Words&Dirt

“When I arrived in South Africa, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter was approaching and the ANC had decided to mark the event with a media spectacle.  The plan was for Parliament to relocate for the day from its usual commanding home in Cape Town to the far more humble surroundings of Kliptown, where the charter was first ratified.  The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, was going to take the occasion to rename Kliptown’s main intersection the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, after one of the ANC’s most revered leaders.  Mbeki would also inaugurate a new Freedom Charter Movement, a brick tower in which the words of the Charter had been engraved on stone tablets, and light an eternal ‘flame of freedom.’  Adjacent to this building, work was progressing on another monument, this one called the Freedom Towers, a pavilion of black and white concrete pillars designed to symbolize the charter’s famous clause that says, ‘South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, black and white.’

The overall message of the event was hard to miss: fifty years ago, the party had promised to bring freedom to South Africa and now it had delivered––it was the ANC’s own ‘mission accomplished’ moment.

Yet there was something strange about the event.  Kliptown––an impoverished township with dilapidated shacks, raw sewage in the streets and an unemployment rate of 72 percent, far higher than under apartheid––seems more like a symbol of the Freedom Charter’s broken promises than an appropriate backdrop for such a slickly produced celebration.  As it turned out, the anniversary events were staged and art-directed not by the ANC but by an odd entity called Blue IQ.  Though officially an arm of the provincial government, Blue IQ ‘operates in a carefully constructed environment which makes it look and feel more like a private sector company than a government department,’ according to its very glossy, and very blue, brochure.  Its goal is to drum up new foreign investment in South Africa––part of the ANC program of ‘re-distribution through growth.’

Blue IQ had identified tourism as a major growth area for investment, and its market research showed that for tourists visiting South Africa, a large part of the attraction is the ANC’s global reputation for having triumphed over oppression.  Hoping to build on this powerful draw, Blue IQ determined that there was no better symbol of the South African triumph-over-adversity narrative than the Freedom Charter.  With that in mind, it launched a project to transform Kliptown into a Freedom Charter theme park, ‘a world-class tourist destination and heritage site offering local and international visitors a unique experience’––complete with museum, a freedom-themed shopping mall and a glass-and-steel Freedom Hotel.  What is now a slum is set to be remade ‘into a desirous and prosperous’ Johannesburg suburb, while many of its current residents will be relocated to slums in less historical locales.

With its plans to rebrand Kliptown, Blue IQ is following the free-market playbook––providing incentives for business to invest, in the hope that it will create jobs down the road.  What sets this particular project apart is that, in Kliptown, the foundation on which the entire trickle-down apparatus rests is a fifty-year-old piece of paper that called for a distinctly more direct road to poverty elimination.  Redistribute the land so millions can sustain themselves from it, demanded the framers of the Freedom Charter, and take back the mines so the bounty can be used to build houses and infrastructure and create jobs in the process.  In other words, cut out the middleman.  Those ideas may sound like utopian populism to many ears, but after so many failed experiments in Chicago School orthodoxy, the real dreamers may be those who still believe that a scheme like the Freedom Charter theme park, which provided handouts to corporations while further dispossessing the neediest people, will solve the pressing health and economic problems for the 22 million South Africans still living in poverty.

After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results of its experiment in trickle-down justice are scandalous:

• Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
• Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
• Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year.  The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.
• The ANC government has built 1.8 million homes, but in the meantime 2 million people have lost their homes.
• Close to 1 million people have been evicted from farms in the first decade of democracy.
• Such evictions have meant that the number of shack dwellers has grown by 50 percent.  In 2006, more than one in four South Africans lived in shacks located in informal shantytowns, many without running water or electricity.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 269-72

“No longer is the United States sending jazz and classic Hollywood films into information-starved Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as in the early decades of the Cold War.  Nor is it sending rebellious youth culture to dissidents who welcome it in the spirit of the European avant-garde, as in the later decades.  Instead, America is sending raunchy sex comedies, blood-drenched horror films,  and crude talk and reality shows into non-Western societies where the vast majority of the population is socially and religiously conservative.  For audiences also exposed to the rougher edges of US foreign policy, this flow adds insult to injury.

Yet the news is not all bad.  While researching this book I interviewed more than a hundred American practitioners––public diplomats, trade officials, foreign service officers, soldiers, missionaries, businesspeople, media executives, academics, and artists––as well as over two hundred informed producers, consumers, and observers of popular culture in Britain, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Oman, India, Indonesia, and China.  I did not ask these people what they admired about America, but while describing the distortions of popular culture many of them took the trouble to remind me that America is still greatly esteemed around the world.  When asked to elucidate, several of them sketched a picture that is remarkably consistent.  What others admire most about America, they told me, is the ordinary citizen, not a big shot or celebrity, who is hopeful in the sense of believing that a given problem can be solved, but who is also prudent in the sense of being mindful of limits, both material and human.

I call this blend of hope of prudence the American ethos, because while not unique to America, it is uniquely woven into our history.  It is also the heart of soul of our culture, and as such provides a useful backdrop to the wideranging discussion that follows.”

––Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad, by Martha Bayles, loc. 193