Maybe we are mal. But also granite-tough. Like our mountains, writes Murray Williams.
Cape Town - “It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll” I recall these lyrics from the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Time Warp when thinking of friends. Friends in trouble. A guy and a girl who want different things. Their divergent desired futures have opened a chasm.
But, in the meantime their normal lives continue. And that disjoin, that daily duality - between the conflictual and the normal, the dismay and the today - is leading to madness.
It Is dangerous. Extremely.
We see it, too, on the national stage.
Early warnings have become fulfilled prophecies of compromised integrity, rapacious personal agendas and now grand larceny. South Africa is in a particularly dangerous space. Not because of what is “going down”, but because we are becoming dramatically desensitised to such rampant wrong.
And one suspects the irreconcilable conflict between the severity of our live catastrophe, and our “normal”, will lead to madness.
Some might think of this head-splitting agony as a recent thing. A pathology we can blame on the arrival of an emperor who was thought to have no clothes, but who actually held all the cards.
But that would be profoundly disingenuous. Wilfully incorrect. Unforgivably wrong. For the madness has always been with us. For hundreds of years.
Evil and normal have been locked in mortal combat ever since we’ve been a “we”.
South Africa’s entire history is built on institutionalised mega-injustice that has required nothing short of madness for anyone here to stay sane.
A feudal split-personality that began in 16-something, and still persists today.
Even our “proudest moments” were mad. Did our “new beginning” of 1994 ever really stand a chance of fixing the past? Mathematically? In our most euphoric supposed “moment of unity”, in 1995 when we won a rugby match - was this founded on any actual prospect of physical, practical redress and real-life restoration of dignity?
The fact that colonialism and apartheid lasted so long - their core wickedness diluted by the relentless short-term grind of daily life - probably means madness has long been the foundation of our national condition.
So what might this mean?
That we are all certifiable? And most definitely doomed? Possibly. But hold on.
Are we missing something? Too punch-drunk to see clearly?
Are we not, actually: a nation capable of surviving relentless waves of brutality, evil and madness? Survivors of hundreds of years of seriously rough, pounding history? A nation with: resilience?
Resilience - the Holy Grail.
Maybe we are mal. But also granite-tough. Like our mountains.
So: No retreat. No surrender. Not yet.
A luta continua.
* Williams’ “Shooting from the Lip” column appears in the Cape Argus every Monday.
Cape Argus