by Zuma against South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro
than by surmising that the South African president has gone Zulu on
Zapiro.
I've previously said that by going after Zapiro, Zuma was on the path
of bringing South Africa down at the level of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. As it
happens, people are now being thrown in jail in Zimbabwe for calling
Mugabe a little troll or a gnome.
But Zuma's (and incidentally Mugabe's) predicament, it now appears to
me, is more fundamental and therefore congruent with the so-called
"traditional" and "authentic" (Mobutu) ideational system whose many
tenets Africans have still to individually and collectively shed
before an elusive "African Renaissance" could possibly dawn on the
continent.
Franz Fanon once theorized--and I'm loosely paraphrasing--that culture
isn't some frozen meal left intact in the fridge that you go and
retrieve at will any time you'd want to. Culture is a dynamic,
ever-changing and flickering practice by a human group at any very
present moment.
Treading along the same vein, Nigerian literary and cultural critic
Abiola Irele once delivered a now-famous lecture aptly entitled "In
Praise of Alienation."
In sum, culture is created or re-create and engineered willy-nilly by
social formations or larger human institutions. Hence a global culture
in which human rights, gender equality, gay and lesbian rights,
democracy, etc, is now being created before our very eyes--though
Claude Lévi-Strauss saw such a global cultural uniformity project as
detrimental to cultural diversity.
In point of fact, South Africa is a progressive modern society that
prides itself on its ethnic and cultural diversity. That's why it
juridically integrates the many customary laws of its ethnic groups.
Zuma can thus lawfully marry any number of wives as polygamy is part
of Zulu cultural heritage whereas his Jewish compatriot Zapiro is
paradoxically prevented by law from doing so.
In Zulu customs, as in many other African traditional cultures, the
chief is a hallowed and aura-radiating individual to whom one owes
obsequious respect and in whose presence one is awestruck. And in our
traditional societies, making fun of the chief is unthinkable and even
punishable by death. I was once told a legend on the lethal protocol
at the court of King Chaka Zulu: if a notable made the unfortunate
mistake of sneezing when the king was speaking, he was strangled on
the spot!
In today's South African society, however, public figures are (and
should be) fair game to cartoonists and late-night-show comedians; and
Zuma, not being the Chaka, might be interrupted with impunity by the
thundering sneeze of one of his cabinet ministers.
Zuma might have conflated two realms in this row with Zapiro: the
modern multi-ethnic and centripetal realm that moors different groups
into one South African nation, on the one hand; and, on the other, the
centrifugal and ethnocentric realm into which individual groups find
their specific identity.
And, as the president of a multi-ethnic state, Zuma ought to firmly
stand with both legs on his country's centripetal realm. This is an
argument made a while back by a South African lawyer about the serial
marriages of Zuma...
The hope is that it'd soon dawn on Zuma that he'd confused two
different genres. Zapiro isn't a Zulu tribesman. And even if Zapiro
were a Zulu, he could still shed his tribal identity and diss the head
of state in his cartoons without violating the constitution and the
law.
This being said, how could a mere cartoon so terribly incense Zuma to
the point of his running the risk of reminding his compatriots of some
of his actions that amount to repeated rapes with aggravated
circumstances of Lady Justice (like having parole granted on grounds
of serious illness to a healthy millionaire friend of his who also
happens to be his one-time creditor)? That's the kind of bafflement I
recently heard Zapiro express in an interview with the BBC...
Well, we've also watched on TV frenzied people foaming at the mouth
and engaging in the ritual burning of the Swedish flag and attempting
to exact unspecified reparations from the Swedish state for the
unspeakable crime of drawing prophets committed by one or two of
Swedish cartoonist nationals. In the US, we saw Reverend Al Sharpton
gathering a mob for a demonstration against a New York tabloid that
depicted Obama's stimulus plan as undecipherable signs smeared on
paper by a chimp! (And without mixing genres, an ayatollah--just like
a marshal in a Western movie keen on capturing a dangerous outlaw--had
issued a death fatwa against a writer, with money to be collected by
the free-lance bounty hunter who'd drop the felon!)
But having said from the outset that Zuma has gone native on Zapiro, a
bizarre move by an incumbent head of state, there's only one place
where I can find a beginning of an explanation: anthropology, the
field of study of the "apparently irrational behaviour," as quipped
British anthropologist Alfred Gell, citing the ethnographic baffling
quandary of "my brother is a green parrot."
Gell gave this definition of anthropology while developing his
"anthropological theory of art" (see his "Art and Agency").
Gell discovered that "art objects" (which he calls "indexes"), in
indigenous societies, have no bearing on the way these objects are
understood in Western institutionalized settings and circles (museums,
academia, art collectors and aficionados, as well as the general
public).
In indigenous settings, indexes are things around which social
relations are mobilized. These indexes, in an animistic way, are even
"extensions of persons" and have social agency.
"This agency," says Gell, "can be agonistic or defensive as well as
beneficial."
These indexes have dynamic relations between themselves, between them
and people, or between people through their proxy. (Well, this is an
extremely reductionist take on Gell's complex theory.)
It seems to me that to Zuma Zapiro's cartoon has turned into an
"agonist" index, with the nastiness of a Haitian voodoo doll. Hence
his "apparently irrational behavior" in this matter.
Ultimately, the millions of rands in damages being sought by Zuma
would never ward off the nefarious juju Zapiro's cartoon has become
for him.
In Zuma's worldview, breaking the spell of the wicked cartoon can only
be done according to the following script:
Mwalimu Saleh, a medicineman from Tanzania, is flown to South Afica to
cure the ailing soul of Zuma. He's brought in his luggage the most
potent body parts harvested on murdered albinos (genitals, anuses, and
hearts). He stews these body parts. When the stew is ready, he tells
Zuma: "You'll eat this stew four Fridays in a row. This powerful
medicine will right your listing soul knocked off balance by the
soul-eater Zapiro. Focus on Zapiro while you eat: you'll be nibbling
at his soul till you slowly and painfully turn the loathsome
cartoonist into a golem!"
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