In the first of our “In Conversation With” series to commemorate Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday, Njabulo Ndebele talks with Tara Turkington on issues including leadership, citizenship, the level of public debate, and the role of creativity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Tara Turkington: The Nelson Mandela Foundation would like to use this year as an opportunity to reflect on where we have come as a democracy, and to celebrate ideas and thoughts about where we still need to go.
You are someone who exemplifies multi-dimensionality. You are so many things at once – novelist, academic, political commentator. Do we need to encourage our citizens of the future to think and act in a wide variety of ways?
Njabulo Ndebele: It strikes me now that you raise this that the South African of the future will most likely be a multi-dimensional person that cannot be easily pigeon-holed. That was the problem with our past: there was a concerted attempt to define people, individuals and groups definitively, and that is impossible because in reality all of us have multiple dimensions.
Even within the same racial group you have daughters and sons who have relationships with other people, you have people who belong to different denominations in church, they may belong to different social classes, they may be gay or heterosexual, so even within defined ethnic groups, you can’t find a single definition for that group and for the individuals in it.
If you look at the way our country was configured or described in the days of apartheid, it was “KwaZulu-Natal is for Zulus”, “the Northern Province is for the Pedi people”. In reality you find, right bang in the middle of Zululand, a Sotho-speaking group, and the same can be said about most parts of our country.
The Constitution says provincial authorities and local government authorities have a responsibility to develop the languages in their region. If you enter into a language you’re entering into another culture, another way of viewing the world. That cannot but make you an open-minded individual, open to new experiences, not threatened by uncertainty because uncertainty itself represents an opportunity for growth. The South African of the future will live comfortably with uncertainty because uncertainty promises opportunity, but you have to be robust about it, you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to contemplate it to get the full richness of it, and I think that is the challenge of being South African: to run away from uni-dimensional and definitive characterisations of ourselves. If we master that skill, we are in a sense preparing ourselves adequately for the global world of the future, where to be a South African is to understand South Africa within Africa and within the world.
We have an ever-widening sense of responsibility beyond ourselves as a country. We have to be right at the forefront in issues relating to global peace, the environment, global governance, and so on. At the heart of that process is an implication that the world as a whole is part of what defines us in the same way as we seek to define ourselves in relation to the world.
I think that there are few countries which have gone beyond what the United States used to represent. While the vision of the US was good for its citizens, it then began to instrumentalise the rest of the world, so that everything outside the US was deemed as there for the service of the US. We have to have a different approach: that everything outside ourselves is there to be lived with, it is there to be deepened, to engage with, to grow with, and that is a patently different vision within which to define a foreign policy. We want to take that forward and I think we have a unique opportunity to do so. If, and that’s a big if, this historic change of leadership that is under way does not actually take us into another hole out of which we may not recover.
Professor Njabulo Ndebele.
(Image: Nelson Mandela Foundation)TT: In your new book, Fine Lines from the Box, I loved the essay for the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, where you sat down and wrote a few words without knowing where it was going, and how the words that came randomly helped you to form a metaphor for South Africa of going boldly into a future where you don’t know what that future holds, but if you go bravely and with thoughtfulness, something good will come of that.
Of course it can be a bit scary, though, for a country! How do we meet the challenge of drawing on the good parts of our history and using those in non-patriarchal and non-patronising ways to help make this world a better place? What do our leaders need? What do our citizens need to make South Africa and the world a better place?
Njabulo Ndebele: I agree, it’s very scary, but this is why the test of leadership emerges. I’ve worked in different institutions around the country and when I look back at how some of the problems have been resolved, one thing emerges – when there is a crisis, the fact is no-one who is involved knows how it is going to end. All of us in crises are faced with enormous uncertainty, but at the precise moment when you admit that you don’t know which way it will end, you open up your mind, your ears, your eyes and yourself to imagined solutions.
In most cases, I would say, 80% or more of the time, if you go into a crisis with open-mindedness, you are able to find an all-encompassing solution. Where the solution is imposed before you reach that definitive moment of a complex of factors coming together and emerging, where you do not wait for that moment and you impose a solution before it comes, there will almost always be a continuing problem.
There is, profoundly, an act of faith involved, and a belief that things won’t collapse and that there is enough will out there to find the best solution. But it means you’ve got to be open to experience, open to different interpretations, and then formulate at the precise moment exactly what needs to be done, not seek to control the outcome. The outcome will emerge and you will make an input into it, no doubt, but at the right time. I think this is a leadership skill that is learnt over time, but one we must talk more about, to help people who are caught in moments of uncertainty, not to be paralysed by their uncertainty, but to simply study, watch and analyse, discuss, debate and wait for the moment when things will all come together. But there’s also got to be the willingness and the preparedness to take the leap at the moment when you as a leader think everything is in place. It’s an imprecise thing, but many years of experience also reveal a consistency that allows one to put some investment into that kind of approach, which has consistently yielded good results.
I think it’s a disposition that is counter-intuitive. When there’s a problem, we tend to want to solve it. But you don’t have to solve it at that precise moment, you’ve got to be open to the messages that the problem itself will send out to you, because even problems contain many messages and we have to find them and understand them.
TT: You talk about counter-intuitive leadership in one of your essays, in which you mention an exchange between Nelson Mandela and Constand Viljoen, while Mandela was still in prison. He told Viljoen, “Yes, we don’t have the ammunition and arms to beat you, but we have the numbers.” There’s a moment of recognition on both sides that they’ve got to reach a solution together. That is what you’re talking about, that our leaders of today need to find?
Njabulo Ndebele: That comes out of Allister Sparks’ book, Tomorrow is Another Country, in which he was reflecting on the transition. I think that really speaks to it, that solutions of this nature will come out of the most unexpected circumstances, but also that when it is articulated by a person of Madiba’s calibre, then everybody recognises it for what it really is.
Mandela himself comes to such an understanding as a sum total of his own historical experience. In a sense, he paid his dues to arrive at an understanding of conflict resolution that includes the ability to identify and define common purpose embedded in a situation of conflict. Common purpose can emerge under the most unlikely circumstances.
Jameson Hall, University of Cape Town.
TT: How do we get from the personal, learned skill of leadership that you’re talking about to the understanding as a nation that we don’t have to go head to head with each other every time there is a problem? That we don’t have to solve problems now? That leadership is a more democratic thing than we as a nation and as ordinary citizens sometimes think?
Njabulo Ndebele: I think it’s learned in the same way that we’ve learned to be intuitive about the other kind of leadership – force – and the way that we taught the old kind of leadership is how it is reproduced in the schooling system, in the family environment.
I don’t believe we have invested enough time, energy and resources in fundamentally changing our schooling system post-1994, so that it truly becomes a means by which the values of our new society are transmitted to the new generations. I like to believe that even so strong and powerful an organisation as the ANC failed to define self-preservation within an ethos in which its own values were properly transmitted to future generations internally within the ANC. They seem to have abandoned all that in the effort to govern and deliver.
TT: In your book you talk about corruptive situations and systems; it’s not only about individuals, it’s about transforming cultural systems. Njabulo Ndebele: You know, I’ve watched people that I knew were not corrupt or immoral, but they just found themselves … they get into this company and, “Oh, I can get a car, I can get a bonus of five million! It’s all happened overnight and I have needs, it’s the first time I’m going to have a house!” We didn’t think about these things and they do have a corruptive impact.
Trade union officials have forgotten that they are now part of the labour aristocracy. They talk about workers, but they are not talking about people that don’t have jobs. They are emulating the bosses of old in this focus on getting more. So the corruptive influence of capitalism has taken over the imagination of these fiercest critics in the labour movement.
Let’s get to these cash-in-transit heists – why they are increasing as they have over the years? I don’t think that these people necessarily want to live that life, but it’s: “Whoa, I’ve just read about someone in the newspapers, there’s a black empowerment deal or something, one, two, three, they have a billion rand, you know, where’s my share?”
