If I were to be asked what the most entertaining event was that I attended last month, I would have to say Denel’s conference at Emperor’s Palace on the maintenance of Russian helicopters.

It sure beat the Lekker Life luxury goodies show at Silversands Casino, with its awkward title and grumpy cheese vendors and signs that said “’n Vrou se plek is in die kombuis”, in a stall run by a guy who had to be called from the gambling tables for a photo op.

Gambling with one’s life, of course, is what one does when one boards some Russian helicopters, especially one of the 220 or so said to be operational in sub-Saharan Africa. I’m not being nasty or bitter; this was admitted as much by Yuri Kozlov, continental director of the company called Russian Helicopters.

“Maybe you’ll fly today, and even tomorrow, but what about the day after tomorrow?” he asked. “If you drive a car and it stops, maybe you drive into a ditch, if you are very unlucky, but with a helicopter…”

He made a rude noise, and a thumbs-down that was rather quick. “Only God knows how they fly. I don’t,” he said. “It’s a philosophical question, really.” It is also “an issue of human rights. Everybody has the human right to safety on a helicopter.”

Now that’s a new dimension, brought by a Russian nogal, to the perennial accusation that human rights are being imposed on Africans.

Kozlov added that some buyers would out fork millions of dollar to buy new helicopters, only to scrimp on parts that sometimes cost only a few thousand dollars – even when the original parts are available, “but in Africa they want the fakes, the second-hand parts. It is something I don’t understand.”

Helicopters are more intricate machines than aircraft, he explained, and need even more rigid maintenance schedules, which are simply not kept to in certain countries. Elsewhere, quality and safety are assured by certification, and Russian Helicopters has special maintenance, repair and overhaul centres all over the world, just not in Africa.

Except in Sudan, Kozlov hastily added – where it is your right to be bombed in Darfur or the south by a helicopter whose pilots’ human rights have been assured by proper and frequent maintenance. But he didn’t say that.

Anyway, Denel and Russian Helicopters have now entered into a deal to set up a maintenance, repair and overhaul centre in South Africa. Part of it will be a mobile brigade that would be able to fly at short notice to any sub-Saharan country to fix helicopters on the fly, so to speak.

If you want to become a new African explorer, don’t become a philanthropist with a beard dispensing mosquito nets and drinking rum and warm Coke. Join Denel to become a Russian chopper mack, and the beard will be optional.

Kozlov also took the opportunity for a sales pitch on his company’s new VIP helicopters. Indeed, a handful of ambassadors from African countries had come all the way from Pretoria.

Of course, the Russians are old hands at supplying African dictators, and a key part of the offering is the new configurative permutations.

Some leaders take their families with them, so they can be set up like play pens. Others are more at ease with their bodyguards, and there are arrangements for guards sitting in various cubicle formats. Still other leaders need their guards but don’t trust them all that much, and could have them aligned across the coffee table or the aisle, depending on the level of paranoia.

On said coffee table, a full glass of water will not be spilled, so smooth will the chopper ride be, Kozlov claimed. What then about the Johnnie Walker Blue Label to be added, someone in the audience asked – but Kozlov pretended not to hear.

One ambassador asked for the mic and launched into a diatribe. VIP helicopters are just another method for exploitation. “Classified trade leads to overspending,” he said. Accountability suffers. Russian Helicopters “may be assisting governments to rip off the people of Africa”.

The poor Kozlov was still reeling from after five minutes of such invective when the same ambassador asked without missing a beat: “And what is the price, if I may ask?”

Kozlov surfed the laughter of the audience to add new yaw to his sales pitch. Just don’t wait, he said. African governments tell us they don’t have any money now – don’t wait for the new funding, order so long, since the order book is filled until mid-2014.

“If it is needed urgently, we can always make a plan,” he added, to more laughter.

So what was the price of that chopper, you ask? Between $10m and $17m, said Kozlov. No big surprise there, said the ambassador.

If you want a schizoid shot in the arm to boost both your afropessimism and your afro-optimism, go to Mali. You’ll find some sublime stuff in the arts and its traditional cultures, but also the most heartbreaking tales of squalor and venality.

The country’s new dictator looks out of his depth as a leader – indeed, Time magazine reports that his American trainers did not recommend him for high command – which just adds to the air of the desperate that wafts from its deserts.

Much sympathy has been expressed with him, and there were actually demonstrations in his favour. One has to view the Economic Community of West Africa’s stern stance with some cynicism as, well, looking after their economic image, and dissuading similar actions in their own countries. For similar motivations boil under the surface there.

Drive to the university in Bamako to see why. In years past the budgets for tertiary education had been simply hijacked by the ruling patronage, and the result is achingly visible as you approach: rows of beggars holding out bowls for food. These are students, whose stipends never seem to realise.

