kagablog

The out-of-tempo indignation of a liberal: a semi-serious deconstruction of André Brink’s “Glad to be alive”

It must have been hard for renowned author André Brink to keep locked inside his heart all the resentment and the grudge against the “ignorant” and “swaggering” individuals who have occupied the seats of power in post-apartheid Mzansi. Yet, short before migrating to safer shores in Australia, fellow writer J.M. Coetzee had made the very effort to write a whole book to subtly warn his homies: “Leave, buddies, before it is too late. The barbarians are coming”. Message left unheard by brave Mr Brink who, unlike smart Coetzee, decided to stay, because – he writes: “this is the place of my birth and my ancestors, and I happen to love it”.

Courageous Mr Brink stayed. And he gutsy endured almost silently the barbarism of the “New South Africa” for more than a decade. Until something too outrageous to be handled by his bullet-proof liberal heart happened. One last drop fell on the vase, making it to overflow. This forced Mr Brink to hold his pen and burst out on paper all the anger accumulated in these years. Finally. Once and for all.

The above quoted and the following excerpts are taken from an article published by Rome-based liberal newspaper La Repubblica in 2006, maliciously translated into Italian with the title “This is how South Africa has betrayed Mandela’s dream” from André Brink’s original article “Glad to be alive” (http://www.finistere.se/blogg/entry.asp?ENTRY_ID=469)

Though a little outdated, it’s a story worthy to be read:

A story that goes like this :

It’s “late in the evening on a quiet weekday night”, and Mr. Brink’s daughter Sonja and her husband Graham are having dinner in a “small restaurant in a peaceful suburb in the town of Somerset West, near Cape Town”. They are “discussing their two small children and how to occupy them during the winter holidays which have just begun; and reminiscing about the reception at the French embassy earlier in the evening”, where they had met “the members of the French rugby team”. The world – continues Mr Brink – “seems to be a pleasant, relaxed and generous place”.

NOTE 1: This is the set of Mr Brink’s story, which immediately makes me – an immigrant living in a township – wonder: what are we exactly talking about here?!? But it’s too early to drop the newspaper in the dust bin, and curiosity pushes me ahead. So – I think to myself – let’s give Mr Brink a chance.

Proving to be a navigated poker player, in this first part of the story Mr Brink plays the first good card in his hands, “the children card”, which is always a good one to capture the reader’s sympathy. Poor Mr Brink’s bored grandchildren… Let us imagine the hypothetical conversation:
“Graham, my darling, Sakhile hasn’t yet cleaned the swimming pool. I asked him to come over two weeks ago and he said there was no transport… Plus, the Playstation is at the shop for repairs, and kids have already been to the US during last winter’s holiday. How are we going to keep them busy this year?”

Already at this point, I can’t stop thinking about Ntate Nhlanhla and Ma Agnes (who live in the squatter camp 500 mt far from my section in Tembisa) and their sleepless nights, for they don’t know how to put three meals together for their kids the next day…. How unpleasant, unrelaxed, and ungenerous place the world must be for them…

But then again, at least I know from the very incipit of the story that Mr Brink is speaking about someone whose world is a pleasant and generous place to live in… someone who definitely belongs to a South African elite.
Still driven by curiosity more than any other sentiment, I am determined to read further.

The couple’s carefree conversation is violently interrupted by a “sudden commotion”, the bursting of “five men, armed with pistols” who “start shouting, in a cacophony of voices, orders and instructions which are at first quite incomprehensible”. In the next minutes, some of the people in the room are “attacked, beaten to the floor and savagely kicked in the face”. Then (and here comes the climax of the first part of Mr Brink’s painful story) “everybody is ordered to strip themselves of rings and jewellery, watches, cell phones, wallets”, while. “ the manager is forced to hand over the keys to the safe; the cash register is smashed”.

NOTE 2: I figure out that the set of voices seems to be “cacophonic”, and the given orders and instructions “incomprehensible” because, most probably, they are spoken in one of the (allegedly) nine South African official languages which the diners are unable to speak (unlike their domestic workers, their gardeners and the waiters serving at their tables who, I bet, are all fluent in at least three of them ).

There’s a racist innuendo in the description of the robbery but, whatever the case, Mr Brink, as the Latins said: Dura lex, sed lex (“A tough law, but a law”). You got to know it the hard-knocks way, but at least now you know that South Africa is a country where it’s seems quite hard to enjoy a dinner. In fact, it’s hard to enjoy it if you get assaulted between a filet and a mousse au chocolat, your diamonds gets stolen and the Italian wine you were sipping stains your silk dress. But it’s even harder when papa has no job, mama is sick and there’s no food on the table. Yes Mr Brink, bejewelled people do find hard to enjoy their dinner sometimes. But don’t forget that many times poor people don’t have dinner at all.

“Apart from a single paragraph on an inside page of the small local newspaper” – the story goes on – “the incident will not even be reported in the press: it is too insignificant, too banal, too commonplace in the New South Africa. No-one has been killed, no-one raped. It will not even rate as a statistic”.

NOTE 3: I guess the incident will not be reported because, amongst the thousand crimes committed on a daily base in the New South Africa, the theft of a few cellphones and gold rings, though disturbing, is indeed a totally irrelevant or, as you called it, “insignificant” and “banal” piece of news, given the socially troubled situation of the country. I guess that most readers (not to mention “the everyday people”, those who can hardly afford to buy newspapers) simply wouldn’t care.

Nevertheless, I also have a small daughter, and the Goddess knows how much I, as any other conscious parent, care about her safety. In a glimpse of parental solidarity, I feel pity for Mr Brink’s preoccupations. I can actually visualize him.

Genuflected, clasped hands, in front of an altar with a giant effigy of Rudolph Giuliani, “the sheriff of NYC”. The one who, when the mayor of the Big Apple, with his “Zero Tolerance” doctrine, “cleaned the streets” of the city by targeting micro-crime. In other words, by throwing into jail thousands of people (mainly black, latinos, or, to cut it short, poor people), while leaving untouched the “white collar crimes” which, on the contrary, flourished in the same years. As they say in Italy: strong with the weak ones and weak with the strong ones… “Ah, Rudy, if you were here, instead of that useless…”

Then the story takes a sudden turn. A new character appears in the texture of Mr Brink hot-hearted story. Now the issue is no more daughter and son-in-law’s indigested dinner. The target has shifted to “the large, beaming, bearded face of the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula” whom from now on becomes the scapegoat character of the story’s dramatic plot. Scary individual indeed, Mr Nqakula is depicted as a vulgar, gross brute with “a singularly unremarkable career as a politician”, who displays an “almost criminal indifference” towards the “complaints against violence” and holds a bizarre grudge against “people (mostly whites) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa” who – Nqakula declared, “would do better to leave the country”.

NOTE 4 : The narrative construction of a monster-figure has started, and goes on in a crescendo of anger and disgust which flow from Mr Brink’s outraged and enraged pen.

Poker player Mr Brink plays then card number two, “the apartheid card”, to induce a sinister subliminal concept.

Mr Nqakula is emphatically equated to ancien régime “Minister of Justice Jimmy Kruger” who, in a notorious, “infamous remark” claimed that “the murder of Steve Biko by Security Police in September 1977, ‘left him cold’ ”.

NOTE 5: According to Mr Brink’s fuzzy logic, Nqakula and Kruger are as one. They are both insensitive towards the tragedies that occur to their people; therefore they belong to the same family of monsters. Yet, Mr Brink forgets to remind that Kruger’s commented the heinous murder of one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of Mzansi’s history, while Nqakula was speaking about minor crimes. Unless Mr Brink wants to put the assassination of Steve Biko and the “Somerset West restaurant incident” on the same level. But I am sure that’s not his intention.

