The following three quotes sum up, in many respects, the measure of my mantra.
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1946.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." - Thomas Jefferson.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
In the ostensible pursuit of the first, and in contravention of the other two, often perversely, as pointed out by Orwell, many political parties tend to barrage their subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind's capacity for independent thought.
Orwell portrays the Party, in his generic, fictionalised but telling view, as controlling every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party, in Orwell's 1984, does not allow individuals to keep records of their past.
As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them. By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.
The leader of my party, Mmusi Maimane, alludes to this in a recent piece entitled, 'Let's rewrite our future, not our past.' His observations, informed and catalysed by Orwell, are pertinent.
It is important not to contest the space of liberation 'heroes' or the seek to appropriate these; in this space lies the desperate domain of the ANC, who scrabble in the increasingly thin soil where flawed icons are buried.
It brings into relief the ANC, which persists with ploughing the past in pursuit of securing the future. They elevate, in their quest to hang on to a compromised liberation narrative, the flawed and complex Winnie Madikizela Mandela, to the status of a saint. The graveyard of potential saint-like icons to perpetuate a myth is however covered by increasingly thin soil.
The ANC's strategy seeks, to run the last icon, no matter how flawed, solemnly down the historical flagpole and simultaneously run a new one up the other side. The unassailable truth, however, is that there are no new ones, and that speaks to the end of liberation chronicle as a claim to the future.
In tandem, the ANC seeks to debunk any who might contest the space. They flail at the spectre of challengers and vilify others at will – as Maimane points out. This is why it is important not to contest the space of liberation 'heroes' or the seek to appropriate these; in this space lies the desperate domain of the ANC, who scrabble in the increasingly thin soil where flawed icons are buried. Real icons don't need to be run up any poles; they flutter effortlessly, unaided in the stratosphere.
It needs to be remembered that you cannot simultaneously and honestly write the script of the future, and rewrite the past – whoever you are, or seek to be. When you build a future, you sometimes have to make a clean break, and that does not mean inventing the past to remember the future. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't learn from the past; it does mean we don't necessarily have to buy into the created narrative of others.
Different epochs in the history and trajectory of nations call for a reinvention of purpose, not the past. Progress is often predicated on cutting the umbilical cord, and in this instance, it does not involve saving the historical placenta of the buried (with all their genetic flaws) to salvage the future.
It's all about a bold bid by the audacious, rather than a last throw of the desperate. The former is what the DA embodies; the latter is the domain of the ANC.
Ghaleb Cachalia is a member of parliament for the Democratic Alliance.