Richard Pithouse’s book Writing The Decline provides an exquisitely well-written and analytically acute diary of SA’s decline during the Zuma years, says Imraan Buccus.
During the mass uprisings in North Africa it was often asserted that social media – and in particular Facebook and Twitter – had enabled new democratic possibilities. Social media is useful for calling mass meetings in a public square, or sharing a photograph that, for instance, shows police repression.
But it is not an edited space.
This means that along with thoughtful and useful contributions there are also all kinds of assumptions, prejudices and crackpot theories. A Twitter mob is not necessarily a democratic force.
For more than a century open editorials in newspapers have been the most important space for democratic debate and discussion in the public sphere. In fact the public sphere, as we know it, was developed via newspapers. In colonial South Africa figures like Sol Plaatjie and Mohandas Gandhi consistently used newspapers to advance their ideas and positions.
Today newspaper readership is in steep decline as readers increasingly get their news from digital sources. Advertising revenue is also in steep decline as the classifieds also migrate from print to online spaces. But because social media is awash with material of questionable quality readers still look to writing first published in a credible space when looking for serious analysis.
In recent years some of our democratic institutions have been battered. Some of our newspapers are in real financial trouble, and have suffered major austerity measures, but our public sphere is flourishing. We have a number of world-class columnists whose work is avidly read and widely shared and discussed on social media. We also have a flourishing publishing industry with books on current affairs.
Writing the Decline, by Rhodes University’s Richard Pithouse, is the latest of a series of books that attempt to grapple with our condition. He previously worked at UKZN. Before that, he taught philosophy at the former University of Durban-Westville. He is fondly remembered as a committed and democratic teacher by generations of students. He has been writing in newspapers for more than 20 years and has always been a committed activist.
Writing the Decline is a collection of essays, mostly published in newspapers, of the Zuma years. The book is highly praised by the likes of Achille Mbembe, Sisonke Msimang and Niren Tolsi.
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Praise is also heaped on Pithouse for the unusual beauty of his writing. But another aspect of his work merits serious consideration – it is written from a considerably more radical position than authors like Eusebius McKaizer, Ferrial Hafferjee or Justice Malala.
Pithouse’s concerns extend beyond palace politics and frequently include popular politics, a sphere often given inadequate attention by the commentariat but one that we ignore at our peril.
Writing The Decline specifically covers the Zuma years. It is a kind of diary of how things have gone steadily wrong. The endless accounts of corruption under Zuma but also the worsening repression. It pays also close attention to the assassination of grassroots activists. Pithouse offers witness to events often not taken seriously in elite society.
While the majority of Pithouse’s writing deals with South Africa he also writes about the wider world. He has written about Haiti, Palestine, the US, Greece, India and other countries. This gives his work a wider focus than that of most of our commentators and allows us to understand our society in a broader context.
As a society we are often wrapped up in our own problems. But there is much that we can learn from Brazil and India as we grapple with a declining economy, endemic corruption and the emergence of new forms of what Vishwas Satgar calls authoritarian populism. The comparative analysis offered by Pithouse is very useful indeed.
He uses comparative cases to drive home the point that South Africa can’t continue on its current path.
We must, he argues, choose between an authoritarian or a democratic resolution to our crisis.
This book went to print before the firing of Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and Chief Justice Moegeng Moegeng’s judgment against Jacob Zuma.
Last year, when this book was completed, the battle of ideas within the ANC was more or less suppressed. But since the firing of Nene, and then Justice Moegeng’s judgment, that contestation has come into the open.
ANC figures like Pravin Gordan, Cheryl Carolus, Mavuso Msimang and many others have openly challenged the decline of the party. This is a development of utmost significance and one that this book – which ends with the mass mobilisation by students last year – doesn’t capture.
But Pithouse provides an exquisitely well-written and analytically acute diary of our decline during the Zuma years.
* Imraan Buccus is a senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Social Sciences, and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of InfoTrust Media.
