GONE TO THE DOGS? By Asithandile Gxumisa

 

From an old and retired village located in an obscure and tranquil corner of South Africa, I have caught wind of a rumour as disconcerting as it is praevalent, to wit: ‘South Africa has gone to the dogs”. Tidings of a gloomy and melancholic turn, and this rumour happens precisely to be of that kind, are such as customarily feed my deep and imperishable pessimism. Yet a part of me, that of a patriot deeply and infinitely in love with everything South African, refuses on this peculiar occasion to gobble up this dreadful and saddening news. Now I do not for one moment doubt, for we are credibly informed, that the fortune of all sublunary Kingdoms and Republics will come to naught eventually, on that great and dolorific Day when the heavens will pass away with a roar and when all souls will marvel at the sign of the Son of Man; but I should like to believe, from purely patriotic motives, that South Africa’s star is auspicious enough to guide her through the troubles and convulsions of this dark Century.

To be sure, fellow compatriots, the prevailing and unsettling socio-economic circumstances of our Republic do not inspire much hope or confidence in many a follower or observer of public affairs, with the exception, perchance, of the incorrigible optimist. The publication of the Report by the so-called Zondo Commission expectedly and meticulously detailing the endemic rot that pervades government and State-owned Enterprises tells a lamentable story of a crisis-ridden nation that is going through a leadership emergency of alarming and gigantic proportions. Afflicted with boundless ambition and stricken by a voracious appetite for affluence, members of the ruling class have remorselessly bewrayed the majesty of the South African Republic by betraying to the world at large the painful and humiliating truth that in them we have governors who will neither hesitate nor scruple to auction off our precious country as vendible realty to the highest purchaser. A parricide of parricides!

As a consequence of these detestable and treasonous public enormities, the perpetration of which is commonly and regrettably rewarded with impunity, the citizenry has lost all faith in the integrity and value of our democratic institutions or are now accustomed increasingly to regard them with disdain and suspicion. The sudden and mysterious outbreak of a devouring conflagration in the very heart of the country’s national legislative capital is one more deplorable and shocking indicant of the ongoing and systemic breakdown of political leadership. No sooner did we discover from the cavalcade of depredations committed during the July Riots of the past year, that our law enforcement agencies scarcely can afford to defend the private property of citizens, than we all learned not many days ago that the infinite and proverbial incompetence of our political grandees has actually left the resplendent halls of Parliament and the iconic edifice of the Constitutional Court exposed to the mischief of incendiaries and vandals.

In the midst of these calamities and predicaments, I, presumably with many other law-abiding souls, have yet to recover from the savage and startling manifestations of the impulse of violence which seems to possess my own contemporaries with devilish power. The story of a clever and young lady barbarously slain and sawn up into chunks in East London by a jealous and sadistic boyfriend, or that of a woman whose lifeless body parts were found stored in a refrigerator by her own paramour, is a sad and dreary illustration of a people, if I may employ the sombre expression of an Apostle, ‘in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity’. The Prince of this World is on the prowl.

The famous and woeful passage of a Seneca who lamented with profound and penetrating reflections the follies of a sensate Aera might be equally pertinent to the swelling vanities of our own Age: “The world is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer hidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere.” Poor old Seneca had lived long enough to witness a public and powerful man whose beastly and ravenous libido had driven him to geld a boy for the sole and bizarre purpose of wedding and bedding him. Alas! we have seen worse than Nero. To resolve the perennial crises occasioned by vice and criminality, intellectual and cultural evangels of the ‘New Morality’ have prevailed upon almost all the modern and Christless world to embrace the autolatrous and utilitarian creed that virtue essentially consists in performing all those deeds and obligations which are compliant with an ‘enlightened self-interest’ and conducive to the wellbeing of the greatest possible number.

You may add to this shallow yet popular notion the incredible and superstitious dogma of Progressivists who anticipate with dewy-eyed and groundless confidence that the whole human race shall be delivered from the shackles of corruption by the absolute equality and universal opulence that supposedly awaits us all in the Future. However, seeing as the multiplication of private and public crimes has established beyond dispute the fatuity of the principle of ‘enlightened self-interest’ as a sound and sustainable sanction of morality, and as the urgency of our dismal and desperate social conditions cannot wait any longer for that chimerical catholicon promised by champions of Progressivism, I must hasten to asseverate, under the unfailing aegis of the ancients, that true morality is one which rests upon a divine or transcendental sanction of one kind or another.

It is, therefore, why I often call upon all those who are invested with appreciable sway over the course of this country to sincerely examine the connexion between the gradual collapse of religious faith and the aggravation of moral villainy among us. Harsher and longer confinement sentences, or social and economic ostracism, may unshackle us for a time from the dread and menace of the malefactors and murderers against whom we are fortunate enough to secure convictions in keeping with the forms and maxims of the criminal law. Yet the great chasm between the incident of sexual offences reported to relevant authorities and the excruciatingly low rates of convictions for such criminal offences confirms the frightful words of the Roman statesman, “More (crimes) are committed than can be cured by force.”

