Renaissance dreams and discontent

Submitted by Chris Waldburger

This month, South Africa ached for a leader. South Africa’s shoulder rubbed raw against the wheel of destiny; there was nobody to stand as a midwife for her so that she could bear the hopes and dreams of a continent.

She shook with the fever of fear, hatred and criminal opportunism as vulnerable refugees were killed and victimised simply for the bare fact of their identity.

But, in our bid for destiny, all is not lost — even as many notable leaders have been heard to comment that this is the first time they have felt shame in being South African.

No, all is not lost, because this fine nation has once again a window of opportunity to prove what it is that a true African renaissance would look like.

The lines of latitude and longitude that were used to define the scramble for Africa can finally be shown for the absurdities that they are. South Africans can rise up in justice and compassion and repel the criminality of the xenophobes and show our brothers and sisters of the north just what a new day may bring.

We have done it before, with the aid of a fine leader, and by God it is needed once again. A cry has been heard throughout the country: “Who will go before them, and who will speak the words threatening to go unspoken?”

Renaissance. Rebirth. In these heady times of false dawns, tragedy and elusive hope, much has been made of Africa’s bid for reinvention. Our president has made tangible the taste of this wind sweeping the dust of broken promises across the continent.

If Thabo Mbeki stands for anything — and I have no doubt he stands for much — then he stands for what has broadly, and perhaps paradoxically, been termed post-colonialism: the deprovincialisation of Africa, the unshackling of a continent ready to stand on its own, as it did before the subjugation of the West, to rejuvenate itself and give to the world, as Steve Biko prophesied, a “human face”.

The most glaringly obvious, if not perhaps the most vivid, stamp of colonialism has been the definition and establishment of the nation state.

Ever since the Peace of Westphalia, Europe and the West have been locked into an existence of national economies, international trade and arms build-ups that overflowed into both world wars (particularly the first) and into the decolonisation process that took place in Africa during the second half of the century.

As the system warps with the influence of the multinational corporation and the slimy mixture of government and industrial conglomerates, so too does Africa rot in a system that derives little hope and meaning for the little man, and even less prosperity.

Men and women find themselves beholden to political forces they did not create, which apparently exist because of democracy. Opportunists seize the thrones of states and loot their countries dry, and this, you see, is how a continent burns.

We have become used to the idea of conflict and mass displacements.

Well, allow recent events to awaken you to the notion that such things must not be tolerated.

It seems as though if renaissance were to come, it would come not in more exhaustive planning and resolutions, but in something more subtle, and more explosive.

It would be the contagion of spirit, not of politic. Something more communal, and more complex, it would be something more, dare I say it, African?

It would, indeed, be less redefinition, à la the 20th century, and more (would you believe it) renaissance; an actual rebirth.

It would be more reformation than revolution, more epiphany than regime, and more democratic than the system of democracy itself.

In the misty fog that has been the tragic past days, and in the attempts to rescue the evil days, one can dimly see an outline of what an African renaissance could look like, for albeit but a glimpse.

It would look like state sovereignty but not at the expense of community, which only leads to apathy and depression and the strangulation of soul.

It would look like community, but not at the expense of the individual. (Let it rise up!)

It would look like geographical nationalism, but not at the expense of justice and humanity. (Give it birth!)

It would look like economics and trade, but not to the sacrifice of sanity and fulfilment. (Dead bones come to life!)

Call it fuzzy idealism, but what else should one aim for? Political and diplomatic expedience never seemed to attract any great person’s attention before; let us not begin to reinvent that. If we are to solve a supra-legal problem, we had better start imagining supra-legal solutions.

“History teaches us not to hope on this side of the grave” are the words written in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. With this lesson I am in wholehearted agreement; it is just that I believe one should choose to ignore it.

It seems as though it is no coincidence that these events have overtaken us in the midst of domestic uncertainty.

But in the pregnant pause before the inevitably deeper darkness that is to come, let us pause a moment and use the darkness as a weapon, for it is during the night one is afforded an opportunity to dream.

Let us dream of rebirth and of renaissance and of great lessons to be shown to the world. Let us dream of solutions that would go beyond state governance to fix societies which have more to them than surface-level democratic institutions.

Perhaps it is that we can only wait for the other side of the grave for such dreams to become reality.

But it may just be that it is in the seemingly fruitless dreaming (and the work which derives thereof) that we in Africa may find for her a last chance for integrity, redemption, and, alas, a noble death.

Chris Waldburger is a schoolteacher in Cape Town. He wrote this piece after seeing firsthand the anguish and the fear that the displacements resulting from the xenophobic attacks caused