Does freedom mean being free to shop?

When Jacob Zuma visited the Maponya Mall a couple of weeks back, he made an interesting statement. “I came here because I wanted to see the shopping mall because this tells a new story, he said. “Here you can walk into world-class shops and buy what you want. You don’t have to go to town or Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate or Westgate. This is a story of our freedom.”

A story of freedom, as it turns out, is a story of being able to shop at a mall conveniently located near you. Which, when reflecting on Smuts Ngonyama’s statement — “I did not join the struggle to be poor” — makes sense. I had assumed that the consumerist interpretation of the struggle against apartheid was out of favour — we’re faced with a recession after all, and the new president has a reputation for being a friend of the working class — but it seems not.

In truth, the notion that the transition to democracy was as much about getting and spending as it was about human rights has been around for while. It first gained real traction in the early 1990s, when advertisers such as Bonita, Castle Lager, Castrol and Sales House (remember them?) quite explicitly positioned the equalities and freedoms promised by the 1994 elections in the context of consumption. As Swaer told Boet in one of the Castrol Can of the Best ads: “Ja … business is going to boom in the new South Africa.”

And so it did, in many ways.

Mark Gevisser described the trend away from socialism as “the quietest and most profound revolution of our time”. Former communists and trade unionists were embracing free market principles as well as the perks that went with them with almost indecent enthusiasm. Black South Africans had achieved political power; now they wanted economic power and, along with it, the power to dictate the terms of public discourse. As the former head of SABC television news, Joe Thloloe, remarked, “We may have won political power but economic power is still in white hands, so the struggle continues … ”.

It’s the sort of thing that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would cite as the “poisoned gift of national liberation”. So many national liberation projects have not led to true revolution: “The calendar has gone crazy,” they complain in their neo-Marxist tome Empire. “October never comes, the revolutionaries get bogged down in ‘realism’, and modernisation ends up lost in the hierarchies of the world market”. Instead, the revolutionary struggle becomes what they describe as a “delegated” struggle, in which a ruling elite is tasked with carrying out the modernisation project. Thus the revolution is “offered up, hands and feet bound, to the new bourgeoisie”.

This is, of course, exactly what happened in post-apartheid South Africa, with previously committed socialists and communists doing an ideological about-turn that astounded even their liberal critics, and former trade unionists and political prisoners becoming millionaires, even billionaires. (And where, one might add, the government apparently finds it easier to find the money to pay for million rand Mercedes-Benzes for MECs than it does to pay doctors or teachers.)

Over the years since the first democratic elections, we’ve seen the steady entrenchment of the notion of consumerism as a public good, with the emergence of such phenomena as “the emerging market” and “black diamonds”. The materialism of our culture at the expense of deeper, more meaningful values, has been blamed for everything from crime to corruption. We are free to shop, but it seems that that freedom has come at a price. As Brandon Hamber wrote in 2006: “South Africa is not the only place in the world where consumerism is all-encompassing, but it specialises in pretension. As a friend mentioned to me, life is measured by the three Cs – car, credit card and cellphone. It is a national obsession.”

What does this mean for South Africa? I know from the research I have seen over the past couple of weeks that many people are battling even more so than usual. But despite the problems presented by consumerism — the shallowness for one thing, not to mention the obsession with instant gratification or the crass emphasis on external signifiers of status — I do believe that Zuma was broadly correct. Maponya Mall does symbolise freedom, at least for those of us who believe that, for all its manifest flaws, the act of consumption, of shopping, does offer many of us the closest we will get to a sense of autonomy and choice — real pleasure, in fact. And autonomy and choice are things that matter, because they have not always been enjoyed by all South Africans.

The significance of the freedom to shop should not be underestimated. It is a bedrock of democracy. Empty supermarket shelves are the surest sign of a society in collapse: ask any Zimbabwean. In fact, more South Africans should be free to shop. The country would be a better place if they were.