Oprabama and the corruption of ubuntu

By Mahmood Sanglay

Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey were in South Africa in June and wowed South Africans in an unprecedented way.

Obama was here on a visit to meet our youth. Oprah came to receive an honorary doctorate conferred upon her by the University of the Free State.

The two women met for dinner in Johannesburg and I don’t imagine diplomatic relations between the US and South Africa featured in their small talk.

They were not likely to discuss issues that genuinely speak to the concerns of South Africans, like the significance of the June 16 Soweto uprising or the millions of jobless in South Africa or the legacy of Andries Tatane. They are too far removed from our concerns — socially, economically, politically and culturally.

I find the image of these two women in private conference on African soil rather intriguing. Africa is a charming platform, a lovely distraction from other important matters. What are these matters?

For starters, Mr Obama should take credit for pressure placed on the world’s developing economies having to accept pro-corporate free trade agreements. Invariably these agreements serve the interests of American multinational corporations while it impoverishes local businesses and precipitates job loss. Agribusiness is particularly skewed in favour of American corporations that flood the markets of weaker economies with cheap genetically modified foods. The result is the paralysis of the domestic food industry and unemployment.

Meanwhile Michelle Obama champions the cause of organic home-based food production. The irony offends.

And the irony deepens as it appears that Mr Obama’s predecessors have given Africa a little more time and respect. Clinton initiated the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and George W Bush launched the President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief (Pepfar).

Obama comes along and undermines Pepfar by reducing funding targets. The Treatment Action Campaign publicly criticised the Obama administration in 2010 for turning its back on Aids in Africa.

Obama’s rhetoric and charisma may have paid dividends in his race to the White House. But he has set himself up for a catastrophically greater meteoric fall than his rise. He has led the American people to believe that his departure from the gung-ho style of Bush, his empathic manner and his metrosexual charm will be followed by substance in policy and delivery. Not so.

Alas, in 2009, when his Republican opponents questioned him on a package in his economic stimulus plan introducing tax cuts for those who do not pay tax, he responded with the grace of a bowel movement, “I won”.

The president who launched his administration with the promise that he truly listens and understands the poor and middle class eventually confronts the censure of frustrated Americans.

Citizen Velma Hart’s remarks, in September 2010, are emblematic of middle-class Americans: “I’m exhausted of defending you.”

At times the veils are inadvertently drawn, and the public gets a peek at the emperor’s clothes. But, generally, the shame of naked political machinations remains dressed in rhetoric. And this dress must be donned when the Afro-American emperor dispatches his Afro-American emissary to Africa. But being Afro-American is no qualification to speak to African experience, especially if you’re close to the empire. And more especially if you’re of the empire.

Obama is of the empire and Oprah is right behind her. Yet, the citation accompanying Oprah’s honorary doctorate reads “she has truly become a South African”. What a shame.

Does her philanthropy in South Africa automatically make her of us? How does an American who built a media empire through the commodification of misery become truly South African? Oprah pursued the individualist American dream, not the communalism of ubuntu. The twain shall never meet.

But the twain that are inextricably connected are Oprah and the Obamas. The latter are seriously indebted to Oprah for her massive support of their successful election campaign in 2008. Hence my surprise when news of Oprah’s first honorary doctorate from a South African university was proudly announced. Does a progressive South African university routinely de-historicise and de-politicise active support for the policies of the empire in order to confer doctorates on individuals who give us charity? Is the university making a political statement or is it just basking in the public-relations capital to be gained from the Oprah brand?

Oprah mastered the art of generating content from private life experience, including her own, for public broadcast on privately-owned media.

She influenced people’s decision to participate in her shows through the incentive of cathartic release and a personal association with the exclusive Oprah brand.

People’s misery became the focus of her programme of public healing through the agency of televised glamour. Oprah’s private media empire benefited by making a public spectacle of the suffering of individuals and families.

The commodification is insidious. People see the value of the on-air therapy. They do not see the value of the media capital translated into ratings and revenue.

They may be aware that the performance is transient but they are not aware of the extent to which it is manipulated for television, that the interaction is one-sided, non-dialectical and controlled by the performer. It is the use of power, ostensibly in the public interest.

Oprah’s Book Club is a fascinating case in point of such use of media power.

What we see is the positive influence on literacy levels and the rendering of a serious literary genre like the postmodernism of Afro-American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison for populist discourse. It has high public interest value. It’s great for literacy and it makes good entertainment.

What we do not see is the underlying capitalist enterprise. The critic Houston Baker Jr calls it “something obscenely-though profitably gut-wrenching about Afro-Americans delivering up carefully modified versions of their essential expressive selves for the entertainment of their Anglo-American oppressors”.

How loyal are we to the memory of those who made the highest sacrifices for our freedom in our land when we seem obsequious to agents of the empire? How loyal are we to the dignity of the majority of our people struggling today in the face of poverty when we seem to endorse imperial elite values of struggle and success?