Something else, something more, something that will penetrate to the cloistered and mystical alcoves of the conscience is urgently needed in order to domesticate the savage in man which so often impels him headlong into outrageous impiety and mischief. ‘Order in the soul’, that is to say, the subordination of the vagaries of passion to the dictates of reason, is that something which we all so desperately require for the restoration of tolerable order and harmony in the Republic. Do not take my word for it; I am only a humble and grateful disciple of an old moral tradition which ennobled and immortalised colossi like Homer, Moses, and Sunni Maa of the African Danakil Depression. I must now humbly seek the pardon of the reader for having fixed your attention for so long upon such dismal and unappetising themes, even if I did so with a fair and prior warning respecting my personal appetite for the tragic.

I merely sought, before I got carried away, to draw attention to the events which form the basis of the cynicism and hopelessness of those who appear to be convinced that this twenty-eight-year-old democratic Republic is doomed. Now, a few reasons why we ought not yet to abandon ourselves to despair over the affairs of our Republican commonwealth. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, the repository of the inalienable privileges and rights of citizens, still enjoys high and wide esteem among the general populace. The flailing and mindless attacks upon its worth and legitimacy by political opportunists seem incapable of shaking the attachment of the citizenry to its power and promise. Walter Sisulu’s daughter recently discovered, by her puerile and populist attempt to attribute to the document of the Constitution the socio-economic misfortunes of the African majority, the impatience and displeasure of South Africans at governors who have perfected scapegoating into an art.

I cannot help but remark what a great pity it is to witness the glorious lustre of the Sisulu name and legacy insensibly sink into ignominious notoriety because of the skulduggery of a reckless and thankless daughter. It is, therefore, a truth worth celebrating that a generality of citizens are still fully persuaded that the Constitution affords us all a civil social order which is tolerably compatible with freedom and justice and deserves all the energy that may be expended and the trouble that may be suffered so as to conserve it for the benefit of posterity. There is also something delightful and positive, fellow compatriots, in the fact that we fail to secure justice for the long succession of barratries and malversations in government and State-owned Enterprises only after great and painstaking undertakings towards that end. It is always better that we should aim for Justice even without a guarantee of success in that endeavour, than that we should despair entirely of achieving that goal only on the ground that success is not guaranteed.

So, if for no other reason, we must still be grateful to the inquiries undertaken by the various Commissions and the investigations conducted by constitutional bodies like the Public Protector for their concerted and laborious efforts to ensure that the transgressions of criminals in public life are punished according to the rigour of the law. We recently learned from the imprisonment of our quondam President that no person is above the law; and so, from this precedent we have grounds to hope for the triumph of the Rule of Law over impunity and lawlessness. You would be extremely surprised to find how the punishment of President Jacob Zuma by the Constitutional Court significantly revived the confidence of the ordinary South African in the institution of the Judiciary and in the broader legal system.

Of the upsurge in private and public crimes I have already intimated above that our best hope is in acknowledging that ‘distempers of the soul’ call for remedies of a spiritual nature. It often excites in me no small measure of consternation and bewilderment whenever I recall that my beloved country is without those voices the chief concern of which is the welfare of the soul of the citizen. The moral authority of Christian ministers is greatly diminished on account of countless scandals committed by famous members of their own body, or by their pusillanimous capitulation to the hellish and impious doctrine of Caesaropapism since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Representatives of the African spiritual tradition stand absolutely no chance in a thoroughly secularised and modernised world – even as the marvel of the spiritual customs and institutions of our ancestors fades away in the blazing glare of scientific innovations and revelations.

Do not be alarmed at my sorrow over the impending extinction of the African spiritual tradition. I may be an orthodox Christian wholly persuaded that the moral hopes and aspirations of all persons and nations are fulfilled entirely in Christ the Son of God; yet in the midst of the evangelical impotence of Christianity, a phenomenon which says a lot more about Twenty-first Century Christians than Christianity, I would still more gladly prefer neighbours who also subscribed to a transcendental creed of one kind or another than compatriots whose minds are benighted by the desolate and degrading philosophy of materialists. Accordingly, in order more effectually to grapple with the cognate crises of vice and criminality, we have to defer to the light of Patrick Henry’s ‘lamp of experience’, to wit, the collective and time-honoured wisdom of our human ancestors.

“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living”, so wrote a T.S. Elliot who earnestly sought in his own time and country to enkindle the waning veneration of his countrymen for what he called ‘the Permanent Things’. If you will not give heed to my voice, admittedly being that of a living man like yourselves intimately implicated in the follies and vanities of his own Age, then I humbly exhort you to seriously attend to the ‘communication of the dead’ which has ever affirmed in every age and land that God, and not Man, is the measure of all things. And for as long as we are at liberty thus to speak freely in this great and beautiful country, we do not have any reason yet to give up on the fortune and future of the Republic of South Africa.