Time for SA to evolve into a better place for all of us

Unbidden, the spectre of a failed state haunts the contemporary imagination of SA.

State responsibility and accountability have been piecemeal, and the citizenry is left to fend for itself, as organs of state have ground to a halt due to missteps in securing physical and knowledge infrastructures, and endemic mismanagement of vital resources.

Many have warned of the spiralling road to purgatory and many social phenomena have been harbingers of an SA in violent transition — the Marikana massacre; roiling xenophobic attacks that have maimed particularly African transnationals; rising unemployment, particularly among the youth, and the militarisation of the state in “defence of order and the rule of law” during Covid-19.

In this uncertainty, SA’s destitute have been embattled psychologically, physically, emotionally and financially. Survival, life, is not guaranteed. Various government departments lack the political will, knowledge, and sense of responsibility and accountability towards the people to respond.

This thin knife-edge has led to SA cycling between mass inertia and rabble-rousing rebellions, literally and otherwise, that agitate for a reorganisation of the social order.

Operation Dudula, like many other social movements, foregrounds the vast, seemingly insurmountable obstacles we face in living lives of and with dignity in SA.

Listening to the rhetoric from the face of Operation Dudula, Nhlanhla Lux Dlamini, one hears the lion roaring; and like so many before him, he uses hyper-masculine tropes of protector, provider, and gangster as swirling metaphors tempered by “the rule of law” to assert that SA is for South Africans.

Using unsubstantiated claims, the complex nature of criminal activity, inclusive of intent, range of crimes, and the identity of perpetrators, are reduced to legality or illegality of citizenship.

Yet statistics do not support this; the leading majority of our male prison population is South African.

While Operation Dudula is becoming a threat to the veneer of “business as usual” and to the lives of non-nationals, there are seeds of potential cast among the operation’s challenges.

However, this potential will be wasted if we do not recognise and respond to the inter-related and inter-dependent nature of SA's contemporary state of affairs; power inherent in an active citizenry that understands that I am my brothers' and sisters' keeper, irrespective of socially constructed markers of difference; and collective psychological and emotional trauma that undergirds our interactions with each other, and “the other”.

Xenophobic responses to perceived and real threats over the past two decades confirm that stereotyping and scapegoating are part of rudimentary attempts to eradicate these threats to self, and to effectively disarm them.

However, history also shows that annihilation of the other does not secure one's self. Instead, it has detrimental effects on a thinking-feeling human being.

We are a country in trouble. We are a world troubled. And if we are to survive this, we will have to question and resist years of indoctrination and socialisation that assert that “might is right”; that fighting and going to war is a righteous endeavour if one does so to protect land, borders, bodies, and ideologies.

The revolution will not be televised, for it is an internal one. We have no map to chart the way forward as old-world orders dissolve; as the earth implodes under human waste and damage; and as humans continue to live desperate lives separated from the life-giving forces of nature and the divine feminine.

Those resident in SA will have to fashion new social compacts that uphold the sovereignty of individuals and their right to dignified life, supported by interventions that supersede the state.

Ordinary citizens will have to free themselves from mental shackles as they re-root and re-route themselves in ancient philosophies and ways of being that extend beyond one originary myth.

We will have to grow the potential that exists within an uncertain world and trust the humanness within self and others.

Operation Dudula, and the Gift of the Givers, for example, confirms that we have work to do across generations. This includes healing our individual and collective psyches and the re-envisioning of a future that is supportive of all life. We need to serve life and make our country and “the world safe for human differences” (Benedict).

The time to evolve, consciously, is upon us.  

• Prof Owen is head of the department of anthropology at the University of the Free State