GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The ANC’s memorial lecture mania
‘Death. It’s all that keeps the ANC alive. Funerals, memorials, lectures, today these constitute the party’s unofficial platform, as it constantly talks to its own ghost’
There are two things you need if you are a deceased or retired ANC politician: a foundation and a memorial lecture. In a country where the past is the only thing that animates the ANC in the present, they are some of the tools used to maintain a perpetual, backward-looking gaze. To help sustain the illusion, the future is an immutable and inevitable reflection of those past glory days. Of course, pageantry is also good for the ego; the countervailing force inextricably attached to so much low self-esteem in South African politics. You need but have served in the ANC to be immortalised. Oliver Tambo and Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri sit side by side on the memorial lecture circuit. Anyone who ever set foot on Mount Olympus is a god. All the big political guns have foundations: Cyril Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Oliver and Adelaide Tambo, Steve Biko, Archie Gumede, and a hundred others besides. Dullah Omar has a foundation, an institute and a memorial lecture; the trife...
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