Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya
DEAR Mr Samuel L Jackson
I don’t know if what I read – about you saying that if America elected Donald Trump you would move to South Africa – is true. I assume it is, as I haven’t seen a retraction or correction.
From the first time I saw you playing the role of the manipulative crack addict in Spike Lee’s J ungle Fever in 1991, I have been a fan. Your role as a basketball coach interested in making young men more than just athletes resonated with me and many others who grew up in spaces where young people dream limited dreams.
With Trump increasingly looking like he will be the GOP’s candidate for the presidency, and by implication, having a 50 percent chance of running your country, I thought I should take it upon myself to help you to decide whether you really want to migrate to our country.
If the reasons for your considering South Africa are connected to political leadership, I’m afraid you might just be jumping from the pan to a boiling pot. We have a problem in this country, sir. I sincerely doubt whether you will find better leadership in South Africa than you will in the US.
Unlike in America, where politicians are bought in an open market, we have in South Africa a situation where even the highest leaders of the country’s governing party hear from reporters that we have a new finance minister who, as it turns out, was appointed after someone else rejected an offer by family friends of the president.
No great wonder that even the erstwhile friends of the present political hegemons have lost faith in the president of the Republic. The communists, the youth league of the ruling party and some in the trade union movement, who were at some point willing to kill or die for the present leadership, now have nothing but unkind words for their former heroes.
It is difficult to say when their Damascus moment happened because, to his credit, our president has not changed his reputation for being, to quote a former daily business newspaper editor, “a man who has never heard an idea he did not like”.
He still likes all ideas without committing himself to any one idea or set of ideas for a long enough period to allow for some policy clarity.
What our president has to his credit is the will to live and survive the odds. I guess he has the makings of what the movies tell us is what makes America great – the opportunity for a man of modest means to attain the highest office in the land.
I am sure that with our president, historians and future political scientists will be spoilt for choice when they study how to win political friends and confuse enemies. Who knows, he could inspire a movie script. The sex and scandal are built into his biography.
Don’t get me wrong, sir, ours is a beautiful country. We have it all here. We have the majesty of the Drakensberg, the warmth of the Indian Ocean, the pristine Kruger National Park – and our major cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban compete favourably with the world’s major cities as centres of commerce and enterprise.
But if what you are yearning for is political leadership, I’d recommend you consider a country like Tanzania, whose president, John Magufuli, is demonstrating the servant leadership style we so crave in our country and continent.
You could also consider Burkina Faso, where they have finally arrested the man they say was involved in stealing the life of one of Africa’s greatest sons, Thomas Sankara.
In the event that you envisaged living in Johannesburg, do note that the opposition party might field a local Trump wannabe, a free-enterprise fundamentalist who thinks the poor are responsible for their own plight. This fellow thinks the poor should just swallow their pride and accept the largesse of their employers.
I also hope you aren’t looking to South Africa to escape the race issues in your own country. We have an odd situation here. Despite the hundreds of years of institutionalised racism, we don’t have racists any more. We have an even more fascinating scenario where those who say they are opposed to racism are the ones most vocal against talking about racism.
You read me well. Those who say they are opposed to racism are unwilling to even entertain the idea of some among us being racist. We have racism without racists.
So, of course, we would love to boast that Mr Samuel L Jackson is our countryman, but if you do choose us, I hope it won’t be because you want to help make this country what it can be and free it from the clutches of corrupt, self-serving men and women more worried about their grand-yet-fake lifestyles.
Signed,
The Fan