By: Ebrahim Harvey
On the 20th April, I posted a piece, ‘Spare a Thought for Ramaphosa and the ANC’, which dealt with the enormous and in fact intimidating challenges facing the country around the devastating impact of the coronavirus. The first thing to be said is that my strongly critical position on both Ramaphosa and the ANC is very well known, inside and outside this country.
The simple reason for saying so is to summarily dismiss any notion that in that piece I had sucked up to Ramaphosa and the ANC. To the contrary, if you read that piece it strongly repudiates any such false and misleading interpretation. But unsurprisingly, Selim Gool – who appears to think that progressive and revolutionary politics revolves around him and his family judging by how he responded – not only accused me of that but did so in the most unsavoury, vulgar and in fact provocative language imaginable on a public platform as huge as Facebook is.
His response to a later piece, ‘Facebook must act against appallingly vulgar and brutal posts’ (25th April) – which in fact the subject matter of this purported ‘debate’ with Ramalaine – was very illustrative of why I in the first place made that appeal on Facebook and ironically served to reinforce the validity and rationale of that post. Referring to me he said: “This coming from isiBongi (praise poet) of Cyril – the butcher of Marikana and the Bull Man – is itself VULGARITY writ LARGE! Sir, jou p**s and jy is n groot n**i!”
But there u have exposed for all to see very clearly the purpose and logic in the first place of my appeal to have to deal with this sordid problem. Having lived for many years in Cape Town I’m not at all surprised by the unhappy consternation my post elicited in those circles in Cape Town.
But the question is: how does one even respond to that kind of sick and vulgar mind and conduct a reasonable, rational and constructive conversation or are we expected to turn a blind eye to such obscene language in the shallow and misleading name of anti-censorship? In this regard, I really don’t care who says what in defensively responding to my post, especially that coming from his friends and associates in Cape Town. I insist that such abusive language should be completely unacceptable and intolerable on Facebook or any other platform. It should be firm but constructive addressed I believe.
And for those in Cape Town who have attempted to lamely and erroneously defend, excuse or tolerate such language, otherwise, it will amount to censorship, are seriously mistaken, confused and misleading. I’m wondering now what the world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky would say about this matter or even Neville Alexander, Mandela, Biko and Sobukwe.
But the very revealing thing about this Cape Flats vulgarity is that it often has a sexual twist to it for over a century: almost every moment of it is punctuated with terms such as “n**i”, “p**s”, “p**l”, etc, etc. Eish! Upsetting but also somewhat amusing what our history has done to our minds and language. But you will find sometimes similar profanities with Abdul Karriem Matthews, though very happy since this issue has been ventilated on Facebook he seems to have dropped most of those terms in his posts over the recent period.
One last thing about the background before I deal with Ramalaine’s shallow intervention in this matter when he responded to my post. About 2 months ago I appealed to a close friend and comrade in Cape Town, Martin Jansen, to please speak to Mathews about his regular profanities. I’m trying to indicate that this striking problem has a history to it. He immediately acknowledged the problem and said he will talk to him. He projected no defensiveness at all. To the contrary, he acknowledged that it was a serious problem
Let me now turn to Ramalaine. The first golden rule in any debate, especially that which is an attempted rebuttal, is to confine the comments and analysis to the pertinent issues in the debate and not refer to or introduce extraneous and irrelevant issues, as he liberally does. A striking example occurs when he says that I “literally drag Alexander into the fray to lend credence to….my “uncritically adopted Trotsky’s “cultured speech”.
Now, firstly, Alexander was a big supporter of much of Trotsky’s work. But more importantly, is the ridiculous allegation that I have uncritically accepted everything related to this notion. How does he arrive at that conclusion?
But ‘culture’ in SA is a big and unexplored elephant in the room, as is the question of languages and the integrally related National Question which has virtually disappeared from the political vocabulary of the ANC after 1994. The National Question is at one level important in dealing with the question of vulgarity in posts by mainly Cape Town ‘Coloured’ activists on Facebook but that for another time
However, these matters have not been addressed in contemporary SA, especially what has happened in Cape Town over the past few years. There is no city in the world where a few thousand people have been killed in gang warfare over the past 3 years. Of the greatest interest is the fact that gang violence and these horrific rates of gang killings coincide with the worst social crisis since 1994.