They are the unlucky ones, whose parents could not afford to bribe them into a career in the civil service, or the army. Untrained youngsters serve in the north, where until now they had to tackle fierce desert warriors who had cut their teeth and other things in the horrific Algerian civil war. Often the only food and amenities they had was what their parents sent them from the cities.

Or drive to Timbuktu, which you won’t do on the road, not from the last town before the desert, anyway. That is a long stretch of anthill-like protuberances, of what was left over of the highway, badly constructed from cheapened materials by corrupt engineers. Instead you slalom in the sand through these in an undulating four by four, in a mad dash to reach the Niger River, before nightfall when the local bandits might reach you.

Another scene: desperate Muslims clumping under the street lights in the squares of towns to try to memorise the Koran, a little better than the candle light in their hovels. There is a buzz, and it might be the sound they make as they mumble, or it might be an electric cable box on the blink again.

Mali is suffused with corruption. The forces are there not for law and order, but as a kind of economic police. On one occasion a contractor had to pay a bribe to arrest a South African official who had cheated him. The official simply played the race card, paid a larger bribe, and the contractor was the one standing before the jail’s door.

It is not difficult to see how it all came to pass. Mali is often touted as the site of proof for Africa’s magnificent past, the one the African Renaissance is about. But closer inspection reveals that its empires were driven by the same sort of exploitation as those of Rome and Greece, with at its heart, slavery.

The Tuaregs who are said to behind the uprising that might soon solidify in Africa’s youngest state, Azawad, are symbols of the past for other Malians, more than anything else. Because they were the purveyors of slaves to Arab states across the Sahara desert, on harsh journeys lined with skeletons, according to Arab explorer Ibn Batuta.

Many such slaves, poached from the animist south, also served in the armies of Mali’s empires. The Tuaregs themselves used to be a slave society, with up to 80% organized in a system of castes, mostly made up of former slaves commandeered from the caravans, probably when they proved themselves to be extra hardy, capable of handling the extreme conditions – a sort of evolutionary selection.

In the latter stages of colonial times, when slavery was getting banned, the Tuaregs had to turn to farming and trucking to survive, and they were systematically shunned. Before this year’s uprising, for instance, nomads were not allowed to bring their camels to Timbuktu town, and only to overnight in the former slave quarter area.

The Tuaregs had been revolting against such neglect since the 1960s, but had always been beaten back, also because they did not really want to give up all of their nomadic lifestyle. But growing constraints, such as America throwing money at border control in its war on terror and interfering with what some call smuggling but is really wholesale trade, have driven them to the towns.

The coup in Mali may have been spurred by age-old fears in the south that slavery may return, since it is still practiced in western Africa, widely if not intensively, going by human rights reports. Globalisation has brought an invasion of entrepreneurs across the Sahel from oil-rich countries – Arab TV and radio stations, airlines and businesses are ubiquitous.

The Darfur conflict has also had its effect: some politicians in countries such as the Central African Republic fear a victory by the Arab-dominated government in Sudan over the African-dominated rebels there would prompt the return of slavery in the whole region.

All this may be deeply irrational – one does not see slavery as viable to any serious extent in the current international watchdogging climate – but the possibility that exploitation of each other in the past has laid the foundations for exploitation of each other in contemporary times is plausible enough.

If the crisis in Mali has one positive effect, it might well be to divert the spotlight on Africa’s own defects as the root of its current problems.

Galileo Galilei should have been called a coward. Unlike all those other heretics who got bravely burned at the stake, he recanted when the Catholic Church took issue with his celestial sightings and confirmation that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

But he is a hero, and has always been. Bertolt Brecht wrote a play about young firebrands taking him to task for his lack of enthusiasm for martyrdom, and made Galileo come off best. This reading of his life had always puzzled me, until I discovered the other day that his writings had been reproduced all over Europe by the time he fell out with the Church. A recantation was safely meaningless, since few of the thousands of his books in circulation could be recalled.

A somewhat similar situation has me scratching my head these days, when it comes to the ANC’s media appeals tribunal. What exactly is the party trying to achieve? I agree with City Press editor Ferial Haffajee that it really is an attempt to gain control over the media. But how does it propose to do that with a tribunal?

It’s common cause that the internet has changed the world. Even when you suffer from senile dementia you can see that. News is now constantly available, and instantly reproducible. And it has no centre any more; once on the web, it whizzes everywhere immediately and takes on a life of its own.

Even before the internet, trying to control information did not work. The fall of the Berlin Wall was due in large part to intercontinental radio and TV. Communist countries watched and listened and knew life was better on the other side. LM Radio did its bit to keep the spirit of pop resistance against calvinistic authority in South Africa going. Radio stations outside Zimbabwe kept the opposition going. Cellphones exposed the election robbery of Robert Mugabe in 2008.

As we all know, the internet has one weakness – it is unreliable as a source of truth. It is suffused with rumour, virtuality, disinformation, noninformation, PR and pop psychology. All these act like a veil over the truthfulness that is out there somewhere.

