Profoundly South African

“How long shall you carry that burden on your shoulders? How long shall those tears keep running down your beautiful face? We all have troubles now and again, know what I’m saying? No matter how hard we try, trouble will find us one way or another. People had trouble since the Pope was an alter boy. People had worries from when the Dead Sea was only critical. Hear those drums rolling. Listen to those guitars skanking. Put a smile on your face. Don’t let the troubles get you down.”

Clicks:

• Beautiful Faces: Rattray/Phala/Dube
• Feel Irie: Live 8 Performance/Lyrics

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It’s the mid-70s and a French philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) has just hammered out a book concerning the birth of the prison system. The work tracks the evolution of the social and technological mechanisms used to entrench dicipline in Western Society. His ideas serve up an effective theoretical means of understanding the dystopian world conceived by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover, Foucault has devised a philosophical matrix through which the existence of Big Brother can be perceived in familiar contemporary contexts.

Discipline and Punish asserts that we live in a state of perpetual imprisonment, drawing connections between the mechanisms of law enforcement in modern society and the panopticon. A type of prison building dreamed up in the Eighteenth Century, the central characteristic of the panopticon was that the guards could observe prisoners while prisoners were unable to see the guards. The bottom line was that the prisoners never knew when the guards were looking. Fewer guards were needed, costing taxpayers less money. Everybody was happy.

Needless to say, Foucault would have drawn profound conclusions concerning the evolution of enforcing the speed limit on South African roads. Once upon a time, traffic cops crouched behind bushes and cables were intermittently stretched across roads in unexpected locations. When it was discovered that the income generated by speeding fines was not commensurate with the cost of conducting these stealth operations, the government turned to the panopticon method, slapping up signs like the one above.

As there were no cameras to go with the signs, people quickly realised that there weren’t any guards on duty. Big Brother was caught napping and all the mice came out to play. When the cameras arrived, the farmer’s wife raised her carving knife and speeding vehicles broke wildly to avoid persecution. However, they remembered where the cameras were located and formulated a strategy of slowing down in all the right places.

In a flash, the intuition of South African drivers sped to the lofty philosophical heights of Foucault. These days, even in unfamiliar territory, the collective consciousness of drivers around you makes it clear when there is trouble ahead. Nevertheless, the panopticon approach may not have been completely exhausted. Empty green boxes perched on metal poles might just do the trick. For the time being anyway.

Clicks:

• Horse’s Mouth: Foucault Quotes (Wikiquote)

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A profoundly South African sign that commuters pass as they shuffle onto metrorail trains. Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 - April, 11 2007) would have approved. The American novelist and social commentator contemplated the mess that dangerous weapons make during his involvement in the Second World War. Held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut took shelter in a meat factory during the infamous bombing of the German city in 1945. He emerged to find piles of rubble and death.

Vonnegut later drew on his experience in Germany to create a novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. An exploded narrative that skips backwards and forwards in time, the book is laced with science fiction and provides a gloomy picture of war. Published in 1969, it was was embraced by readers who were puzzled and drained by America’s Vietnam blundering. Around the time it hit the shelves, polls in the United States indicated that only 33% of the nation supported pursuing a complete military victory.

Vonnegut concocted a distinctive brand of hopeful pessimism in his literary contributions to Planet Earth. His final work, an exhortation of the Bush administration entitled Man Without a Country, sees him soaring the lofty peaks of intelligent insubordination. “What can be said to our young people,” he writes, “now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”

Clicks:

• Man Without a Country Extract: Custodians of Chaos

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It’s September in the year 1979. Five months have past since the Last King of Scotland fled Kampala and Emperor Bokassa has just been extracted from the Central African Republic. The President of Equatorial Guinea is being tried for genocide and Nigeria is weeks away from its Second Republic. South Africa is currently suspected of conducting a nuclear test with Israel in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. In seven month’s time, Zimbabwe will be born.

It’s September in the year 1979. Three years have past since hundreds of Sowetan kids were killed by South African police during protests against legislation that enforced the use of English and Afrikaans as languages of instruction in “black schools.” Right now, a profoundly South African woman is introducing a song to a Dutch audience at Varra TV Studios. “It’s a Xhosa wedding song,” she explains, taking her time.

“Everywhere we go, people often ask me, ‘How do you make that noise?’ It used to offend me because it isn’t a noise, it’s my language, but I came to understand that they didn’t understand that Xhosa is my language and that it’s a written language. We use the same Roman Alphabet in writing it. The only difference is that we pronounce certain letters differently.”

47-year-old Miriam Makeba is on top of her game. She discharges a volley of crackling Xhosa vocabulary to the delight of the crowd. She finds humor in the sombre subject of South Africa and its languages: “Now, I’m sure everyone here knows that we in South Africa are still colonised. The colonisers of my country call this song ‘The Click Song,’ simply because they find it rather difficult saying ‘Qongqothwane.’”

Clicks:

• The 1979 Varra TV Studios Performance (Described Above)
• A Phenomenal Performance at Bern’s Salonger (Sweden, 1966)

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