MICHAEL MORRIS: SA could do worse than follow Boks’ blueprint - Business Day

Michael Morris
Going all the way back to the early 1990s, it has often been assumed that some supernatural agency was always indispensable to otherwise unthinkable home-grown SA success. Given the odds, this “faith”, if you like, didn’t always seem wholly irrational.

Back then, after the grim final years of apartheid’s failure (made grimmer by its bloody effort to keep going), it almost made sense that the “miracle” narrative caught on as having the most plausible explanatory power, reinforced in turn by the veneration of the emergent, soon sainted, figure of Nelson Mandela.

The near universal reverence for him — and his “Madiba magic” — often meant that his generalship at the head of the ANC, with all the grandeur of his finest impulses and the flaws of his worst, was seldom properly appreciated for its far-reaching political implications, good and bad. The same was arguably true of the misappreciation of the limits of the role history cast for him. 

For a good while, though, “miracle” seemed about right. Now, I suspect a growing number of people have become, for want of a better term, “faithless”, at least in the secular sense of having lost their belief in the “miracle” of a political transition that was otherwise unattainable, or the likelihood of any similar “magic” emerging again soon, and having the desired effect of setting the country right. 

For many, perhaps, the future is shaped more by a fearful unknown (always the worst) than by what is unthinkably wonderful (always miraculous). Of course, it would be foolish to wholly discount anxieties about the former condition. 

I was reminded last week of then US secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld’s ominously mysterious conception of “unknown unknowns” during the 2003 Iraq invasion, when BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen recalled it in the context of the Middle East conflict.

For all the mockery Rumsfeld earned for his odd choice of words, Bowen wrote, “in this part of the world as much as any other, [unknown unknowns] exist — and when they emerge, they can make a big difference”. 

Yet every now and then some incident or event — often, funnily enough, one that people may speak of as being “magical” or even “miraculous” — will demonstrate something about how things actually are, and show the way to understanding the value less of searching wildly for reasons to pin our hopes on fantasies than of rationally examining how we actually live, how we determine what matters and make the most of what we have.

The most inspiring recent example is, of course, SA’s Rugby World Cup triumph. Important as it may be, the gees and social cohesion are not the lessons. The key idea was best expressed by colleague Marius Roodt when, writing elsewhere at the weekend, he observed that “the national rugby team did not become world-beaters through luck or divine intervention. It was through preparation, hard work and using all the talent at its disposal”. 

There was no reason, Roodt went on, why this “basic blueprint” could not work for the country as a whole. Identifying a fundamental truth so easily overlooked in much of the national conversation, Roodt wrote of the Springboks’ 2019 and 2023 World Cup successes as feats achieved “through meticulous planning and through harnessing all the resources at their disposal”. 

We don’t have to long for supernatural intercession, or be paralysed with dread at the prospect of “unknown unknowns”. Adopting the Springboks’ “basic blueprint” would be a good — real — place to start. 

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

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-11-06-michael-morris-sa-could-do-worse-than-follow-boks-blueprint/