Smart governments have long developed ways to exploit such veils, producing their own fog of noninformation and cluttering the system with inconsequentialities. Officials are trained in producing sound bites that by unceasing repetition become the catchword for the issue at stake. Whole TV series have been written about such shenanigans.

One thing to avoid nowadays is for something to go viral. Then you’ve had it. The only way out for a government would be to sack some people. This where the puzzle about the ANC tribunal is deepest (not that the ANC is a great sacker of people).

Isn’t bringing a matter before a tribunal, upon which surely more media than before will be trained, a failproof recipe for making something go viral? Won’t a poor journalist being grilled Buta Komphela-style by some ANC apparatchik hoping to rise in the ranks make for excellent YouTube theatre?

Or will it be all in camera? That would surely be a contradiction of the transparency that is ostensibly being sought. And it will only enhance the YouTube-ality – imagine our haggard-faced, tousled-haired, tearful journo standing outside a massive wooden door bolted fast, having free rein to give his or her account of what happened.

If I am right about this, the next question is whether no one in the ANC has thought this through – as with so many other half-baked measures, such as the secrecy clauses in the Protection of State Information Bill. Are we having yet another demonstration of capacity constraints? ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu’s ramblings at the Press Freedom Commission hearings would suggest that.

Journalism schools all over the world still teach Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the mainstream media, that it is a tool for ruling elites to manufacture consent through various filters to distort the news. Some of this comes through in the ANC’s digs at the purported white ownership of the media.

But perhaps what is happening is not the ANC’s rejection of the manufacture of consent, but its deep resentment that it is unable to do something similar. Here the synergy between media moguls, politicians, experts and officials that is so rightly criticised in America – and was so devastatingly demonstrated in George Bush’s ability to sell WMDs in Iraq to the public – does not really exist. The mighty SABC should be winning the propaganda war for the ANC hands down, but it is just too inefficient.

One can agonise about a certain measure of liberalistic conformity in the Anglocentric media complex of which we are part, but by far the biggest stick in South Africa’s wheel is the conformity reigning in the townships. The fact that the print media generally have little penetration there is a key factor in the malfunctioning  of democracy under the ANC.

We can write till we are black and blue about rampant misgovernance and maladministration, but as long as the masses conform to the ANC’s liberation-movement ideology, it will have no lasting effect.

As for Galileo, I would be happy to take him as my example. I am not the martyring type; I will be quite ready to recant if the tribunal is set up one day (if my editor will allow me). If there is any truth in what I write in the future, a recantation will not destroy it.

Is there any greater villain nowadays than a rhino poacher? Perhaps a rhino poacher moonlighting as a contract rapist in small towns in Limpopo?

How can one but feel revulsion for a person who stalks an endangered species just for the monetary return on fairly useless parts of its anatomy? Even if the rhino hype often looks like greenwashing – allowing many people to pretend they care about the environment – this is one cause that is justified left, right and centre.

But we forget that not so long ago the tables were turned, sometimes literally. The rhino filled man with universal fear and loathing. Especially in chic places such as Paris, where in the 1950s the play Rhinoceros was performed for the first time. It’s about people in a village turning into rhinos and demolishing furniture all over the place. This clearly was a reference to the tide of totalitarian herd movements such as communism and fascism.

The British empire had adopted rhinos as bumbling, naive creatures who suffer from bread-crumb irritation – explaining their loose skins – as per Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play set matters right, depicting rhinos as dangerous throwbacks from Jurassic times that will stomp you to death out of pure ignorance.

That is closer to the truth about beasts in Africa, anyway. This is the continent where animals are not cute and aspiring to be man’s furry toys, but monsters out to devour your flesh and then crack your bones to lick up some marrow. OK, so rhinos are vegetarians, but how sure can you be?

In my previous job, we had a correspondent from Malawi who was not bad at reporting on local events, except when he earnestly wrote about supernatural creatures terrorising the country’s rural areas. Queries about their veracity invariably elicited the response that he could cite several witnesses whom he would trust with his life.

I once spent a night in Maputaland, during which I was awakened by the saddest and most beautiful singing I had heard in a while – by the man who was on duty tending the village fires meant to keep hippos out of the maize fields and vegetable gardens.

Until electrical times, nature was the enemy everywhere, to be battled to the death and subjected to man’s will if he was to survive. Waves and earthquakes demolishing nuclear reactors underscore the point to us modernised sorts, but in the African or Asian bush just dealing with the animals in the surrounds of one’s home still requires lots of nerve and fatalism.

Granted, some monsters are fabricated, but elephants charging through villages, hyenas and lions dragging off children and stampeding buffalo are real enough to warrant serious consideration on a daily basis. Popular historians such as John Reader and Jared Diamond regard these as key factors in explaining Africa’s technological underdevelopment.

