JOHAN KOORNHOF: Dreaming up enemies helps political elite shift the blame
Hendrik Verwoerd was shot at the Rand Show in 1960 by an English-speaking South African, David Pratt. I was there on that early autumn highveld day. I saw a sliver of lead-grey smoke slowly rise above the crowd in the grandstand, followed by the crackle of pistol shots.
Many around me were farming men, keen of eye and eager to tell what happened. The word spread like fire: the prime minister had been shot. An ambulance appeared, flanked by two khaki-clad soldiers in maroon berets, running in symmetry. Nobody knew yet who had attempted the assassination, but my father’s response was swift and angry “It is the bloody English!” while my mother cautioned: “Shhh, people will hear you”.
I was four years old. The memories are etched — the outrage, the anger, Verwoerd’s bloodied head cradled by bystanders. But what still intrigues me is my father’s remark about the bloody English. The Anglo-Boer War was six decades gone, the republican dream of the Nationalists a little more than a year away.
The English were truly defeated, and even one of “them” pulling a gun and shooting the Afrikaner leader could change things. But the comment betrayed my father’s ingrained prejudice and belief that it was still necessary to fight, and blame the English.
The Nationalists were, of course, great at inventing enemies, a whole raft of them: the red peril (communism and the USSR), the Catholic church (“Roomse gevaar”), the black peril, the Left peril (liberals and liberal thinking), and of course the bloody English. It enabled them to build the “volk” and give it an identity, value and worth, separate from anyone else.
In 2008 Umberto Eco delivered a brilliant but disturbing lecture at Bologna University titled “Inventing the Enemy”. His list of invented enemies over the ages is an astounding one, many of whom often stank to others — Austrians to the Italians; Germans to the French; gypsies, Jews and “Negros” to almost everyone; and even James Bond’s enemy Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, who was, worst of all, also lesbian.
Eco’s list of invented enemies also included witches, lepers, the lower classes, women, prostitutes, religions, and “the epitome of difference … the foreigner”. So everybody does it, and has been doing so for aeons. And here we find ourselves again.
“Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” — Donald Trump campaigning in June 2017.
According to Eco, having an enemy is important “not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth”. When there are none, people invent one, but often those that do not provide real direct threats. The downside is, of course, considerable. Invented enemies form the cradle for miscreants of the worst type: racists, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, hypocrites and bigots.
Foreigners being targeted and even “monitored” by political parties in SA is a good example of using “otherness” to invent an enemy that does not directly threaten, is itself vulnerable, and is often used for a populist agenda. Ironically, this echoes some of the messaging deployed by the apartheid government not so long ago. The Nationalists hung on to the idea of their invented enemies for more than six decades, while building their “volk” based on being different from the “others”, resulting in untold misery for millions.
Many of us deal with immigrants daily — baristas, carers, cleaners, Uber drivers, chefs, waiters, managers. Most are in low-income but steady jobs, have children here at school, and some have no other home than SA. People who have travelled far, sometimes the length of a continent on foot, to eke out a better living in another country, have been proven in many academic studies worldwide to be more inventive, purposeful and diligent than average. They are generally productive, become fully fledged members of society, and contribute to the economy. Not all of them are law abiding, but the same is true of locals.
How do we make this better? Eco perhaps has a solution: “Trying to understand other people means destroying the stereotype without denying or ignoring the otherness.” Understanding immigrants (and “others”) therefore is a worthwhile goal — it requires an open mind, a bit of knowledge of the “other”, and being a little brave.
As a country we are certainly not short of real enemies — inept officials, freeloaders, factious political parties, the corrupt, racists and dogmatists, to mention a few. Invented ones are not going to unite us or help us define our identity. Rather the opposite: it will bring further division, and humiliation to some, only to serve the expedient interests of the politically privileged.
One cannot but think: if we already have so many real enemies, and we find it convenient to invent new ones, was the cartoonist of Pogo not right all along: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”?
• Koornhof is a businessman from Stellenbosch. His father, Piet Koornhof, was a National Party cabinet minister.