Beckett seems a little out of sync

Ian Glenn*

Redeeming Features
Denis Beckett
Penguin SA
2004.

Denis Beckett, legend has it, started Frontline magazine with a mortgage on his house. He produced a space which defied many of the clichés of the old South Africa and can be seen as the forerunner of important cultural exchanges. He presented the TV series Beckett’s Trek and has written several books, most recently about SAA and the Coleman Andrews saga.

Before starting, I expected a book either turned sceptical in the Age of Zimbabwe and AIDS denialism, the now-defining marks of Mbeki’s first presidency (and will there be three?) or, perhaps, a celebration of what seems to be a second wind to South African democracy. I found an odd mix of these: a messy, unfinished, agonised work on transformation and over-hasty black empowerment as possible ruination of South Africa. And there’s more: interviews with media figures, occasional pieces on topics such as the new South African flag and his relationship with his relative Samuel.

Beckett’s central hypothesis, which the putative book couldn’t work out fully, is on the ill effects of transformation and over-promotion in South Africa in the first decade of post-apartheid society. While he observes the phenomenon acutely and gives telling examples of the hypocrisies at work, he doesn’t really seem to get to grips with the issue logically. The power of the account lies in explaining the turmoil of white South Africans pushed to leave, feeling they no longer belong here, that there’s no future in a country of violence and corruption. Is there any white South African who can say that all this is foreign?

But … I’d have liked facts and figures and consequences and some consideration of the phenomenon of white flight. The Unilever Institute at UCT calculated that about 450 000 white South Africans left during the decade of the 90s. If one assumes that each of these took with him or her several employees and jobs, one has an instant explanation of job losses and economic pressures. One also has an explanation of how job replacements might not have posed such explosive consequences for the economy. So the phenomenon of white (and, increasingly, brown and black) flight was the key social phenomenon of the first decade of post-apartheid life and deserved his keen attention.

But there are other key omissions or gaps. First, Beckett does not openly consider the political interests served by the policy. Neither Mbeki nor Mugabe crops up at all significantly in his account, yet the cultural nationalism of the former and his defences of Mugabe’s policies suggest that Beckett is naive to hope that bringing testimony from the basket cases caused in “tropical Africa” by “empowerment” will somehow persuade the black elite in South Africa to move beyond the empowerment Antithesis to a new Synthesis.

The closest Beckett gets to making sense of Mugabe is to see his actions as “a death wish, to dislodge a chip on the shoulder”. That explanation seems to get it precisely wrong: it’s a desperate grab to hold onto power and political life by invoking the chip on the shoulder as pretext and it’s scary because it seems to appeal to Mbeki and many black South Africans. For many in the Third World, Mugabe’s adventure, even if it leads to economic penury, is somehow preferable to an alternative. Better a traditional peasant economy with a (corrupt) black elite in charge than a modern economy in which whites were still prospering more than blacks. Better thuggery and an evocation of a global anti-Anglo-American alliance than the chafing virtues of the IMF and good governance.

Second: A central statement in the book comes when a white friend, Rod, says, “Our grandchildren won’t be here.” If the argument were because they can’t get jobs, then this section of the book would at least have an intellectual logic. But is that really the logic of why people leave? We could surely imagine a country with lots of bad ethnic promotions but with a low level of violence and corruption. Would that country not be quite acceptable? Would Beckett’s protagonist lose any sleep about this?

In other words, why and how does Beckett link the issue of transformation to the other standard issues causing dismay: crime, violence, corruption, black hostility? Could we not argue that there might be more crime if there were not a policy of transformation? Criminals now have black targets rather than white … and some of the dispossessed might be placated by the obvious growth of a black middle class.

So, the corollary questions. By what logic is crime — or corruption — caused by the deep logic of transformation? We could give several suggestions: Over-promoted and often corrupt (but why corrupt?) police and politicians can’t or won’t cope with crime. Or, empowerment feeds a sense of entitlement that takes an alternative form in the condoning of theft and violence. Or, more complexly, empowerment creates a sense of social movement and possibility, of changing power relationships, that for those who are, precisely, still out of power, cries out for redress through sexual or other violence or theft. Many argue that rape here is more a sign of social powerlessness — from the young, the poor, the already infected — than from those in power.

Beckett, I think it is fair to say, doesn’t look at any of these (or any other) possibilities thoroughly, or with any kind of learning beyond that given by the personal encounter. In this, of course, he is not alone. Where in South African media or imaginative writing do we get any kind of compelling account of black violence, rage and criminal behaviour? And would it be possible to give such an account that doesn’t invoke powerful racist stereotypes?

Third issue: How much does bad promotion policy really matter? What often gets overlooked is that empowerment at the level of employment rather than through consideration of those served is in many ways an apartheid legacy and has damaged blacks more than whites. Notably: separate and inferior universities were created to serve separate and inferior schools. The logic of affirmative appointments has old rotten roots in the homelands.

But to return to the issue of why young whites leave — is it true that black graduates get jobs and whites don’t? I don’t think so. Black graduates from the historically black universities, I suggest, struggle in getting government or big company employment. Big companies are increasingly outsourcing, and often the small businesses and consultants and contractors are invisible whites. If not, if there isn’t some kind of invisible way whites still get jobs, how come white Afrikaners are richer now than they were 10 years ago? And if the AIDS predictions are correct, surely South Africa will need all its skilled workers desperately in the next decades.

From the safety of academic tenure, perhaps one can even raise the cheerful longer-view question: Does the bungling matter? Hasn’t the market already started to work in South Africa? If you appoint bad black headmasters or vice-chancellors or company directors, you end up having children go to other black or historically white or private schools or having to merge universities or fire people, or having your company go under. If you have a terrible police department, you let ADT or Chubb, staffed by ex-policemen, make money. In many cases, surely, economic reality kicks empowerment butt. The Penta media group goes bust, black empowerment editors of black empowerment companies or foreign companies get fired, badly run companies suffer. If you are e-tv and want advertising, you turn out a news service that seems quite at odds with your credentials as a BEE success story. And insofar as government and black business have come to understand that, reality, not Denis Beckett, will teach them to change.

Also, was the push for empowerment in government services and big business necessarily to the detriment of white graduates? Imagine a young white matriculant, discouraged from going into medicine like his father because he knew that white male matriculants were no longer desirable recruits. Tragic — but if he were Mark Shuttleworth, one might wonder who really benefited from this situation. Young white males have moved out of the professions into business precisely at the time that the professions have lost status, earning power and even prestige.

I don’t offer these points as rebuttals or the outline of a counter-thesis, but simply to point out how personal, almost myopic, Beckett’s view is. Nothing is business, everything is personal. His strength and weakness as a writer is that he relies so strongly on personal reactions, on everyday encounters.

It’s difficult to see who Beckett thought he was writing this tract for. Whites don’t need to be persuaded that there is a problem, while blacks, even if they tacitly agree, as Beckett argues many do, are likely to see the phenomenon as a temporary, necessary one. I don’t think he addresses the black elite as a power group or looks at what is surely the most interesting group in the elite: African women.

When we move to the non-tract pieces, the weaknesses of Beckett’s approach remain. In part, it is difficult to review because Beckett works on a scale that’s gone out of fashion in an age of chunk journalism and news gobbets: he really expects readers to follow him for over fifty pages on a day trip to Cato Manor. The piece is rich on account and meetings and his reactions and counter-reactions, thin on anthropological method, linguistic competence, research and reflection.

When it comes to his pieces on media figures, Beckett has unfortunately been overtaken by history. Post-Hefer, Vusi Mona now looks like a case study of media corruption and venality and manipulatedness rather than the impressive, benign figure Beckett paints. But Beckett gets to sit in on an editorial planning meeting at City Press that is revealing, because the journalists are smart, but also because of the huge gap between insight and delivery, between the posturing and the serious journalism. Once again, though, there’s no analysis or follow-through as to why this is the case.

Beckett’s accounts, like those on Marcel Golding and e-tv, too often degenerate into a “he said, they said” list without analysis or independent audit. If one imagines a Tim Sebastian doing any of these interviews, one sees where Beckett falls short. How did e-tv build ratings, or their news style? Why is there no study of the Independent Group?

More generally, Beckett seems a little out of sync. Surely, post 9-11 and the rising rand, South Africa seems a little more easy, the rest of the world rather more problematic, violent, malevolent? From the Western Cape, probably a different country from Gauteng, the major phenomenon seems to be the ability of whites to become “inner emigrés”, to live in a country of the mind and sensations that could just as easily be Australia or the USA or (now that DSTV channel 90 is French TV5) France. DSTV and the Internet and white educational and residential enclaves may be the alternative to actually moving.

To Denis Beckett’s credit, he wants to trek us all out of that space into a shared country, but here he ran out of the intellectual and imaginative power to do it.

*Ian Glenn convenes the major in Media and Writing at UCT’s Centre for Film and Media Studies. His particular research interests are media in the new South Africa. He teaches courses in investigative journalism, advertising, sports journalism and editing and works as a freelance journalist and scriptwriter.

LitNet: 27 December 2003

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