If we want to save marginal species such as the rhino, this has to be taken into account. The poor Mozambican peasants from whom poachers’ scouts are mostly recruited still confront nature every day, especially the force driving it, called hunger and want. Using animal parts to gain mental strength is part of the preparation for this constant war, and so clients who use them in a similar fashion in faraway places are much more in sync with their world view than any green organisation close by.

Displays of fury and calls for collective action by ministers at press conferences broadcasting into homes where the nearest rhino is likely to be a keyring-holder fits better with the fears expressed in Rhinoceros the play. It’s really an attempt at mass incitement against and constant surveillance of suspected poachers. Muffin-loving mollycoddlers might be turned into vigilantes hunting innocent zombie-haters (Hollywood’s version of the play).

So what’s the solution? Nobody should kill the rhino, and the rhino should not kill anybody, not even the white ou. Ceasefires and peace talks are called for here, followed by reconstruction and development plans.

A case for the African Union’s Peace and Security Council? Let’s rather not go there. Before you know it, Nato will be bombing the Kruger National Park.

At the weekend, another member of my left-wing circle of friends announced that he had “turned”; he was no longer an ANC supporter. I think he stopped short of declaring the ANC the enemy, but looked ready to raise arms against it, even if it’s only an angry beer as yet.

How sad this is as the party celebrates its 100th anniversary, and I’m not trying to be ironical. I’m sure the party will not miss those of us whose support bordered on fanaticism in the 1980s and 1990s, but who are now disillusioned, to use the cliché and some understatement. Still, there seems to be little in the current ANC with which to identify for many of its former activists.

My friend does a lot of work with the government, and his assessment is the same as that of many others: party and state have become indistinguishable, and it’s like fighting the National Party all over again. Walk down the passages of a department in Pretoria, he says, and one would be back in some or other homeland.

The ANC’s history remains worthy of awe. It’s right up there as one of the key movements in the evolving global ethos and rights structures of the 20th century. Its legacy of putting ideals of nonracialism into practice, also when a measure of force was required as part of a broader programme of action, will inspire many in the years to come.

What went wrong is well documented. We should not forget that it is still a democratically elected movement – its failings have at their root the completely forgivable inability of the electorate to look beyond the still too recent trauma of apartheid. Until it gets voted out of power, its supporters will have to put up with the vagaries of cold-blooded corruption and party-sanctioned incompetence.

Therein lies the rub: if it ever allows itself to get voted out. Its claim to power is now almost sacrosanct, and it is fast becoming a civil religion just like apartheid, with its declarations of eternal government until Jesus comes (which is a more subtle statement than it appears, since he is not an African). Its new sacraments of power replacing those of human rights are being performed dutifully by one African dictator after another attending the spectacle in Bloemfontein.

I have one quibble, though, with the emerging consensus on the ANC’s degeneration, that is a degeneration to start with. The roots of the ANC’s own dictatorial ambitions go back right to the formation of its predecessor, the South African Native National Congress, in 1912.

It should always be remembered that the National Party, formed at about the same time, was an anticolonialist movement too. Apartheid as an ideology arose from the British empire being perceived as acting in cahoots with the black tribes against Dutch-speaking poor whites. To right these perceptions, the empire allowed the South African union of 1910 to adopt the infamous 1913 Land Act, reneging on promises to partition the country equally.

The long lead-up to the act, and its clauses aimed at destruction of the rising black middle class by banning sharecropping, was the direct inspiration for the formation of the SANNC. But a key element to grasp was that the organisation’s main grievance was a sense of betrayal.

As brilliantly recounted in Native Life in South Africa, SANNC founder member Sol Plaatje’s book of reportage, black South Africans looked up to the British empire as the broader structure that would both unite the fractious tribes into a new modernity and safeguard their rights as British citizens. Plaatje went on a tour of Britain to persuade the British that the SANNC saw itself very much as a part of the empire. In his book he headed every chapter with indigenous language versions, including two varieties of Afrikaans, of the first two lines of the British troopies’ song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary to demonstrate this allegiance.

It took the rebellion of the youth league under Nelson Mandela to finally rid the movement of its delusions that the British government was on its side.

But the ANC’s identification with empire has remained. Among the gurus of the Occupy movement are Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who have offered a new critique of empire after the collapse of the Soviet “second world”. A key concept of theirs is that there is no single, dominant empire, but rather several nodes of empire stretching across the globe, from Washington to Beijing, from Stockholm to Pretoria.

This concept allows them to take in flagrantly despotic regimes in the “third world” as part of their critique, whereas their leftist predecessors relied on the rhetoric of anticolonialism to explain the failures of Africa in particular.

The ANC’s imperialist ambitions show in its perception of itself as a vanguard movement in the new multipolar world, as Africa’s representative. As South Africa’s government it did not join the Brics bloc to bequeath to it its human rights legacy, but because the alliance offers it a chance to co-rule the world, along with the Communist party and Vladimir Putin’s securocrats. It torpedoed the Dalai Lama’s visit to South Africa not only to please China, but also because it does not like anti-imperialist movements like Tibet’s.

Chinese diplomats boast of the ANC’s admiration for the Communist party. Of course, if it can duplicate that country’s growth rate and ability to create jobs for its citizens all over the world, the electorate would not complain, and neither would South African business.

China and the global Sinosphere have replaced the British empire as the ANC’s guiding light. At the moment though, the most obvious similarities lie in the 180 000 or so “mass incidents” every year in that country, and the continuing “service delivery” protests in South Africa, by far the most frequent on the continent.

It’s now no news at all that the next millennium will belong to the Chinese. I am surprised that Trevor Manuel hasn’t pushed for the importation of Chinese teachers to teach us all Mandarin as part of his Look East recommendations in his national development plan.

Going by the rumpus over China’s plans to build a naval base in the Seychelles, some observers appear to believe the Chinese offensive for domination of the world has started. Upon a closer look, this seems exaggerated – just as the building of China’s first aircraft carrier became less ominous when it was discovered it was a second-hand ship, so one base for peacekeeping purposes looks whimsical compared with the hundreds and hundreds of American bases in foreign lands.

Not that we should believe Chinese propaganda that it’s just about peacekeeping. There has long been a doctrine of a Greater China in Beijing, of a sinosphere of influence around all the areas where Chinese populations have been settled. And the Seycelles are not that far from Singapore.

Neither should we fool ourselves that it’s not about domination. The sense of racial superiority is strong among enough Chinese to spell trouble for the rest of us in the future. (If only 1% of Chinese were racial supremacists, for the sake of the argument, they would still number about 13-million.)

But that’s how it was meant to be. The truth is that this millennium has already been the Chinese millennium. Or a Chinese Millennium Interrupted, to be more precise. And Africa would have featured strongly in it, had this millennium been realised.

Its leader would have been Admiral Zheng He, or San Bao, the greatest explorer of all time. It is only in recent years that the significance of his voyages has been acknowledged, even though in some Arabian communities he had been long lionised as the reincarnation of Sinbad the Sailor.

Zheng He, for those of you who haven’t heard the story yet, assembled the greatest fleet in history in terms of vessel numbers, and set out during the Ming dynasty in the 15^th century to impress on its neighbours that China was the Middle Kingdom, and that they were all, well, barbarians.

After seven voyages, Zheng He had progressed right to the Mozambican Channel. When he encountered other empires or kingdoms, he would come with a show of naval and cultural force – a stick and carrot of gunboat diplomacy and clever courtesans, if you will. All along the Pacific Rim he revived Chinese settlements, today called the Overseas Chinese empire, whose enormous savings over several centuries are driving China’s resurgence.

But then the most astonishing event in world history happened. Just as Zheng He was about to venture out to what was 60 years later called Natal by the Portuguese, the admiral was recalled to Nanjing, then capital of China. Citing divine instructions, the Ming emperor ordered his enormous ocean-going fleet to be disbanded, and that the empire’s defensive resources be devoted to fighting the Mongol hordes to the north.

Had this not happened, Zheng He or his scouts soon would have discovered Durban harbour, perhaps, or Richards Bay. It is quite possible that a Chinese colony would have been settled there, several generations before any English, or before the first Bantu peoples arrived from the African interior, for that matter.

Table Bay might have followed, and what is now Luanda and Congo. Somewhere in all this a computer game is waiting to be developed, around wars of African conquest between European slave traders and Chinese settlers in the Bay of Benin. Had Jan van Riebeeck still managed to sneak into Table Bay, Afrikaans would have been infused with Chinese word and phrases, and not Malay. Afrikaans may have been written in its own script – wouldn’t the Broederbond have liked that.

Being avid explorers, Zheng He’s teams, or those of his successors, would have discovered southern Africa’s gold and diamonds in no time. Instead of De Beers, we might have had Deng Bao, and Anglo American could have been Chin Chin. All indigents would have worn conical hats, and not only those of Lesotho.

Of course, it’s all speculation, tempered by the fact that Zheng He himself was reluctant to venture much beyond the upper parts of Mozambique, apparently seeing Africa as even more barbarian and unexploitable than Arab deserts or Indian decadence.

But the current invasion of Africa by China should not come as any surprise. It’s about half a millennium overdue.

Are we journalists getting it right over the secrecy bill?

Some years ago a duo of editors from SA, heavy African Renaissance advocates, travelled to Ghana for an African Union summit. Their brief was more or less to impress on African leaders the necessity for press freedom in the United States of Africa being discussed at the time.

The leaders gave them short thrift. They would not even see them. The editors meekly submitted and went off to their five-star hotels again with their tails between their legs. When they’re not going on about Africa’s purported imperial history or the evils of eurocentrism, they are actually nice people, so I felt sorry for them.

Like my colleagues I wore black last Tuesday when the secrecy bill was adopted by Parliament. But I had to wonder over the self-centredeness of the media reaction. As SA gets closer to becoming just another African state, I was reminded of the failed Ghana expedition, and that your average African leader or ruling party of the day, doesn’t worry much about the press.

SA’s press is one of our saving graces, I have to hasten to confirm. I am just stating an easily observable fact when I claim that corruption and tyranny would have been much more advanced had it not been for us, the media, and our freedom of information-biased constitution.

The tragedy of the contested provisions of the secrecy bill is part of the broader ANC tragedy, of a liberation movement steadily reversing its pioneering work on entrenching a rights culture in African society, for the sake of some fantasy future imperium riding on the coattails of authoritarian models such as China.

So I am not moved by the ANC’s counterargument that few states have a public interest override in their intelligence legislation. The point is, we have lost yet another opportunity to show the way in developing such unique measures.

But perhaps we should listen to the ANC when it says it is not trying to curtail press freedom. That is to say, its preoccupations lie elsewhere. Of course, unintended consequences can be just as dire as intended ones, so this is little consolation.

However, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe spelled it out when he talked of the dangers for the party of the many leakages from members doubling up as state officials, who use these in the now all but officially confirmed internal power struggle in the party.

Recall the hoax e-mail saga, and browse through Frank Chikane’s near-comical accounts of his time as presidential office manager, and one simply has to factor in the difficulties encountered by the party and its extensions into the state in identifying true data from false. Paranoia rules in the ANC, that’s for sure.

Part of the problem is the total revolution we are undergoing when it comes to information and communication. I am reading a fascinating account of this by Massachusetts robotics professor Sherry Turkle, in her book Together Alone. It is true most of her thorough research focuses on adolescents, but the ANC is acting rather like one, isn’t it?

One of the general sources of anxiety among America’s teenagers, the ones who have grown up online, is the internet’s feature of recording anything and everything an online-dwelling person does. Turkle says adolescents have to have the freedom to act and say things that are relatively consequence free, as they experiment in finding their individual identities.

However, the opposite happens with constant texting and multitasking. Teenagers can also be extremely nasty to their rival peers, and so one’s messages, once recorded somewhere on the internet, can quickly run out of your control should they get copied, often by total strangers. So teenagers spend a great deal of their time stressing over the right wording for their next text.

Judging from Chikane’s ramblings, the political teenagers in the ANC are struggling with the same sort of problem. That’s actually why have earnest and staid commissions of inquiry into reams of mostly frivolous material such as e-mails.

Of course, if this motivation for the secrecy bill were true, it would beg the question whether the bill can bring order into the chaos. And it raises the possibility of  a 1984-type surveillance culture in the ANC, in which cadres spend huge amounts of taxpayers time peering over one another’s shoulders or trawling e-mail databases. In such a scenario, show trials of the Soviet type cannot be far off.

Such an outcome would actually be worse than just your ordinary clampdown on the media. So here’s hoping the ANC is gunning for us journalists, and not for itself.

So the ANC disciplinary committee reined in Julius Malema. However, the jury remains out whether, as the stuttering process now goes into the appeals stages, we are going to have Tedious Julius or Rejuvenated Juju.

Meanwhile, the ultimate loser will be the ANC, as division grows and the general mess it is in only gains greater exposure. Disciplinary action is not enough, what the movement really needs is something much more far-reaching, something like a truth commission.

Or from another viewpoint, its failure to use the facilities provided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s to retool and cleanse itself, and especially its youth wing, is now coming around to haunt it.

In the Mandela years truth commisions were very much part of the South African model for resolving conflicts. The designers of the process, such as Alex Boraine, were in great demand and travelled all over the world to lecture on it.

In spirit at least it became part of the decade of African democratic revival, when elections proliferated and some dictators actually began to step down. There were attempted commissions in countries like Nigeria, and successful ones in countries like Liberia. In Rwanda, the unique gacaca system was a truly African solution to an African problem.

These bodies all demonstrated that probably the key benefit from any legal process, is the knowledge it generates, beating more obvious social functions such as  public justice. What is less obvious is that such knowledge strengthens communities, to the point where they could forgive perpetrators of crimes. In the case of the TRC, communities gained the ability to integrate into a new dispensation which in many respects did not deliver the justice they deserved.

On the other side, it helped white communities to transform and reinvigorate themselves. The TRC may have created a scapegoat, the Eugene de Kocks and Dirk Coetzees, which turned into the stereotype of the middle-aged, white Afrikaner male, as irrevocably racist. This has destroyed much potential for the mentoring that is so essential to build capacity or capability.

But it allowed white communities to rid themselves of this oppressive patriarch, and liberate all the energies suppressed by his Protestant, settler version. The patriarchs benefited too: FW de Klerk helped himself to some Greek salad, and Piet Koornhof went for the Cape bobotie, goes the old joke, the joke itself an expression of the new freedom.