At this point the story has already turned into a tragicomedy, but at least the picture starts getting clearer, as I start wondering to myself: isn’t that the futile story of Sonja and hubby is being used to convey another, between-the-lines message? In fact, it sounds to me as the agenda Mr Brink’s has (unsuccessfully) tried to keep hidden, is finally starting to surface.

As a matter of fact, the whole central part of the article is occupied by Mr Brink’s vehement anathemas against Mr Nqakula and his colleagues of the ruling political class. “One expects, of course, lapses of intelligence or plain common sense in politicians” writes Mr Brink “And experience in recent times has revealed in Mr Nqakula both a limited capacity for understanding and an unlimited capacity for arrogance. He does not seem to consider that his professed ignorance about the unlamented Kruger implies also an ignorance about the life and death of Biko: surely the one memory cannot exist without the other. And this may be a key to the full scandal of Nqakula’s attitude. He is ignorant about his own history.”

NOTE 6: I was starting to miss the part where the civilized liberal lectures the savage native about the latter’s own history. But here it is. It’s only a coincidence that it was Biko himself who warned about the patronizing attitude of liberals when it comes down to “educating” “the Native”. A very sinister coincidence, indeed.

“[I]n the process” Brink goes on “he [Nqakula] betrays everything the ANC has for so long claimed to stand for… In one callous, off-the-cuff remark, he has betrayed the legacy of Mandela”.

NOTE 7: Here we are! We had to wait for 51 (fifty-one) lines before poker master Mr Brink played card number three, the most powerful one in his astute hands: the “Mandelaring-card”— which is always an “Ace takes all”!… But he finally did it! Great move… worthy of the most expert of players.

“Of course not all members of the power establishment are like [Nqakula]” concludes Mr Brink, “[t]here are other members of the government who are humane and generous and understanding, and dedicate their considerable talents to realising Mandela’s dream”.

NOTE 8: Ok. Can someone please tell me once and for all what is this so-called “Mandela’s dream”? Please, Mr Brink, tell me, because I still don’t know what’s all about. I will not say, as Trevor Ngwane did, that Mandela was the one “who sold out the country”. Mtate Trevor has definitely gone too far. But then again: what was this beloved Mandela’s dream? Was it to build, as Rachel Donadio has confusedly stated: “a multicultural democracy (sic!) where the leadership is black, money is mostly white (sic!!!) and the line between power and exploitation extremely thin?” Was it to set up a country where the townships and the “informal settlements” (which are, according to Sabata-Mpho Mokae “of all the results of apartheid and colonialism […] the most hard-to heal and deepest of wounds” ) have not only disappeared, but rather mushroomed? Was it to found a new nation where the rich get richer and the poor poorer?

And it’s always funny to see how liberals like mandelaring these days! (For further documentation on the recurrent issue of “Mzansi’s white iberals and Madiba” I suggest also “Happy Birthday Saint Mandela; Long-live White Privilege!” In Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s Bluesology & Bofelosophy, pp. 147 -149). Maybe it’s because his so-called “dream” fits so well into their picture of a dream. A dream in which their privileges are left untouched. Where the “previously advantaged” have remained “still advantaged” and the “previously disadvantaged” keep being… “still disadvantaged”. Why I don’t hear you and your liberal folks, Mr Brink, calling out so often Sobukwe’s dream for example, or Hani’s dream, or Biko’s dream? They also have been betrayed, haven’ t they? The point is (and we both know it, Mr Brink) that, historically speaking, Mandela (in part), but especially his curious successor, have been the architects of a country which has charmingly put into practice the principle so well expressed by fellow writer Tomasi di Lampedusa in his masterpiece The Leopard: “If you want everything to stay as it is, everything must change”. Speaking in an out-of-fashion lexicon: at superstructure level important changes have taken place in post-apartheid Mzansi. Nonetheless, at a structural level the ANC-led so called “revolution” has been a leopardesque one so far..