We didn’t spend enough time talking about incentives, about changing incentives, about how to motivate in a situation of scarcity, where we are not going to provide houses for everyone in the next 10 years. We’ve promised all these things, and the only way we can make them available is to work with the incentive schemes that we have inherited, which have caused the problem in the first place.
TT: Do you think there’s a lack of imagination in the challenge of transforming our society on the part of, not only our political leadership, but also business leadership? Njabulo Ndebele: I think big business has been the least imaginative. This is not to say that businesses cannot be imaginative, I think that they can, because they have these enormous resources, technological, institutional and otherwise. Leadership becomes such an important thing in that regard. The capacity of the country to imagine the future depends on the capacity of that country to nurture imaginative thinking from the beginning of a child’s life right up to the end of life. We’ve somehow given all that up along the way. The capacity to reinvent ourselves constantly has to do with the quality of our family life, quality of our communities and the environments in which we grow up and then beyond that, the schools, the governance, and the principles embodied in our Constitution. We haven’t worked enough with our Constitution to make it work. The Constitution is becoming a tool for opportunism, where you use it to gain an advantage, and that’s not what we were about.
TT: As South Africans, are we too hard on ourselves sometimes? We have come a long way – the political transformation in ’94 was lauded around the world as a miracle. Njabulo Ndebele: I think we will die if we are not hard on ourselves, frankly. Being hard on ourselves means that we are constantly confronted with our limitations and we want to overcome them. In other words, it’s a disposition that allows us to celebrate fully those moments of achievement that we have earned so that when they do come, they really make a decisive difference. We have to continue to be hard on ourselves; it’s a vital part in ensuring our survival. We should constantly be saying we are not actualising our Constitution enough, what should we do? We have these enormous disparities of wealth. How can we do it better? We have inherited good institutions of higher learning, the vast majority of them, but how can they be better? With our tax collection ability we have these huge surpluses, so why are we not doing more with that to improve the schooling system?
We must constantly set ourselves high standards. My instinct tells me that the current battle for leadership is not about higher standards, it’s not about the demands we are making on ourselves, I think it has become a contest over limited objectives.
TT: Personal objectives, would you say? Njabulo Ndebele: Yes.
TT: If all citizens in South Africa adopted the academic principles of striving constantly for new knowledge, striving for excellence, wouldn’t it be a much better country? Njabulo Ndebele: And we have the potential to do that, if we take advantage of the technological developments in the world today. The idea of total connectivity and the ability of individuals to engage imaginatively with themselves and the world has enormous potential. With universal access to information communication technology, each and every one of us has the capacity to access knowledge, think about it and invent new configurations of it. The issues about how we then regulate this to ensure that we don’t have monopolies and all that is another challenge, but the idea is a universal access to an instrument can change personal lives, and we are not exploiting that fully.
I think that South Africa must be driven by the objective that public services must be cutting edge. We must move away from the view that it is the private sector that provides cutting-edge services and knowledge. It has to be the public institutions, first and foremost, that set the standards. I think that’s what we fought for, that citizen A, B and C can go to any public institution, such as a public hospital, and feel “I’ve got the best care.” I think that’s the ultimate objective.
Professor Njabulo Ndebele.
(Image: Nelson Mandela Foundaton)TT: Arguably, some of our most creative work, especially if you look at drama for instance, came from a time when this country was the most oppressed. What is your view of creativity and liberation and creativity and oppression and the dynamic between them? Could we somehow have lost our creativity in this moment of liberation? Can we get that back and how? Or am I wrong, are we being more creative than ever?
Njabulo Ndebele: Yes, I think that it is true to say that oppression led to a lot of novels, drama and so on, and that after 1994 we then got confused. Now there’s fresh writing coming up, I think, in response to basically two things. One is that we can be fired by the possibilities that democracy has opened up. I’m thinking of the American poet Walt Whitman, who celebrates democracy and the growth in the individual, the expressive possibilities. I think it is possible for South Africans to be fired by the possibilities.
