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Between Two Fires: Holding the Liberal Centre in South African Politics
John Kane-Berman is uniquely qualified to look back over the enormous political and social changes that have taken place in his lifetime in this fractious country. In his career as student leader, Rhodes Scholar, newspaperman, independent columnist, speech maker, commentator, and Chief Executive, for thirty years, of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Kane-Berman has been at the coal face of political change in South Africa. The breadth and depth of ideas and events covered here are the disintegration of apartheid, the chaos of the 'people's war' and its contribution to the broader societal breakdown we see today, the liberal slide-away, the authoritarian ANC with its racial ideology and revolutionary goals, to mention only a few. Kane-Berman's willingness to confront received wisdom is thoroughly refreshing, and he is forthright about the threats to freedom, democracy, and growth in contemporary South Africa, many of which he identified even before the ANC came to power. Writing, debate, and reasoned argument have been Kane-Berman's stock in trade and his clarity of vision and personal insight have created a memoir of rare candour and absorbing interest.
354 pages, Paperback
Published March 10, 2017
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June 16, 2018
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This book should not have taken me by surprise. In late 1960s, when John Kane-Berman was the colossus of student politics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, I had been a slightly younger student activist. Back then I was torn between my admiration for his brilliance, soaring rhetoric and great charm, on the one hand, and my distaste at his evident conviction that he was the most important person in any gathering on the other. Modesty, false or otherwise, had no part in his makeup.
Reading this memoir, I was struck by how little JKB (as he was known at Wits and as he refers to himself in his many footnotes) seems to have changed. In those days, he was the master of what we used to call “the schlenter” – a dubious set of manoeuvres and backroom deals through which he imposed his desired outcome on reluctant followers. Little of this appears in the nevertheless interesting parts of the memoir that deal with his student years, both in Johannesburg and Oxford. Revealingly, however, his discussion of Wits student politics constantly refers to the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) over which he presided as "my SRC" - as if he, rather than the student electorate, had brought the SRC into being and as if Neville Curtis, Mark Orkin and other stellar SRC luminaries were simply JKB's creatures or minions.
The chapters that recount his years as a journalist and then as CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations also contain much useful material, particularly on the crucial role of journalists and researchers in exposing the daily crimes of apartheid. And Kane-Berman certainly played a significant and laudable role in this process. However, my appreciation of these chapters was somewhat dimmed by the increasingly self-satisfied tone about what a great job he did - in fighting both apartheid and, as he presents it, a deeply conniving left. More curious is the structure of several chapters (at least in the Kindle version of the book that I read) in which the discussion of diverse aspects of JKB’s political activities or his commentaries suddenly veers off into long and totally unconnected accounts him swanning around the temples of high culture in a range of global capitals. At one stage the reader is treated to a homily about how one should always dress for dinner, especially while on an ocean cruise (fortunately the brave anti-apartheid warrior was always able to escape hoi poloi back home on such democratic jaunts). Names are copiously dropped throughout. Having read his little lecture on how to look at great works of art, I now know that spending anything fewer than four days in any art gallery is mere dilettantism, nobody can ever appreciate such art in anything fewer!
The point of this all of this smug and, frankly, boring detail in a book subtitled “Holding the Liberal Centre in South African Politics” is not immediately evident. Yet the tone and content of these sections serve to underscore JKB’s sense of his own erudition, cultural superiority and – as he frequently quotes others as saying – his brilliance. The overwhelming sense of entitlement that shines through these sections equally reveals a great deal about the man’s vanity, his elitist attitudes, and exactly whom he understands the “liberal centre” and his audience to be comprised of. Someone whose political manifesto includes the unblushing claim that “a decent martini almost demands a black tie”, is clearly speaking only to and for the already hugely privileged in a country still seared by the devastating consequences of apartheid and over 300 years of colonialism.
The final third of the book is a long diatribe against South Africa’s ANC government and what Kane-Berman repeatedly insists is its devious intent to transform the former country of apartheid. Indeed, the very idea of “transformation” raises all of his ideological hackles and the reader is enjoined to refrain from ever using this word, and to suspect all who do so. So, an autobiography that starts out as an interesting account of significant moments in South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, turns into a long and repetitive ideological screed, one as turgid and as blind to its own faults (and the crimes committed in its name) as the "national democratic revolution" that JKB so fiercely denounces. Clearly having read this book, black South Africans will now see the light of liberalism, abandon all efforts to transform the country made by apartheid, and trust instead that the author’s prescribed solution of the "the magic of the market" will eradicate poverty and racial discrimination in perhaps the world's most unequal country. Despite Kane-Berman’s insistence on getting "the facts" right, he blithely ignores how the past 30 years of such “market magic” has eviscerated education and health services throughout Africa, and has created the most rapid explosion of global inequality and elite greed in human history. I was left with a profound sense that the “liberalism” he so vigorously promotes is a mere defence of the privileges of those South Africans who — purely by the accident of birth that gave them a white skin — enjoyed a gilded childhood, access to elite education, copious martinis and the patronage of the not-so-good and not-so-great of the British and American elite. In a book dripping with the author’s sense of entitlement, one looks in vain for any self-consciousness about how the rampant elitism of this unreconstructed Cold War warrior might not exactly appeal to those whose lives and future disfigured by apartheid’s hideous consequences.