If the concept is not clear yet Mr Brink, please read what Aryan Kaganof has to say about this in his clarifying poem Previously dissed (with particular attention to the last stanza):

Brothers and Sisters
You still getting dissed
That didn’t stop
Except for window dressing
And a few name changes
Not even that
Piet Retief is still
Piet Retief
And this poem is in English
Not exactly a language
You could call native

And what about the elections?
You can stand in a queue
All day every five years
But the land is still theirs

[…]

Previously dissed
My point
That you might have missed
Is that amandla lost the plot
When democracy got the vote
Instead of nonkululeko
Nowadays it’s all the Yiddish white folks
Going “Viva Nelson Mandela”
With their fists in the air

After almost fifteen years of “model democracy” this, Mr Brink, seems to me, very unfortunately, the heritage of “Mandela’s dream”. But most probably I am misled. And, as it seems you’re able to interpret better than me and anybody else Madiba’s sleeping thoughts, please keep enlightening us in the future.

In the next, epic, crime scene, Mr Brink’s j’accuse against the new power élite continues, in an apotheosis of rancour against grotesque “members of parliament” vandalizing the road in a “rogue car”, as well as the usual suspect Nqakula, who is here freely linked to them for being “a worthy follower” of these bully MPs’ “footsteps”. “Among the new power-élite in South Africa” Mr Brink explains “[Mr Nqakula]’s attitude appears to be gaining ground, in direct proportion to the escalating violence of the country.

NOTE 9: Curious criminological theory which associates crime and escalating violence to the “attitude”, the good or bad manners, of the ruling class of a country. After Lombroso’s, this is definitely the most interesting theory to appear in the criminological academic scenario. According to a vast literature, crime is mainly generated and fuelled by social and economic inequalities. In a country like ANC’s South Africa, where redistribution of wealth is virtually inexistent, and the gap between rich and poor gets larger and larger, crime will continue to expand. That’s the real reason, not Mr Nqakula’s and the MP’s rudeness. Otherwise, according to your theory, it would be sufficient to elect Don Juan de Marcos as the next President (though, given the latest vicissitudes inside the ANC, it looks like it won’t be so), and crime will vanish from the streets like morning dew on a summer day…

Tuning down a bit, but still on a dramatic mood, Mr Brink explains once more how much he feels in danger in the South Africa of the Nqakulas (“[i]n the present state of the country, I may meet that death sooner rather than later”) But tougher than leather, and stronger than any Nqakula, he is determined to follow daughter Sonja’s wise advice (“as Sonja said the morning after her ordeal, ‘I refuse to become a victim.’ ”)

NOTE 10: Something to agree with you, Mr Brink. Although this entire article smells of victimization from its very beginnings…

In the following lines Mr Brink explains how he “refuses to become a victim” because he will not allow his country to be left in people like Nqakula’s hands. He will stand face-to-face against the true problems of the country: (“The problem is that while such incidents [with all the emotional and mental scars they leave behind them for months, for years] characterise the present evolution of South Africa, the real suffering of our new democracy is not addressed”)

NOTE 11: Your daughter’s very unfortunate incident is as serious as cancer, no doubt about it, Mr Brink. But, haven’t you gone a little bit too far? The “real suffering” of Mzansi’s sluggish democracy is certainly not the loss of a few sumptuary goods…

Closed the brief but sentimental parenthesis on the emotional downsides caused on daughter’s mind by the robbery, Mr Brink goes back to his favourite leisure game, the MP hunt:

“The swaggering Jacob Zuma […] takes a shower after unprotected sex to counter the danger of AIDS; Charles Nqakula washes his hands of rape and murder. Nqakula pretends that the only ‘squealers’ are previously advantaged whites who cannot adapt to democratic change. For him it is easy to deny the plight of innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships and informal settlements, and whose clamouring for help over the years also fall on deaf ears”.

