MICHAEL MORRIS: GNU should improve the lot of all kindred spirits - Business Day

Michael Morris

We only travel, I once read, to return home.

It wouldn’t be true for the fugitive or the emigrant, or not literally anyway, but this proverbial wisdom does suggest that however far we go we can only ever be our truest selves. And perhaps going away only intensifies whatever that might be.

Many years ago now, I had a meaningful glimpse of this while reporting on an official Western Cape visit to Indonesia. Right at the end, a debriefing session in the mercifully cool VIP lounge at Bali’s Denpasar airport revealed that the essence of the five-day, six-flight trip was what everyone seemed to have discovered about home − the unrelenting impact of SA’s history, but also the quite ordinary basis for overcoming it. 

We heard about black business people struggling to make headway in a “closed” Cape Town marketplace and prejudices among black people about Muslim employers; how it was that the delegation itself excluded established white business interests; what hope was there of creating wealth, let alone a “home for all” — the political theme, at that time, of the governing provincial administration − when people were limited or frustrated by myths and bigotry. 

This was 2006, admittedly, and a lot has changed since. Still, there are things we might recognise in this list. What arguably has become more vivid is the unmistakable bond of being ordinarily South African. That was true 20 years ago too.

One of the delegation − at the time, improbably enough, a dentist and brick manufacturer — was a man named Jerome Mkhonza. He’d actually been quite forthright about how implausible a home-for-all Western Cape seemed to him.

He comes to mind because of a small, telling episode the night before our departure, when most of the South Africans, along with British, German and Italian tourists, were relaxing in the company of an East Timorian crooner in the plush bar of a beachfront hotel in Sanur. 

We were a motley bunch — black, coloured, white, business executives, entrepreneurs, a political adviser, an academic, an imam, a dentist, a secretary, an architect, an economist. In the course of the chatter and laughter and some good-natured teasing, a German woman leant over to Mkhonza and asked with what I think was revelatory innocence: “Is this your family?” 

I wrote at the time that “it says something about how it was just then, the uncomplicatedly fraternal spirit of the group, of people who share that peculiar blend of pride and shame that forms an unspoken South African-ness, less patriotism than affectionate and forgiving familiarity, that Mkhonza showed no surprise”. Indeed, he was merely truthful. “No,” he replied, “we’re just a bunch of South Africans.” 

All that is bound up in this episode endures, and is today reflected in a marked political alteration. As my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres, told the Harvard Club in New York last week, the government of national unity (GNU) “signalled a move towards pragmatism instead of revolution”, and one that “enjoys high levels of support among the populace, with our most recent polling showing 63% of respondents preferring the GNU constellation over the previous ANC-only government”.

But if there’s another thing to learn from thinking about Indonesia in 2006 it is that the years pass quickly. As Endres warned, “the pragmatic constellation ... will not be sustained in the absence of tangible improvements in the living conditions of ordinary South Africans, which require economic growth to be brought about”. 

We need to make good on what’s most promising about us.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-11-25-michael-morris-gnu-should-improve-the-lot-of-all-kindred-spirits/