It is not far-fetched to say whites were the chief beneficiaries of the TRC process, not because they were let off the hook – they weren’t – but because the revulsion over death squads in their midst gave many the impetus to reinvent themselves. For instance, whereas in the old dispensation women power was acknowledged, but suppressed anyway, affirmative action to redress gender shortfalls have had so many good outcomes one does not know where to begin to list them.

Such beneficiation occurred because it was part of a juridical regime already well established in white society – the sophisticated dispensing of judicial services versus the almost complete lack of it in black societies, was one of the worst imbalances of apartheid.

This is where the ANC lost out. Instead of using the commission to pacify all the ugly energies released in any violent struggle, they were just as defensive as the National Party and just as uncooperative as Afrikaner secret societies and, it must be said, the media.

The main area of “revolutionary” activity that needed the light of exposure and reason, was the terrifying disciplinary activities of the various youth organisations – part of the whole “liberation before education” doctrine, to the extent that one may call it a doctrine.

One of the worst forms of execution in the history of mankind, the necklacing, was swept under the carpet. In my book about the uprising in KwaNdebele in 1987, I included various eyewitness accounts of such horrors (the homeland was the area with the highest incidence.) Although I was unable to do proper research during the states of emergency in the 1980s, it was clear from this sample that only a handful of the 300 odd were carried out for “valid” political reasons. The rest were for quite opportunistic and used to settle petty grudges.

Had these acts been brought before the commission, or any other public body, I believe we would have had a much different youth movement than the one that is threatening all of our futures with its ideological vapidity, ignorance and lack of political nous.

It would also have been a much stronger movement. Because the truth about the ANC Youth League under Malema is that it is so weak. Its emblem is the bare buttocks exposed on the stage when he was first voted in as president at the same FW Reitz hostel where black servants were shown to be as servile and obsequious as ever in the cruel Youtube “initiation” video.

The league lacks the feedback mechanisms enabling it to move beyond infantile rhetoric based on a badly mistaken faith in its own historical importance. It wants to burden itself and the state with the nationalisation of a severely depressed segment of the economy because it does not know any better.

The real danger for SA is that this weak movement may yet gain the ascendancy.

It needs much more than disciplinary action against its leaders. It needs a truth commission, although it is probably too late for that now.

So let’s make up our own struggle song and see where we get.

Kill the Venda! Kill the vendor!

And then we justify it on the grounds that it refers to one of the miserable homelands the whites tried to foist on the blacks. Kill the Mphephus, those impimpi’s!

How will this go down? What would people of Venda origin make of it? Should they just say that it was in the spirit of the times and should still be sung lest we return to the homelands?

The likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, Mathatha Tsedu and Jovial Rantao (?) should then say the meaning has changed, nobody is punting for Vendas to be killed. We’ve all shucked off our ethnic identities and are now South Africans.

So far so good. After all the Vendas did not rule over the rest with passes, sjamboks and death squads. But then what about the ugly xenophobic riots in 2008, when it was well recorded that a substantial fraction of the victims were not foreigners, but migrants from South Africa’s peripheral areas. Among them must have been a few street vendors from Venda, the type whose wares were trashed and stolen by ANC Youth League members in front of Luthuli House the other day.

And then you have ANC figurehead and Ubuntu Award recipient Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hate speech letter to journalist Nomavenda Mathiane in the 1980s has been recalled again in Frontline founder Denis Beckett’s recent memoir, Radical Middle. Although Mathiane was not of Venda origin, her name alone prompted racist invective – in those times, struggle types slagged each other off as “Vendas” during tiffs. And getting in Winnie’s bad books was a serious matter, of life and death.

It is disappointing to read usually incisive observers digging up all but discredited analytical tools from the old 20^th century intellectual arms cache. Judge Colin Lamont’s ban on the Dubul’ Ibhunu song, goes one response, is “code” for the maintenance of historical white privilege.

Much sloppy thinking is evident, such as equalising the ban on one song, with a ban on not only all other struggle songs, but the whole struggle history, when the judge and even the plaintiffs were at pains to say this was not so.

I would be very surprised if the ban is upheld by the Constitutional Court. It is quite apparent too, that it may all be down to a technical problem, a provision of the Equality Law clashing with the constitution. The latter will override the former, and allow songs such as Kill the Boer and Kill the Venda. Freedom of speech is indeed a fundamental right that should not be compromised on a legal level.

But the worst sophistry occurs around that word “code”. That’s because one man’s code is another’s road to perdition. Code is what not only Afrikaner farmers, not only farmers in general, but actually all South Africans have been trying to read these past few years with twitched ears and mouths agape in apprehension.

What do the 3 000 odd usually sadistic farm murders mean?

What does it mean when an MEC for safety and security says only about 5% of murders are racial (do the sums: still a whopping 1000 or so every year)?

What if she is not just incompetent?