This book should not have taken me by surprise. In late 1960s, when John Kane-Berman was the colossus of student politics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, I had been a slightly younger student activist. Back then I was torn between my admiration for his brilliance, soaring rhetoric and great charm, on the one hand, and my distaste at his evident conviction that he was the most important person in any gathering on the other. Modesty, false or otherwise, had no part in his makeup.
Reading this memoir, I was struck by how little JKB (as he was known at Wits and as he refers to himself in his many footnotes) seems to have changed. In those days, he was the master of what we used to call “the schlenter” – a dubious set of manoeuvres and backroom deals through which he imposed his desired outcome on reluctant followers. Little of this appears in the nevertheless interesting parts of the memoir that deal with his student years, both in Johannesburg and Oxford. Revealingly, however, his discussion of Wits student politics constantly refers to the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) over which he presided as "my SRC" - as if he, rather than the student electorate, had brought the SRC into being and as if Neville Curtis, Mark Orkin and other stellar SRC luminaries were simply JKB's creatures or minions.
The chapters that recount his years as a journalist and then as CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations also contain much useful material, particularly on the crucial role of journalists and researchers in exposing the daily crimes of apartheid. And Kane-Berman certainly played a significant and laudable role in this process. However, my appreciation of these chapters was somewhat dimmed by the increasingly self-satisfied tone about what a great job he did - in fighting both apartheid and, as he presents it, a deeply conniving left. More curious is the structure of several chapters (at least in the Kindle version of the book that I read) in which the discussion of diverse aspects of JKB’s political activities or his commentaries suddenly veers off into long and totally unconnected accounts him swanning around the temples of high culture in a range of global capitals. At one stage the reader is treated to a homily about how one should always dress for dinner, especially while on an ocean cruise (fortunately the brave anti-apartheid warrior was always able to escape hoi poloi back home on such democratic jaunts). Names are copiously dropped throughout. Having read his little lecture on how to look at great works of art, I now know that spending anything fewer than four days in any art gallery is mere dilettantism, nobody can ever appreciate such art in anything fewer!
The point of this all of this smug and, frankly, boring detail in a book subtitled “Holding the Liberal Centre in South African Politics” is not immediately evident. Yet the tone and content of these sections serve to underscore JKB’s sense of his own erudition, cultural superiority and – as he frequently quotes others as saying – his brilliance. The overwhelming sense of entitlement that shines through these sections equally reveals a great deal about the man’s vanity, his elitist attitudes, and exactly whom he understands the “liberal centre” and his audience to be comprised of. Someone whose political manifesto includes the unblushing claim that “a decent martini almost demands a black tie”, is clearly speaking only to and for the already hugely privileged in a country still seared by the devastating consequences of apartheid and over 300 years of colonialism.
The final third of the book is a long diatribe against South Africa’s ANC government and what Kane-Berman repeatedly insists is its devious intent to transform the former country of apartheid. Indeed, the very idea of “transformation” raises all of his ideological hackles and the reader is enjoined to refrain from ever using this word, and to suspect all who do so. So, an autobiography that starts out as an interesting account of significant moments in South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, turns into a long and repetitive ideological screed, one as turgid and as blind to its own faults (and the crimes committed in its name) as the "national democratic revolution" that JKB so fiercely denounces. Clearly having read this book, black South Africans will now see the light of liberalism, abandon all efforts to transform the country made by apartheid, and trust instead that the author’s prescribed solution of the "the magic of the market" will eradicate poverty and racial discrimination in perhaps the world's most unequal country. Despite Kane-Berman’s insistence on getting "the facts" right, he blithely ignores how the past 30 years of such “market magic” has eviscerated education and health services throughout Africa, and has created the most rapid explosion of global inequality and elite greed in human history. I was left with a profound sense that the “liberalism” he so vigorously promotes is a mere defence of the privileges of those South Africans who — purely by the accident of birth that gave them a white skin — enjoyed a gilded childhood, access to elite education, copious martinis and the patronage of the not-so-good and not-so-great of the British and American elite. In a book dripping with the author’s sense of entitlement, one looks in vain for any self-consciousness about how the rampant elitism of this unreconstructed Cold War warrior might not exactly appeal to those whose lives and future disfigured by apartheid’s hideous consequences.
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April 18, 2020Amazing
April 29, 2017
Excellent, a page turner about an important problem!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews