I grew up in Bonteheuwel, a poor working class area on the Cape Flats.
After years of studying in
Pakistan, I returned as a Muslim theologian committed to poverty as
a religious option and to the struggle against poverty forced upon people.
(A saying of the Prophet Muhammad which struck a deep cord in me was "Oh
Allah, let me continue to live among the poor, let me die among the poor
and, on the Day of Resurrection, let me rise among the poor.")
My icon was Abu Dharr al-Ghiffari (d. 653), a lone-ranger Companion of the Prophet. He had banged at the doors of the nouveau riche soon after Muhammad's death, demanding that they surrender the superfluous wealth they had hoarded during the wars of Muslim expansion. Known as the "Father of Islamic socialism", he challenged rulers who expropriated community property in the name of God. ("All property belongs to God", was the rulers' argument.) Abu Dharr's response was: "You say this in order to draw the conclusion that since you are the representative of God, all property belongs to you; You ought to say that all property belongs to the people"
After years of "the struggle" I went to the United Kingdom and Germany where I lived on a rather generous scholarship in leafy, antiseptic suburbs. I returned to the University of the Western Cape where both students and faculty hinted that I was inappropriate for the place, a bit of an octagonal peg in a square hole. I rented an apartment in Rylands, a middle class Indian area, although my flat stood on a block referred to as "Rylands se skurwe fletse". (The filthy flats of Rylands) The illusion of being an Abu Dharrian Muslim thus gained a new lease of life.
It's there that People's Action Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), the Muslim vigilante group, was formed. In their first public appearance, they gathered in the parking lot we share with the discotheque, Club Galaxy and marched to the Minister of Justice, Abdullah Omar's house, just down the road. On the same day, I wrote an article in a local daily describing the death penalty - an object of worship for fanatics who invoke religion (note that I am not saying “religious fanatics”) - as “barbaric”. "Today they march on Omar’s place where the cops may block them", I thought, "and tomorrow they may decide that it is easier to swallow the unguarded smaller fish."
Within two weeks, I was gone - to Rosebank, nearer the mountain - though not the mountain of Moses, Jesus or Muhammad which, of course, represents a quest for the deeper things of life and beyond. I live "just below the railway line" - something you omit mentioning when placing your apartment on the property market - and just a hundred meters from the more posh Rondebosch where I could claim Mandela and now Thabo Mbeki, our new president, as a neighbour. I am not complaining though. Staying down the road is the Minister of Education, Abdul Kader Asmal, now in the top ten on the ANC's election list. So, I have progressed: my previous Ministerial neighbour (Omar) only made it onto the top twenty. I still travel by train (always first class) and public taxis. In other words, I have graduated to being an up-market Abu Dharrian Muslim.
I have also become a Commissioner for Gender Equality, with a take-home pay of R15,000. I've added "airplane" to my other modes of regular transport. My SAA platinum card enables me to invite some of my peasant friends into SAA's business class lounge. There, my working class habit of never letting anything free pass by still gets the better of me, and I regularly stock up on the peanuts, chips, biscuits and cold drinks - much of it for later redistribution. (And so redistribution is now of "cake" - as in Marie Antoinette's reputed taunt - rather than in anything structural).
The Commission on Gender Equality has imposed a voluntary ban on Business Class travelling. However, the SAA ground staff invariably seem to think my Economy Class seat was a mistake and regularly upgrade me to Business. (To those who have shall be given!)
In Johannesburg I stay on the border between Parkwood and Rosebank, missing the more exclusive Rosebank by about hundred metres. Parkwood is also the name of really down and out poverty stricken township in the area known as the Cape Flats. Perhaps this entitles me to call myself a residual Abu Dharrian.
While virtually all the organs of the State have a large number of individuals with a passionate commitment to the poor, it is remarkable that our own lucrative salaries have ever been seriously questioned. None of us – including myself - have had the courage to challenge the entire system that sees a new privileged class emerging in the name of democracy.
Gradually we are being absorbed. Some of us, of course, have found genuinely useful things to do with our newfound wealth. We do so quietly, so as not to upset the apple cart - or rather the gravy train. After all, we're eligible for another five-year term when the current one expires. We don't quite want to prematurely discontinue "our generosity", do we?
My story in many ways is also the story of the betrayal of a revolution. It issues questions we should not hide from.
How independent is an independent commission such as the one that I serve on when it doesn't want to upset the gravy train?
How consistently principled can commissioners, parliamentarians and ministers afford to be when they are irrevocably tied to massive new mortgages to fund their new palatial mansions and repayments on their German BMW's?
Does compassion - in the shape of the redistribution of SAA Business class peanuts or of a personalized redistribution of a handsome salary - become a substitute for structurral justice that recognizes that people are being underpaid because others like myself are being overpaid? We're not talking about people who've made comfort and wealth their lives' task. We're concerned here with that other brand of humans so deeply committed to fight injustice that they would literally give their lives for "the struggle". What is it that seemingly awakens in them an even greater commitment to line their own pockets?
Where did all those double-breasted suits come from on the day of Mandela's release, the ones that were so ostentatiously in evidence on the Grand Parade, the square where Mandela made his first public appearance. Did the tailors of these formerly T-shirted comrades know something we did not?
Is there something innately human about us that prevents us from looking
our betrayal in the face
- instead of ducking behind phrases like "redeployment to the private
sector", "black empowerment" and "economic upliftment"?
As becomes a thorougbred Coloured/Mulatto/mongrel cum post-modernist, my response is somewhere in-between: Yes and No.
A while ago, I visited the Provincial Minister for Safety and Security in the Northern Cape at her home. I knew the name of her street and had been told hers was the first house. First option? Look for the cop at the gate. No such luck. Second option? Head for the smarter house. "No, she actually stays across the road", the neighbour said. Third option? Head for the front door of the not-so-smart house. "No, you must go around to the back", the house owner directed. Fourth option? Head for the back door of the not-so-smart house? "No, she stays there", said the same house owner who had opened the front door, pointing to the servants' quarters. Not a little baffled, I strolled across.
The Honourable Ms Eunice Komani, Minister for Safety and Security, came to the door, barefeet, rollers in the hair and wrapped in a nightgown - a genuine Coloured lady. She seated me in the kitchen, the only room other than her bedroom. We sat around a cheap pine table and had our meeting. With one glance I took in her surroundings and the entirety of her worldly possessions.
"Status, my child," she said as I composed myself and asked about her lifestyle, "is not in the kind of house or car that I own; it is in who I am and what I do with my life." "As for a house, I just need a place to put my head down at night - I may as well do it among the people that I believe I am working for."
"And the absence of an armed guard?" I asked. "Well, my job is to look after the Safety and Security of the people, not my own", she said.
A kind of revelatory flush passed over me.
Then came the bad news. Abu Dharr al-Ghiffari's soul-mate in the Northern Cape was dumped from the provincial election list and recently deposed as chair of the ANC Women's League in the province.
(Abu Dharr, by the way was exiled and died a lonely death, something the Prophet had apparently predicted. His wife was found seated alongside his corpse, lying beside a desert path, waiting for someone to offer the funeral prayers and assist in digging his grave).
The moral high ground was a crucial factor in the liberation movement's success in mobilizing both our own people and armies of solidarity activists across the world. Many of those currently in government are daily "compelled" to sacrifice much of that moral high ground at the altar of realpolitik or personal ambition. But a few, mercifully, dream and soldier on.
The task of the dreamers is to remind those in power that economic constraints (the market and the guardsmen of the IMF) or geopolitical realities are not the only factors that should inform political or economic policy.
Moral imperatives are not only useful as mobilizing tools. They should stand at the core of a vision to which, I would like to believe, all of us were - and a large number of us still are - sincerely committed to.
This is the vision of a world where people do not die of malnourishment because others die of gluttony, where factory workers do not hop at the scream of a boss because a previously disadvantaged now thoroughly economically overempowered servant of the state has enough money to shop till he or she drops.
In some ways, we are being called to choose the paths of lonely deaths - the culmination of living lives for others.
In different times, many of us walked those paths. Today, we soar over
them in business class, pocketing a packet of peanuts or two for re-distribution.