How does one decode the knock at the door, the rustle of leaves in the garden? Or the quite evident and widespread loathness of the police to not only act on emergency calls, but act in time? Let alone act against rampant thievery on farms?

How should Afrikaner farmers read the ANC Youth League’s public tearing up of the names of farm murder victims, followed by the constant singing of “Kill the Boer” by its leader?  Do our analysts really expect them to tell themselves, don’t worry, go to sleep again, it’s just part of the continuing struggle against apartheid?

I recently read Paul Theroux’s riveting account of his bus and train trip from Cairo to the Cape, titled Dark Star Africa. It was a most enjoyable book, packed with insight, until he got to South Africa. All sorts of mistakes became spottable, since this part of Africa one knows better than others.

But what I found most disconcerting was his account of a meeting with a man who tried to persuade him that the farm murders were part of a new genocide. Of course, it is easy to dismiss such an obvious rightwing fanatic, since there is no evidence that there is any systematic campaign behind the murders.

However, Theroux’s description of what he was shown, photographs of mutilated and disembowelled corpses of farmers, and his reaction of eventual indifference to it, is bothersome. I respect Theroux too much to say it was a callous reaction, but many others who don’t care for good writing will not have such scruples.

That Afrikaner farmers should be stereotyped and demonised, is to be expected, because apartheid was not about picnics in own affairs parks, but not to expect any counterreaction is not very smart. For them, and Afrikaners in general, such indifference and stereotyping will become code for some other conviction: the world wants us sinners dead.

This is the code that Judge Lamont read, and which forced him to make the finding mandated by the equality laws. This is also the class of code that SA’s peripherals, the Venda’s, Pedi’s, Shangaans, makwerekweres, read when xenophobic chaos tears through their neighbourhoods.

How Afrikaners as a collective will react, is a moot point, since they have little power left. But what I observe is that code such as that produced by Theroux and our analysts are helping to revive ghosts from the past much older than the struggle against apartheid, the ghosts of independence and self-determination.

A ghost has the habit of being uncontrollable, unpredictable, unreliable. She may turn out to be meek and malleable, but she might not rely on perfume and earrings like Charlize Theron or Nataniel.

Dear John,

It is with great regret that I have to write this letter, what with you and the other boys biting the bullets on the frontline against all those blacks in New Zealand. But see-through nighties are the fashion statements and on the tax invoices here and so I am going to be brutally transparent: I’m leaving you for another guy.

I am not going to say who he is, because transparency comes with responsibility, but you can guess: he is Franco-German or  maybe Germano-frantic. Some say he is a shark, but they’re just jealous of his teeth. Anyways, you have left him on the bench too often with me, and one thing led to the other thing.

John, I haven’t read the Bible in such a long time so I tend to mix up my proverbs. I can never figure out which is the right one for the occasion: Out of sight is out of mind, or Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The problem is not that I see too little of you. We live in postmodern times, and so I just see too much of you. You’re on billboards, in advertisements, on programmes, on back pages, on websites… I find it difficult too escape such doubts as, When is his hair going to grow again, or Green is for carpet cleaner salesmen.

But the worst is, when you’re live on TV, people get upset.  They say you are P Divvy’s blue-eyed boy, and then I realise I can’t tell, I can’t remember the colour of your eyes. And you’re not into hip-hop anyway, you’re too old.

If a girl can’t remember someone’s eyes despite seeing him every night, it’s time to move on, isn’t it? You have had your fifteen minutes of foam with me; and my jacuzzi is too small for more than one hooker at a time among all those props we use.

Why don’t you just come home. Nobody is expecting you to fall on your sword, bring it with you, every smith (I never liked your surname, it sounds like you have been smite with some or other lock) is entitled to his hoard of scrap metal. And the market is surging on the back of Gautrain cable.

You’ll be such a hero if you just walk away. Nobody will call you Johnnie Walker, not in a pub anyway, it can lead to expensive misunderstandings. Johnny Come Lately, maybe, but most girls I know are appreciative to the implications.

But you want to avoid John the Baptist, whose head always rolls in the end.  Why wait for somebody to chop it off for you? Fact is, you have been so unsuccessful as a captain for so long, always winning the war and seldom the battle, even the platter that would have had your head on should have been auctioned off by now.

The thing is, your whole platoon’s heads may roll if things carry on like this. It looks like you guys will have to face Australia in your quarters. These are a bunch of burglars; they know their way around the room. I mean, you may not even make it out the door.

Even if you make it to the semi’s, you’ll find all those blacks have moved in next door! These are blacks with tattoos! And they spell hooker “haka”, and then yell at you. And the ref won’t let you shout back. You can’t win against cheats like that.

Now Bismarck, oops, I’ve said it, Wikipedia says he’s into battleships.  That’s what we are going to need against all those blacks. Rather come home John, before it’s too late.

You’ll always have a corner flag in my heart

Your soon-to-be-ex