NOTE 12: As a prophet of liberal culture, Mr Brink here speaks in the name of others. And becomes the spokesperson not only of the “innumerable white victims”, but also of poor, “plighting” township residents. But, in embarking such noble cause, Mr Brink gets downright slack. He speaks about “innumerable victims, black and brown and white, who live in townships, informal settlements and squatter camps”. What’s that??? I live in a township and the only white faces I see around belong to obese tourists on bus tours, casual guests, or random Telkom technicians playing a toccata e fuga… This only in the townships. Since there is scarcity of formal electricity, telephones, and no tar roads to drive through, no traces of white faces in the squatter camps you mention, without even knowing what you’re talking about. And, by the way: what is this “black and brown” distinction? Are you drawing distinctions between black people Mr Brink? Is this yours updated, liberal version of the “pencil test”?

I learned from illustrious genetists and anthropologists, but above all from my everyday life experiences, that there is only one race, the human race. But if, in this sclerotic, globalized, post-modern, postcolonial, post-everything world, we still have to categorize people, then I think that a black person is a black person, regardless to the tonalities of their skin. Looking forward to further explanations, Mr Brink.

“What is lost is not only a generation of the murdered and the maimed and the deprived, but the opportunity to set up our democracy as the example to the world it was once claimed to be”.

NOTE 13: I think South Africa lost the chance to build an “example” democracy when the democrats you extensively talk about in your article decided to set into practice the neoliberal agenda imposed by today’s neocolonial powers (i.e. the IMF, the World Bank and other “democratic” institutions). And building that Garden of Eden for foreign corporations which is today’s Mzansi. Hence, turning their back on the people who had elected them.

‘At least,’ Sonja wryly said after the event, ‘we should be grateful that we are still alive’. In a curious way that remark was what angered me most. What kind of a country is this in which life is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed (by our admirable constitution among other things), but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary that it deserves special consideration and gratitude?

NOTE 14: Out of the blue Mr Brink gets “angered” because he finally finds out that people of this country wake up and are “glad to be alive”. He eventually opens his eyes to the fact that “life [in South Africa] is not a normal given, a norm, a status guaranteed, […] but something exceptional and remarkable, a privilege so extraordinary”. It sounds like if it weren’t for daughter Sonja’s unfortunate experience, Mr Brink would have never discovered such terrible truth! Yet, it would have been sufficient to live a couple of months in a township to be aware of it! In this mysterious place you prove not to know at all, people around you keep passing away because of hunger, hiv/aids, crime, etc. Life for them deserves “special consideration and gratitude” because it’s an everyday achievement, not something one can take for granted.

And then, turning poker-player again, Mr Brink plays the “constitution card”… another ace up his sleeve. C’mon, Mr Brink, you’re not a naïve, undergraduate student. I am sure you are fully conscious of the fact that, if not put effectively into practice, even the most socially advanced constitution is dead letter, don’t you? You don’t agree with me? Well, re-read Soviet Union’s 1936 Constitution and think about how “admirable” it could have been for Russian citizens living under comrade Big Moustache Joseph. To my experience, I come from a country which, like South Africa, has produced one of the most progressive constitutional charts ever written. And so what? Millions of my fellow-citizens (especially the younger generation and migrants) are struggling to pay their rent, their purchasing power keeps falling resulting in the inability for average families meeting the rising cost of living. A progressive Constitution does not protect anybody from being vulnerable and insecure. In other words: from being poor.

“[t]his ‘insignificant’ episode – Mr Brink bitterly whispers in the following lines – “marked as it was by the minister’s apocalyptic arrogance, has become a watershed in my own thinking about the New South Africa”.

NOTE 15: At least, some ground in common: the “insignificance” of the episode, given South Africa’s innumerable other, much more urgent, problems.

The story continues. From Mr Brink’ accounts of his speeches around the globe we find out he “feels [him]self left in the lurch” because people like Nqakula, “have now begun to define the image of the ANC”. Due to this aesthetic reason (and not to other reasons like, for instance, ANC’s neoliberal policies and “frustrated reforms” , the most striking one being that of the land) Mr Brink’s optimism has evaporated (“[I]n recent years, whenever on my travels I have been asked about the many ills that beset the New South Africa […] I have taken pains to insist what a dramatic change there has been in the country, and that there is good reason to be essentially, if cautiously, optimistic. I can no longer do that. It would be a betrayal of the most important values I believe in, and which were once, in a dream, exemplified by the ANC”).

