Dancing on the edge

“Every cloud has a silver lining”, they tell me. Of course, every bodybag has a silver lining too, I would imagine. But as an idiom, that kinda sucks. Still, in the spirit of always “looking on the bright side” (another folksy saying the lustre of which has been slightly dimmed of late by the Eskom load shedding debacle), let’s embrace the carnival that is South Africa today, and catalogue things both crazy and cool.

I like to think that South Africa now is where Germany was in 1919 – 1933. The Weimar Republic was that briefly glorious period in between the two World Wars, when German culture went crazy, and there was what’s glibly referred to as “explosive intellectual productivity”. Some of you will have heard of Weimar culture. Others, given the current patchy state of our education, will not have heard of the World Wars. Not to worry. If my theory is correct, we’re about to experience our own burst of intellectual productivity.

Weimar culture gave the world some great things. The modernist style of Bauhaus, the political paintings of Otto Dix, Bertolt Brecht’s laugh-a-minute plays, Kurt Weil’s happy-go-lucky cabaret singalongs, the scifi futurism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It also gave us loads of jolly German maidens sitting on horses flashing their breasts, and waving big swords at men quaffing martinis out of beer steins.

A crude summation of Weimar history is necessary here, even cruder than the preceding paragraph. Germans fight war, lose war, so have to pay loads of money and stuff to other European nations. Life gets bad. But paradoxically, arts and culture flourishes. Then Adolf Hitler comes along, exploits the resentment of German people, takes advantage of the economic depression, becomes a darling of the masses, designs some coolly evil uniforms, and starts his career as Evil Dictator. People making great art and culture, and indeed great science and philosophy, have to flee to other countries, especially minorities singled out for special treatment.

Loads of trite parallels here to South Africa, as I’m sure you can see. Some fun ones too. We haven’t lost a war, in fact we’ve won one – but we’re still losing huge amounts of money into the First World, because that’s the nature of a post-colonial economy. And I’m not just talking about the money being moved overseas by everyone from big business to small emigrants.

I wouldn’t say Jacob Zuma is our Adolf Hitler – in fact, I’d explicitly say he is NOT our Adolf Hitler. But after the Polokwane Putsch, he has filled the vacuum of charismatic leader, a role he plays to perfection against Thabo Mbeki’s President Hindenburg. The moustachioed figure was responsible for allowing a trumped up charlatan and criminal  to take up a position of power in the cabinet, on the assumption that he’d be able to control him, a mistake that eventually led to his usurpation and the eventual ruin of the country. That’s Hindenburg and Hitler I’m talking about, not Mbeki and Zuma. But you knew that.

Zuma, for example, doesn’t persecute Jews. I’m sure Tony Leon, that loveable scallywag, will say that was Mbeki’s job, anyway. Zuma does, however, appear to have a thing about gays, so expect some pink stars in the firmament, as soon as he needs to drum up a religious support group. Cosatu could stand in for the Brownshirts, and there are some distinctly uncomfortable similarities between the ANC Youth League and the Hitler Youth, primarily when it comes to absurdly worded propaganda statements.

But this analogy is getting a little laboured, so it’s probably time to make the point, which is that great art flourishes alongside political turmoil. But one last irony – Hitler’s rise to power was, to a degree, sponsored by foreign firms who got rich off the subsequent war, including American companies like WA Harriman that had George Bush’s grandfather as president. Our potential next ruler is alleged to have been financed by French arms company Thint, also getting rich off selling weapons to people who want to kill other people for political ends. How we learn from the lessons of history.

Not all is doom and gloom. For every evil nationalistic cultural product, like Umshini Wami, our very own Horst Wessel Lied (the song, written by a murdered Nazi, that used by Germany as a national anthem for 12 years), we have a multitude of great new music, art and literature.

I wouldn’t claim that a fragmented society is an inevitable precondition to the evolution of a band like The Blk Jks, an artist like Willem Boshoff, or a poet like Lesego Rampolokeng, but I would say that consuming their cultural products takes on a particular piquancy when it’s done dancing on the edge of disaster.

First published in Obrigado magazine.