The Sunday News
Tea sits so centrally to the history and politics of South Africa. So centrally that when on Wednesday 5 July 1989 apartheid president P. W. Botha had tea with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela at the time De Tuynhuys, Stellenbosch philosopher, Willie Esterhuyse predicted “the funeral for apartheid.”
At the same time, on 14 July 1989 to be precise, Christopher Wren of the New York Times published a long analytical article ruminating on the possible political meanings and futures that could arise from the tea meeting between the prisoner and the president. Tea had become the oxygen of history and the metaphor of change.
A telling philosophical observation by Esterhuyse was that when “unlikely friendships” in shape of meetings between political victims and their victimisers take place history has no choice but change course in a meaningful if not spectacular way. In such tea meetings between blood political rivals, powerful figures that are not supposed to see each other eye to eye, there is expectedly more to the tea than the tongue can taste.
The tea meeting between Julius Malema and his delegation, and former President Jacob Zuma and his own in Nkandla on 5 February 2021 was such a loaded encounter that got the world thinking and talking. Questions, from the media to pub conversations, ranged from what exactly was substantially in the tea to what lay hidden behind the tea and the meeting around the table. I write to deposit my own observation that the meeting was pregnant with political and historical meanings for South Africa first, Africa next and the world at large.
I argue that this was in a way the ‘funeral for the African National Congress’ as we know it and the conception of another ANC of the future. The tea meeting stood for and continues to stand for a violent death of the ANC as it is known and a daring and laborious birth of another ANC. Things will never be the same, I submit.
The summary answer to the question concerning what happened in the meeting is that influential politicians met and politics happened in word and in deed. What philosophers call, not simple politics, but the political itself took place in Nkandla. The new alliance between Malema and Zuma provides for a rupture in politics, and a spectacular display of the workings of the political.
Enter the political
There is a proverbial difference of day and night between simple everyday politics and the political as an idea and practice of things political. Political philosophy will forever be grateful for the contribution first of Carl Schmitt, he who soiled his brilliant philosophy by joining the Nazis of German, and Chantal Mouffe, she who has become a kind of prophetess of the political.
Philosophy and prophecy frequently intersect. We perhaps must make peace with the philosophical idea that great ideas can be understood and used even if they emerge from the desks of such evil thinkers and actors as Carl Schmitt became by participating in Nazism. The “Concept of the Political” as defined by Carl Schmitt in 1932 and expanded by Chantal Mouffe in 2005 in her book ‘On the Political’ does not only allow us to understand the meeting over tea by blood enemies.
It also helps us to understand and appreciate that such meetings are important, needed and actually good for the future in politics. When political allies and factional actors meet on their own to celebrate their ideas and plot their futures, history may actually remain where it is.
But when political enemies meet history does not have a choice but to make the moves. Political enemies must meet and talk for history to move. One of Mouffe’s baptismal observations is that “the political” proper entails that political rivals, for the future to be bright, have to de-escalate their enmity to the rivalry of legitimate opponents that compete for power but do not have to kill each other or finish each other off, eliminate each other physically and politically. It is Mouffe’s formidable take that “the political” must not just democratise politics but should democratise democracy itself. Political enemies, otherwise, must abandon enmity and embrace being adversaries that do not wish each other death.
That is why bullets that used to be decision makers between political enemies in battle have been modernised and civilised to ballots in electoral not military battles anymore. Instead of counting dead bodies in the battle field to decide who the political victor is, advanced communities of our world now count ballots to measure the popularity of candidates and the will of the exalted people as a political community.
The political is that realm and object of political theory and philosophy that demands the liberation, decolonisation and democratisation of politics. In the political, even blood rivals can share tea and agree to change history and power for the betterment of the political community.
It is my submission here that the Great Tea Party in Nkandla was in many ways an object of the political that is going to change the history of the ANC and that of South Africa for the long time, for better or for worse, actually.
True to Mouffe’s description of the political where political actors abandon their antagonism for agonism, and still remain political competitors, Zuma and Malema in the main, have become genuine subjects and actors in the realm of the political not just in the political landscape.
Political observers must just imagine how much courage and emotional stamina it took for these two political players to even imagine meeting. It took the true labour of the political.
n Cetshwayo Zindaba Mabhena writes from Siyabuswa, KwaMabusabesala Village, in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