So desperate is Mr Brink about the future of the country that he envisages the ultimate national catastrophe at the horizon (“One wonders for how long FIFA can continue to contemplate sending its soccer teams in 2010 to a World Cup presented in a country that has lost the ability to guarantee the safety of players, officials and spectators, turning what should be a world-class spectacle into a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics of a few decades ago look like a picnic outing”).

NOTE 16: Again, the game of associating current South African issues to historical facts does not produce convincing narrative results. Because of Mr Nqakula and some tsotsis the World Cup is to become “a potential massacre which could make the Munich Olympics look like a picnic outing?” Please, let’s not be ridiculous…

Fast forgotten Mr Brink’s drama queen predictions, I can’t prevent myself, once more, to think about the real nightmares troubling Mr Brink’s nights:

“If these distressing rumours about the 2010 World Cup being held in a country other than SA will come true, no dinner at the French embassy with Thierry Henry and Michel Platini! Oh my God! Oh my God, Oh my God!!!…”

In the final part of the story, while humbly recalling his own contribution in the struggle (“[d]uring the years of darkness under apartheid […] I saw it as part of my mission as a writer to explain what dared not be spoken openly by the silenced, to speak what was forbidden - in order to ensure that the truth could be brought into the open”), Mr Brink blatantly undermines Mr Nqakula’s (“[He] can, of course, not care less [about… ]. He has paid his price in the Struggle, hasn’t he?”). And, as in the aforementioned case of Biko’s murder, he plays the trick of crime-to-crime comparison. Going, once again, in utter confusion. According to Mr Brink in fact, Mr Nqakula’s personal experience under Kruger (“When others were tortured and killed, he, too, suffered. He was hit by a banning order, remember: persecuted, on a piece of paper, by the man who was left cold by the death of a fellow human being”) is comparable to that of “the people (mostly white) who ‘winge’ about the level of violence in South Africa” (“just as Nqakula himself is now left cold by the suffering and death of innumerable fellow South Africans, whose only desire was to enjoy the blessings of a generous land in a model democracy”).

For my sadness, the story slowly and tiredly came to an end, not without one final blitzkrieg against the political class: (“Like his colleague, the Minister of Health, Manto Tsabalala-Msimang, who babbles incoherently about curing AIDS with wild garlic and herbal concoctions, the Honourable Minister of Safety and Security is concerned only with assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority”.)

NOTE 17: What you’re talking about here, Mr Brink (“assuring the prosperity of a small group of associates and confidants built on the suffering and deprivation of a huge majority”) has nothing to do with the bad behaviour of the ruling class of this country. It is called capitalism. That undisputable, unquestionable economic system which allows those like Mr Nqakula, as well as the radical chic, to keep prospering and enjoying life at its best. Are you perhaps, in the moving final lines of your story, questioning the accountability of capitalist societies?

No, he’s not. As these closing considerations seemed to make my faith on Mr Brink’s objectivity resurge, the umpteenth sudden twist on the plot brings me back to square one. The ending of the story is, inevitably, another disappointment (“We can still salvage those human and African values that have shaped the New South Africa – not the values that brought forth monsters like Nqakula or Zuma or Tsabalala-Msimang, but those that have produced a Mandela or a Tutu. But there is not much more time to lose”).

NOTE: 18: What are these vague “human and African values that have shaped the new South Africa”? Those thanks to which “62 000 white families still own 80% of the land, […] good education is still unattainable for poor families and […] economic power still resides in white hands”? Those due to which “democracy in South Africa had turned into a democracy ‘for those who have’ ” ?

Even in these conclusive, populist remarks, capitalism is not questioned.
It’s really time to drop the newspaper in the dust bin.

NOTE 19 (CONCLUSION): While I certainly agree with the sentiments expressed by Brink, when they are viewed against the brutality of criminals and the arrogance of politicians, his statements become hollow and hypocritical.

When he urgently takes his pen and pad to denounce the sad story of a tranquil bunch of diners being assaulted by an unruly gang of thugs, he should make an equal amount of noise about the crimes (the “petty” street crimes, but also the “grand”, economic crimes) committed against those who are really left behind: the poorest and often voiceless people who are busy in the everyday struggle for survival.

On the contrary, Mr Brink has proved to be ready to jump from the chair only when what is in danger is his daughter’s life (or, more probably, her jewellery). Let ‘s be clear: crime is a curse for all societies, at any latitude. Whenever, wherever. I am scared of hijacks and robberies too, and I too believe thugs are a serious menace to the peaceful living of our communities. With regards to this, Mr Brink, you must not feel alone. We are on the same boat. But then again, as you seem to be so concerned about it, but above all thoroughly determined to DO something about it, I want to read articles of yours for each and every crime that is committed in South Africa. I want a pamphlet of yours – at least as passionate as this, memorable, one – each and every time a child is raped or a mother dies of aids in the township, or a worker is buried alive in a mine. I repeat, Mr Brink: each and every time. If you believe this is a commitment too demanding fine. I understand. But if so, then don’t write at all about “Mandela’s (?) betrayed (?) legacies (?)”. Please. You know, whatever these legacies are, they are betrayed so many times, on a daily base, in this funny “model democracy” of Mzansi, Mr Brink, that if by any chance you tried to embark on the noble task of writing about them ALL, you would find yourself stuck 24-7 in front of your brand new laptop. And in that case, bye bye Friday’s tea at the yacht club and bye bye wine-and-cheese at the French embassy. As I stated earlier: a nightmare I surely do not want you to go through.

It is your right, or rather your duty, as a citizen, honest taxpayer and writer to vindicate for you and your family the right to live a Gatsby-style life in peace. But don’t get angry if your storytelling sounds to the street person as the maimed “whines” of a petty liberal. I feel it also my duty as a fellow citizen of yours to ask you, Mr Brink, not to speak in the name of the ones you do not represent (and surely don’t know). I have tried to talk frankly, Mr Brink. You know, I and the everyday people of this country are probably quite… insensitive about what happens – good or bad – in your leafy, “peaceful suburbs”. Don’t get me wrong, Mr Brink. I am not saying I am not trying. In fact I try and try to be moved by the terrible tragedies of the bejewelled ones but, for as hard as I try, I simply find it hard to empathize with them. You know, Mr Brink, poor people have tragedies of their own to deal with. It is not a matter of hierarchies. I wouldn’t like to see other people cry. I wouldn’t want to see anybody cry from an offence. My eyes, like yours, are full of tears. But I have so many reasons to cry that my eyes get emptied very quickly. And when it’s time to shed a tear for the unfortunate bejewelled ones, my tears-tank is empty and dry. I am sorry…

Your Glad to be alive, Mr Brink, is not a South African story. To put it simple, it is just the story of a few rich, privileged guys, living in a country where most people around them have to struggle to get by. And the privileged ones are the same, everywhere. When their Rolex is stolen or their Hermès bag snatched, when their private companies are nationalized or their land confiscated, they start weeping “This is outrageous! It’s the end of democracy! Tyranny! Dictatorship! Help! Help!”

If you used your story as an occasion to express your anger against the hooligans and the corrupted politicians who, in different ways, terrorize this country, then I am on your side. Well done, Mr Brink. I’ll sing in choir with you “Down with corrupted politicians! Down with the hooligans!” But if you wrote this story to catch the solidarity of the (poor) majority of South Africans, I think that you chose the wrong set and the wrong characters to develop your plot. Regardless of the fact that you agree or not with my semi-serious comments, Mr Brink, you will at least agree with me that this is quite a pedestrian mistake for a renowned novelist like you. Isn’t it?

Yours unbegrudgingly,

raphael d’abdon
January 2008

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