Bafana Bafana's non-performance reflects our national psyche
February 14, 2006 Edition 1
Benny Bunsee
There are many reasons for Bafana Bafana's miserable performance at the African Nations Cup, not least sheer inability. But I believe it is something more. Despite the national hype that should spur it, nothing, it would appear, can do so.
We had African, coloured, Indian and European stars during apartheid. Indians are no more on the scene, when once there were stars like Dharam Mohan (truly world-class) Lightie Chinniah, Somalingham, Links Padayachee, Rampath and others.
Bafana's degeneration, I surmise, shows something more in our national life, indicated by the alleged ineptitude and corruption within Safa and the lack of discipline among our players.
Something has snapped from the past euphoria and we are going slowly downhill.
The end of apartheid (but not colonialism) heralded many promises. The world marvelled that we avoided a bloody civil war.
Mandela became a demi-god, especially for whites and the Western international media. Reconciliation after all lets them off the hook of the devastation wreaked on the countries of the South over 600 years.
The end of apartheid was to be the beginning of "transformation", although this was never spelled out.
We boasted about our wonderful constitution, talked about non-racialism (we are the only country that does so) but not anti-racism, "Simunye" ("we are together", when we are still a divided society), our wonderful democracy and so on. But we were kidding ourselves.
We underestimated the damage that apartheid had done. We glossed over the innumerable contradictions that now come to haunt us: the land question, the language issue, Africanism, national identity, colonialism, the need to teach African history and build a true African identity for all of us, and so on.
Apartheid succeeded in dividing us. We still live in our ethnic ghettoes. Look at the subtle appeal to certain racist attitudes among a section of the Western Cape electorate by certain opposition parties and the stirring up of the Blackman Ngoro incident.
We talk of nation-building in the abstract, but we remain a fragmented society without a homogeneous national culture. The dream of something new and vital coming out of us through frank debate and dialogue has faded out.
Society only progresses through such truth-seeking. Mediocrity and banality have triumphed in our national life. We complain and protest without a sense of direction. So what happened?
The fact is we had no vision of a new, transformed society beyond non-racialism and reconciliation, which could mean all kinds of things but, as a political philosophy, meant nothing.
Its usefulness in avoiding civil war is beginning to be counter-productive. It covered up the crucial contradictions instead of facing them. It played to the galleries instead of moving towards a truly inspiring national vision of qualitative change. We just joined the old order and slid into the old bureaucracy and retained the old crippling psychology, warts and all.
We, and especially our political notables, just wanted the goodies of apartheid. Hence the corruption, though nothing compared to that of the past, and the grubby shabbiness of our political life. We stepped into the old shoes, thumping our chests and shouting how wonderful and "miraculous" we were.
Thus our mainstream neo-liberal media remain like the old, and mediocre. Our leader opinions generally lack intellectual depth, and in their analysis deal with form rather than content, repetitiously saying the same thing. Our letters columns say much more. Our black journalists and newspapers are no better and are merely imitative of the old.
We have no rich intellectual heritage, and certainly hardly a black intellectual heritage of any note. Noseweek does some good investigative journalism and Biophile reaches out to more interesting topics of note.
I have to look to foreign newspapers to be better informed.
Our society was born in the throes of a Eurocentric colonial modernity. So we are an imitative society in all aspects of our life.
There is nothing new and dynamic about our education system, which must launch the individual with wholesome knowledge, imagination and a sense of inquiry.
What we call arts is actually entertainment. Our debates on race, which is our main concern, are superficial, and generally do not compare with the richness of Afro-American writings, not even in the richer literary heritage.
None of the great philosophical issues of human existence touches us. We talk about being African but do not have a clue about the history of Africa, where the human race was born, and Africanism is largely decried as being racist.
Deep within us we do not believe the legacy of apartheid can be reversed. The whites know they have won.
Have non-racialism and reconciliation stifled real debate on crucial issues, glossing over confronting the real contradictions and issues? The malaise into which we have quietly sunk, I believe has seeped into Bafana. They, too, want the goodies without any star performance.
What is inspiring about us in any field of human endeavour today?