Language and an increase in vulgarity in speech and posts must be situated in that context, though it was widespread already in the 1970s when I first stayed there. I don’t want to go now into it but I often also heard Coloured people utter some of the most racist remarks about ‘African’ people while I lived there.
Obviously, there has also often been racism from African people towards Coloureds and Indians and that this problem not only exists in Cape Town but around the country. However, it’s worse there from my own experience. A total of 11 years of living in Cape Town is long enough to form conclusions around these issues.
But in the light of the vulgarities already mentioned how can Ramalaine even question its characterization as such? He questions whether the aforementioned words are indeed vulgar. And how can he expect me in a Facebook post to comprehensively define and discuss Trotsky’s notion of “cultured speech”? There is ample evidence that lengthy Facebook posts are ill-advised. But surely it should be pretty obvious what its meaning would be within the context in which I used it.
He further alleges that I’m playing the role of an adjudicator on the meaning and interpretation of “vulgar”. But that is patent nonsense because all I did was to correctly characterise the vulgarity and draw attention to the need to combat it since it is both inappropriate and unnecessary. It also has the effect of diverting attention and digressing from the real issues at stake in those posts, which are often important.
In conclusion, go and look at the responses to that post which called attention to these problems. Many people, without reservations, supported it, including people who are very active on Facebook. Some, like Hendrina Garcia, drew attention to the need to respect the honour and dignity of people we might differ with on Facebook and that this principle was not negotiable. Azhar Cachalia urged me to “block the Vulgarians”. My response was that I’ve never deleted or blocked anyone on Facebook, no matter how much I differed with them or been offended by them since I reluctantly joined Facebook in 2015.
Someone correctly pointed out that the problem with vulgarities is much wider than Cape Town. I obviously had to agree with him
But nowhere did I state or imply that it is only in Cape Town. However, from my own experience for over a decade I am absolutely certain that nowhere is it such a serious and widespread problem than in Cape Town. I regularly experienced it from the time I first went to study there in 1974. I have no doubt at all that its social roots lie in the period of slavery in the old Cape Colony.
The main reason why vulgarity is so rife also among teenagers and even children in Cape Town is simply that they grew up in that environment and against that historical background. Interestingly and revealingly by far most of the fierce opposition to my post came from ‘Coloured’ people in Cape Town who themselves all grew up on the Cape Flats
In conclusion, Ramalaine frankly appears out of his depth in his response to my post, which in fact set the tone for the defensive and confused responses that followed from Cape Town. After he accused me of literally dragging Alexander into the fray and implied that I was name-dropping by doing so, which I’m certain Alexander would have found amusing, he alleges that I’m projecting and imposing an elitist European model of ‘cultured speech’ onto those people and others who speak or write in a similar fashion.
This is a discursive, ideological and political ‘trick’ to win support in this ‘debate’, only because of the historical fact that it is the Europeans who indeed first enslaved and colonized black people around the world. So if you are arguing against someone in anything to do with ‘race’ and colour it is a useful rhetorical and polemical device with which u hope you can win support for your argument.
I end this post with some relevant words from Trotsky, drawn from his article, ‘The Struggle for Cultured Speech’, from his book, ‘The Problems of Everday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia’:
“Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation and disrespect for human dignity – one’s own and that of other people. This is particularly the case with swearing-in Russia. I should like to hear from our philologists, our linguists and experts in folklore, whether they know of such loose, sticky and low terms of abuse in any other language than Russian. As far as I know, there is nothing, or nearly nothing, of the kind outside Russia. Russian swearing in the “lower depths” is the result of despair, embitterment and above all, slavery without hope, without escape.”
I know Cape Town very well and most of this country. What you can safely do is to replace Russia than with Cape Town now, in order to more fully appreciate why I in the first place decided to pen that post after that foul-mouthed Selim Gool abused me with the most scandalous vulgarity.
There is absolutely nothing elitist in my calling out this problem. Those complaining that it is are advised to rather focus on dealing with this stubborn problem, which will not be easy because those vulgarities are the accumulated reflection of the social conditions of lives of people from the late 17th century until now. Poverty, unemployment, homelessness and related social miseries are the soil in which all manner of vulgarities and related frustrations grow.
But Gool should test life in Joburg and come and live here for just one month and speak or write to people in that way. Joburg is NOT Cape Town let me assure him.
