock, would not let people push them around. Dit is uit soos varkjaag in Palestina, as I would often hear when I was in the army in 1982-1984. (“It is as unacceptable as hunting pigs in Palestine” to translate the Afrikaans.)

I have no doubt that if Vorster or PW Botha were in power now the Zimbabwean situation would have been stabilised a long time ago, either through force or cutting off Zimbabwe’s leaders from any supplies, forcing them to change. Those men, truly stubborn Dutch bastards that I grudgingly admired, politely or impolitely told the world to go to hell with regard to their decisions. They would not have been bothered by the bleats and moos of the UN or neighbouring countries.
Julle moer met wat julle dink, those NP leaders would have said. To hell with what you think. “Our people are dying in the townships because of your people and now you are giving our people your cholera? Voetsak, Mugabe”. I can just hear the thick gutturals, the plosive p’s and k’s when they say people and voetsak. The word cholera would be vehemently spat out with three rrr’s on the ra, as they speak and wag their fingers at the TV camera. And they would have followed through on what they said, you can be damn sure of that.

Of course, the SADF (now NF at the end, short for naff) was then a force to reckon with.

As Brent went on to say in his commentary, ending with a cynical comment showing his understandable lack of faith in the current and recent SA leaderships: “Just close all Zim’s borders to normal trade etc and Bob will fall in less than a month — or does Vorster’s apartheid SA have more moral guts and gumption than our current SA leaders????”

Vorster did have more guts, though being a staunch supporter of apartheid his morality was completely lacking when it came to the issue of race. (I need to state the obvious in case readers think I am in favour of apartheid: of course I am not.)

Sadly, the Chinese can also be gutless, like the leadership in SA. In 1937 a small country called Japan occupied Nanjing, one city in massive China with barely a token gesture of resistance from the Chinese. If documented testimonies are to be believed, the cowardly Chinese troops were attacking Chinese civilians and robbing them of their clothes so that the Japanese would not shoot them.* An indescribable wholesale rape of women and massacre followed, for which China’s leadership was partly responsible. It was kept quiet for a long time; the government was too embarrassed to own up to its cowardly lack of actions and its utter ineptness.

Let me tell you know (and my finger is wagging) no average SA Dutchman (Afrikaner) or South African second generation Brit or Irishman like myself would have put up with a Japanese invasion. Hulle sal hulle gatte sien. There is something grittily graphic, earnest and stubborn about the Afrikaans language, which reflects the soul of its equally stubborn, gutsy people.

Though Zimbabwe is not invading SA in the military sense of the word, it is invading SA economically, socially and the epidemically. Cholera is just the beginning, bringing with it other poverty-related diseases such as typhoid.

Which brings me to the invidious, inflammatory question, which I ask with great respect of all of us: Are the black tribes of SA proving today to be as equally docile and indecisive as what the Han Chinese can be?

My first job, back under the PW Botha regime, was teaching English in the black township school, Langa, just outside Cape Town. I taught there for two years. The talk of the matric and standard nine students was only politics. The talk of the teachers, in more subdued tones, was mostly politics. The latter were just more cautious because of the spies everywhere, even in our staffroom. (See paragraph six above, on the passports to Hong Kong issue.)

As soon as the ANC was unbanned, most teachers at Langa High cautiously confessed to being ANC members, eyes shifting around the room to see the reaction. (The comparison with paragraph six above is obvious.) I proudly began to wear an ANC badge on my jacket, impatiently waiting for the release of Mandela. I threw that badge away a long time ago in utter disappointment.

But the talk at Langa High prior to the beginning of all the unbannings and the release of Mandela was just that: all talk. It is not unlike the “viva Zuma” tripe in Thought Leadership’s commentaries. I was passionately anti-apartheid (still am) and often wondered why such a majority could so easily be oppressed by the minority rulers, other than a skirmish here, a riot there, a soft-target bombing over there. Sure, there are many books on the subject, such as Alistair Sparks’, The Mind of South Africa. It is beyond the scope of this blog. But that culture of docility and indecisiveness has led to the dismal leaders we have in South Africa.

That, in the process of moving to a democracy, South Africa and her people have become like a castrated, trembling old goat, is deeply embarrassing and disillusioning. This comes at a time when I thought I could not have become more disillusioned about South Africa’s internal politics and the approach to Zimbabwe.

And some of my best holidays were in Zim in Salisbury, Wanke Game Reserve, and the Chimanimani mountains, both as a child and in my late twenties when a group of us spent a week or so on a houseboat on the magnificent Lake Kariba. The following is an excerpt from a poem-sequence called From Lake Kariba, an earlier version of which was published in a South African literary journal, New Contrast:

Spines of branches from dead trees splinter
The lake for miles. They thicken the waters’ shadows
To pincushion clusters, curling round sandbanks.
Crocodiles, mud-dogs, sprawl with jaws agape,
Raised heads and grins impossibly frozen. They mock
The stone outcrops with a deeper, lived-in marbliness.
Solemn to think they eye us, while they eye nothing.
The boat creaks on. We turn again to watch the mud-dogs,
Motionless, staring out the emptiness for eons.

The bows rasp through forests of branches weather-polished
To coal and chicory. They jut from waters coppered
With their reflections. Candelabra carved from stone,
Pushing up from an underworld, tips extinguished
In the skies. Faintly they smoke in tides of heat.
With a cathedral’s silence, the lake has reached into us.
Will I dream again of the ancestral dead tonight, of legions
Of women and men raising candles through the lake?

*

These half-drowned branches, unflagging as they
Quieten us, work through thinking with their
Upturned yearning. Imagine replicas of Dali’s
Metamorphosis of Narcissus: those fingers and thumbs,
Giant and slender, contorted and joined, transmuting
Into figures kneeling, drooped heads immersed
In metaphor, in telling us what we are and that we are.

*

Bubbles, air-sand, glistening through the shadows,
Hint that the mud-dogs or hippos are here again.
The boat tilts. Africa’s death is raw and thrashing,
A dazzling red splashing. Here death is intimate,
Routine, stripping legend and size. Here is to be
Less than myth, less than forests of the dead, those
Beseeching arms beckoning us on, beckoning us in.

Note:

Boye Lafayette De Mente’s The Chinese Have a Word for It is highly recommended to anyone interested in the way Han Chinese think, and to grasp their customs and culture. De Mente is a renowned sinologist, who “brings more than twenty-five years of experience on China to the study”.