MICHAEL MORRIS: Let’s not allow petty squabbles to eclipse SA’s potential - Business Day

Michael Morris

I read a news story last week about Hong Kong officials singling out schools for singing the Chinese national anthem “too softly”, and immediately knew how lucky I was to live in a society that is instinctively contemptuous of anything remotely like approved behaviour.

This is not always comforting, but it is something we can almost certainly count ourselves lucky for.

Hong Kong officials, the BBC reported, complained that students’ voices at one school were “soft and weak” and “should be strengthened”. At another, teachers were told to “help students develop the habit of singing the national anthem loudly in unison”. 

All this, Beijing said, was in pursuit of promoting “unifying thoughts” and “gathering strength for building a strong country”. 

You can’t help feeling nobody would dare to tell South Africans they were singing the anthem too softly or that they should brush up on their “unifying thoughts”. We may even be immune to such nonsense. 

It is not that our state is or ever has been naturally benign, or indeed so powerless. The autocratic impulse is there, to be sure, and has been for a century and beyond. Yet a long history of resistance finds symbolic and substantive expression, since 1994, in a bill of rights most South Africans have shown every willingness to defend and affirm.

And somewhere in that mix of things is perhaps a clue to the likely source of our redemption, which I can’t help feeling is inescapably central to the character of our fractious, complex society: scepticism bordering on scorn for anything resembling instruction.

But this hasn’t always held. It turns out that authority can look very different depending on the angle of the light. It’s little wonder that, now and then, inglorious episodes in our record will have seemed to justify the world’s pitying an SA destined to founder.

In one memorable instance, expanding on his jarringly dissonant assessment of the 1994 transition as “a pseudo democratic farce”, British writer and intellectual Paul Johnson added with funereal solemnity: “Well may the beloved country cry now. If ever a country needed prayers, it is that delectable, cursed land of sinister, doomed beauty.”

Thirty years on, we’ll take the delectable but ditch the cursed, the sinister and the doomed that Johnson pinned on us with transparent melodrama in what was, in fact, our moment of triumph.

Yet it’s true that the mystique of irreconcilability has always threatened to hex the SA dream. Even if it invariably proves itself more of a phantom in the end, we know all too well the grim appeal of one or another discrete interest that excludes on the grounds of supposed incompatibility.

If there was any doubt of this, the collision of hostile ideas in the emergent government of national unity could be said to describe an unbridgeable schism of ideology — though evidence of it is almost entirely absent in society and visible chiefly in the careerism of racial nationalists no different from those who let us down so badly in the past. 

South Africans ought to summon the spirit of their collective bloody-mindedness and make it plain that they couldn’t care less for the survival of this or that party merely for its own sake, and certainly not if its survival diverges from the national imperatives of economic growth and an inclusive economy, cleaner, effective government, and sane, evidence-based policy-making.

Petty spats over nostalgic ideological drivel are unwanted distractions from the urgent task of — to borrow a slightly ungainly phrase — “gathering strength for building a strong country”. 

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

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-07-08-michael-morris-lets-no-allow-petty-squabbles-to-eclipse-sas-potential/