Giant time machine of memorial lectures
There are two things you need if you are a deceased or retired ANC politician: a foundation and a memorial lecture. In a country where the past is the only thing that animates the ANC in the present, they are some of the tools used to maintain a perpetual backward-looking gaze.
To help sustain the illusion, the future is an immutable and inevitable reflection of those past glory days.
Of course, pageantry is also good for the ego; the countervailing force inextricably attached to so much low self-esteem in South African politics. You need but have served in the ANC to be immortalised. Oliver Tambo and Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri sit side by side on the memorial lecture circuit.
All the big political guns have foundations: Cyril Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Oliver and Adelaide Tambo, Steve Biko, Archie Gumede, and a hundred others besides. Dullah Omar has a foundation, an institute and a memorial lecture – the trifecta. They are the Rolex watches of political reputation or status. You simply must have one. And so a number of people boast a foundation although their life, political or otherwise, has yet to run its course. A shrine built by themselves, to themselves.
The process of political preservation these days often precedes the sell-by date by some considerable time.
Quite what the majority of these institutions actually do, how they spend their money and on what, is a question for another column.
That said, most do run a memorial lecture for their principal as part of the posterity package they offer.
When there is no foundation, a third party inevitably steps into the breach, typically a member of the alliance or a university – many of which behave like they are extensions of the alliance anyway.
One need look only at the kinds of honorary doctorates and chancellorships regularly and grovellingly offered to ANC politicians to see the extent of the academy’s obsequiousness.
We await the inaugural Tony Leon Memorial Lecture. No doubt Wits, his alma mater, is working hard on it, and an honorary doctorate for the man too. Perhaps he will one day be recognised as a man of letters, philosophy, public service, law and leadership in the way Jacob Zuma has been recognised. But then perhaps having an actual law degree counts against him. The ANC’s hegemonic grip on SA might be weaker than it has ever been, but a grip it remains.
Yet, of all the mechanisms used to perpetually celebrate and regurgitate ANC history, few compare to a memorial lecture. SA is awash with them. Here is what a relatively quick search turned up:
Archie Gumede Memorial Lecture; Chris Hani Memorial Lecture; Steve Biko Memorial Lecture; Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge Memorial Lecture; Oliver Reginald Tambo Memorial Lecture; Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Lecture; Raymond Mhlaba Memorial Lecture; John Gomomo Memorial Lecture; Harry Gwala Memorial Lecture; Es’kia Mphahlele Memorial Lecture; Thabo Mbeki Memorial Lecture; Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture; Peter Mokaba Memorial Lecture; Alfred Bitini Xuma Memorial Lecture; Sefako Mapogo Makgatho Memorial Lecture; George Botha Memorial Lecture; Dullah Omar Memorial Lecture; Mbuyiselo Ngwenda Memorial Lecture; Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture; James Moroka Memorial Lecture; Ruth First Memorial Lecture; Charlotte Maxeke Memorial Lecture; AB Xuma Memorial Lecture; Pixley ka Seme Memorial Lecture; JT Gumede Memorial Lecture; Bertha Gxowa Memorial Lecture; Sefako Mapogo Makgatho Memorial Lecture; JL Dube Memorial Lecture; Raymond Mhlaba Memorial Lecture; Nadine Gordimer Memorial Lecture; Beyers Naude Memorial Lecture; Govan Mbeki Memorial Lecture; Kader Asmal Memorial Lecture and Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture.
The list runs into the sixties, and it’s hardly complete. In other words, in any given week, someone is hosting a memorial lecture somewhere.
Don’t forget these are merely those memorial lectures associated with the ANC. Outside of the party there are many others. They constitute the perfect platform in many respects, especially today.
The ANC is both in meltdown and headed towards a crucial and potentially divisive election. Thus, one of two speeches is usually presented, under the guise of history and respect: a stale, verbose collection of clichés, offered by a sitting member of the executive; or a damning platitudinous incitement of contemporary ANC politics from those alienated from the centre of power. Occasionally, when the time is right, potential presidential candidates use them to promote their campaigns.
And so you see the same tired roster of politicians make their way to the podium – the ANC’s top six when the task is to promote; the likes of Trevor Manuel, who seems to gravitate towards pseudo-intellectualism and retroactive morality, when the task is to condemn.
All framed in the media with much deference and reverence, as if each person was delivering nothing less than a Reith Lecture. How the media love an event, any event. Give a speech a title and it allows you to wrap up repetitive inanity in a cloak of profundity and present it to the public as both important and prestigious.
But the point of reference is always the same: the veneration of the liberation movement and its past, as a point of comparison or consideration. Rarely is anything memorable or insightful said about any aspect of SA’s current condition, other than government’s programme of action or criticism of the ANC’s morass. They are not intellectual platforms but political stumps. And they offer the world of ideas next to nothing.
You could abandon half of them and simply get the speaker to issue a statement through the ANC’s media operation. No one would be any the wiser.
It is remarkable, too, given the idea of the public lecture as a forum for intelligent comment, how little impact they seem to make on the ANC or the country. Here you have an organisation, which every week ostensibly celebrates intellectualism and insight yet daily it seems to grow more obtuse. There are two options: either the content is vacuous or superficial or the ANC just isn’t listening. Or both. From this font wisdom does not flow, only nostalgia.
The truth is if you artificially transform everyone into a hero then the idea of a hero becomes meaningless. There are some great names on that list, worthy of a memorial lecture. But there are a great many more who are not.
One need not be a hero to establish a memorial lecture. Many great philanthropists have done so. But, when they do, it is usually to celebrate an idea more than an individual. If not, then through time the name of the individual becomes synonymous with an idea. Because ideas live on, not people. Which is why they encourage prospective, not reflective thought.
But not the ANC. These are really just gravestones. And that is the great irony.
While they feign to keep alive a memory by cherishing its virtues, in reality they generally do little more than abuse them, to drive some fleeting contemporary expediency. They are a meeting place, for people to talk about themselves; if not, then to wave a flag for a walking corpse.
Quite what the ANC would do without the past is a question too frightening for the organisation to contemplate. It has had to turn itself into a giant time machine to just avoid the answer. Because it has none.
Thus, its contemporary representatives live out their days by trying to associate themselves with greatness, in some sad and desperate attempt to grasp a dying flame.
Death. It’s all that keeps the ANC alive. Funerals, memorials, lectures, today these constitute the party’s unofficial platform, as it constantly talks to its own ghosts. But the spirit of ANC future has yet to appear. It’s a cemetery out there. You see the markers everywhere.
The ANC is dying to be sure – intellectually and politically – and it has subconsciously turned the national conversation into one big memorial lecture. The past and the present have now merged, nostalgia is a full-time business.
Only the party wishes its own demise to be celebrated in real time. The grieving reading their own oration.
Van Onselen is a columnist for Business Day.