But then possibilities also create their own constraints, which bring about frustrations which artists have to respond to. One of the biggest frustrations, if I can go back to it, is the sudden realisation that our democracy is now facing its biggest threat. We have been seduced by the incentive schemes and reward systems of the capitalist.
This has triggered a particular kind of behaviour which, from the point of view of sensitive artists, suddenly looks like we are losing out again. I have just finished reading Niq Mhlongo’s novel,
After Tears
. It’s a story of this young student who has been at UCT in the law faculty and he goes home, and he’s got a new nickname, “Advo”, short for advocate – they call him advocate even before he finishes. He goes home and they say, “Advo is back, he’s got a degree!” But unfortunately he says, “I can’t get my degree because I owe so much money and they won’t allow me to graduate.” Which is a lie; the truth is that he failed. He lives with this lie, and his mother decides to sell the house in order to pay for him. He lets her do it; he doesn’t say anything until right at the end, when they’ve lost everything and they discover he has been lying.
Now that is a hell of an introspection because I suspect there will be a lot of people who live lies – the opportunities for lying in this world of enormous incentives, of money, of making it, the opportunities for taking the short cut, living the life, are enormous. I think that novel is an act of bravery.
We as black people, because we have been the victims, have not been too comfortable about exploring the darker side. But we are in power, we also have a darker side, and it must be surfaced for contemplation and reflection. Precisely because we are now the standard and what is the standard?
I see a lot of posturing in some of our public debates, as if people hold the truth totally. You put the fear that you don’t know aside, by projecting an all-knowing intelligence. I think the writers, the artists, the dramatists, are increasingly focusing on these sorts of things, and that’s to the good of us all. That’s the second thing that I think is happening, and I think we’re going to see more and more exciting stuff coming out that gets us to think deeply about who we are.
TT: What about public debate? Hopefully our artists and writers are going to contribute, like you have yourself, to making our thinking about ourselves much richer and more textured. But with the change in ANC leadership, for example, it’s struck me that we don’t know what any of the leaders really think about certain issues. I know quite a bit about Hillary Clinton’s ideas on detailed issues like whether illegal immigrants should be able to get driver’s licences, but I still don’t know what Jacob Zuma’s real approach to labour is, or to business. Thabo Mbeki’s been president for all these years, but I still don’t really know what he thinks about HIV/AIDS. Is our level of public debate just badly eroded by our past? Can it be watered and nurtured, so that we can get people to engage with our politicians and hold them to account?
Njabulo Ndebele: I think it’s the only way that we can live in the kind of society that we talked about in the beginning of the interview. We need to develop the ability to embrace the uncertainty from a position of intelligence and imagination. The more of us admit to our vulnerabilities in the face of uncertainty, the more trusting the public space, because all of us have put our bona fides there. I’d like a leader – Zuma, President Mbeki, whoever – who will say, “Oh, on that issue, I really don’t know and I’d like to find out more.” The world is so big and complex, you can’t know everything.
But I’d also like a leader who is not afraid to be asked questions. Frankly, I know more about what President Mbeki wants on a range of things. I really don’t know what Zuma wants about anything; I don’t know what he thinks even about corruption. We know what he has said about AIDS, but then he did something different from what he was saying. We don’t know about a whole host of things. But that for me is an intellectual question that challenges me. The fact that he is riding on a popular wave is not his fault entirely. It’s the people who are pushing him. Why, what do they want? They are not saying.
TT: That’s because we don’t want to engage. Njabulo Ndebele: We don’t want to engage with it, we don’t know why they are pushing him and whether the process is being manipulated, or is this genuine? We must find the answer because depending on what we find, then we will have a solution.
TT: Time will tell. Thank you so much, Prof Ndebele, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.
* A shorter version of this interview was published in the City Press on March 2, 2008.
About Njabulo Ndebele
Professor Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele is the vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town and chairs the Southern African Regional Universities’ Association. He also serves on the boards of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation.
Prof Ndebele is a poet, novelist and essayist whose works include Fools and Other Stories, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Bonolo and the Peach Tree, and South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. His latest book is Fine Lines From the Box: Further Thoughts About our Country.