Psychoanalysing South Africa
Over this week, I was reflecting on last week’s expressed intention to write about Wahbie Long’s Nation on the Couch. I was about to say to you that it felt like a heavy topic to be exploring in the second last month of the second year of the pandemic when I remembered that is more or less what I’d said to you at this time last year about Charles van Onselen’s The Night Trains. I eventually ended up writing about it in this March letter. Once I had that realization I decided to persist and see what it felt like to tackle the tough.
Although Long’s book is rooted in the South African experience, the themes he explores have universal application. We are all grappling with a world with widening inequality, with deep historical wounding, and how this, in turn, impacts on our physical and mental wellbeing.
If you are wondering why I have brought us here today, it is because all of our businesses, our organisations, our relationships are embedded in this social and psychological context. Inevitably they play out in all sorts of obvious and subtle ways. Enriching our awareness and understanding of the forces that flow through our relationships, helps us be better leaders, be better people.
Long’s analysis is built around two key pillars.
One is “Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world.” Emotions are both personal and social, and so the fabric of social relations has a direct bearing on the psychological experience of the individual. In essence, it means we all have a role to play in creating the kind of society we live in, and we can actively influence that through the ways we engage socially every day.
The other is “Who we are is a product of where we have been. Psychotherapists usually understand this in respect of a given patient’s personal history – the absent father, the critical mother, the jealous sibling, the abusive cousin – but equally, there can be no denying the importance of one’s social history either. The areas we live in, the schools we attend, the quantity and quality of our caregiving, the various affirmations and discriminations that come our way – each of these experiences is layered in complex ways by social, economic, and political forces far beyond the control of any single person.” Who we are is inextricably linked to the conditions we experience; they shape how we respond to the world.
Long reminds us that “There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.”
When we confront the ‘illogical’ in ourselves, our colleagues, our country, it is worth pausing and probing to understand what is really going on. And here the world of psychology helps us – it requires us to listen to understand the lived experience of the person in front of us.
He introduces us to the work of Max Scheler’s concept of ‘ressentiment’. It has these components, “First, a human being experiences some injury and an associated negative emotion. Second, he or she is unable to express this emotion directly, usually on account of occupying a lower position in a given status hierarchy. Third, the negative emotion is consequently repressed. Lastly, under the direction of a repressed desire for revenge… the subject falls prey to ‘value delusions’, demeaning those values that are objectively superior, while valorising others that are objectively inferior.”
In short, because fundamentally unequal societies do not allow people the opportunity of individual achievement, or the expression of emotion, that energy gets channeled in ways that are ‘objectively inferior’, from binge-drinking to the support for quasi-fascist political movements.
The wide differences in wealth, education, and success in a society like South Africa, results in a situation in which “For ordinary people, such a divergence can only make sense by evaluating themselves negatively. By admitting that they lack all “badges of ability”, the poor man and woman can lay to rest the question that has followed them all their lives: the question of why – despite their best efforts – they got nowhere in life. Assuming personal responsibility for a society that failed them, not only do they feel the pain of inadequacy – they resent themselves for feeling it.” And that resentment gets turned on ourselves and on to others…
The strategy insight is that everything we can do to increase people’s access to livelihoods, everything we can do in each daily interaction to make people feel seen, everything we can do to increase our understanding has a material impact on the kind of world we want to live in.
Those of you whose business’s financial years are ending now will be wrapping up your budget cycles for the coming fiscal. Look at your budgets through this lens and assess to what extent your spending is impacting positively on these outcomes. It influences the world you live in. It’s worth doing.
During the various waves of Covid, South Africans have been subject to variations of prohibition and much hand-wringing and apparent confusion around South African’s binge drinking. There’ve been many furrowed political brows in press conferences followed by cautiously indignant releases from lobby groups.
Long makes it beautifully simple to understand “The resort to substances, can be conceptualised as a defence against chronic feelings of shame – as much as it can trigger the very same feelings.”
Who amongst us hasn’t ended a tough day with the sigh “I just need a drink?” Put in psychological terms, ‘this day was unbearable to the point that I would like to numb it a little.’ Imagine that is life. When life is filled with frustration, with blocked ambition, with denial of education, the denial of the chance to work and create meaning in your life, then our country’s desire to drink is not mysterious at all.
Let’s remind ourselves, “There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.”
Long reflects on the complexity of South Africa’s transition moment, he comments that “What looked like a rainbow, therefore, was never a rainbow, to begin with – and this was certainly not because Mandela ‘sold out’, as young radicals nowadays seem determined to believe. Indeed, that is the kind of retrospective judgment that can only be made by people who did not sit in jail for twenty-seven years. That there appeared to be a rainbow was only because South Africans did what human beings ordinarily do: rather than confront the monsters of our deep, we chose instead to believe that they were no longer there. In the inspired words of James Baldwin, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”
Twenty-seven years after South Africa’s transition to democracy, our authors are facing our past. Fiction often enables us to explore truths that are too complex, too nuanced, too painful perhaps, for ‘fact’. Sometimes we need to tell stories, to slip through the shackles of ‘real’, in order to get to the true heart of our experiences.
I am not a critic, so will not attempt to do justice to the scope of Damon Galgut’s The Promise or Mandla Langa’s The Lost Language of the Soul, but simply to point to a thought or two that might provoke some thought.
The Promise won The Booker Prize this week. It is a mamba of a book. Lean, muscular, filled with threat.
Galgut takes us into the heart of the Swart family. He takes us through the inter-generational consequences of a father’s failure to deliver on a promise to transfer land. The family’s son, Anton is conscripted to the apartheid state’s army as a teenager. Whilst doing his ‘national service’ he kills a woman, and the consequences of those actions echo through his life. He is undone by the trauma. Galgut’s genius is that he leads us to forget. We forget that trauma. Anton is an ineffectual figure, inept, his therapist deems him narcissistic. Beneath it all runs the memory of violence, of shame and its consequences.
Langa’s The Lost Language of the Soul takes us to the same period. This book is an inner-city taxi rank at month-end. It crackles with multiple languages, it connects places and countries, it sprawls, it is packed with people, in the background booms Brenda Fassie and the other beats of urban life. Spend enough time in it and you’ll experience much of South Africa.
Langa traces Joseph Mabaso’s journey from Zambia through Botswana to his father’s birthplace in KwaZulu-Natal. His father is a freedom fighter, who has gone missing. Joseph, like Anton, is a teenager. Like Anton, he sees and commits violence. And as he comes to understand his father’s journey, the apparently just violence as the heart of his father’s role becomes more complicated, less clear-cut, as activism encounters ambition, as the political explodes into the personal.
Both authors help us explore the realities that lie underneath the surface of our country, the realities that inevitably shape how we related to each other today. The fact that they are writing; that we are reading gives me hope. Together with Long, they help us confront the ‘monsters of our deep’ and so hopefully to change what we do next, for change we must, not only in the images we make, in the stories we create, but in the actions we take. But powerful action is always preceded by understanding, by engaging with the truths of our souls – Long, Galgut and Langa are good guides.
Well, I did it. I tackled the tough on this side of another long year. I hope it was useful. Let me know…
Karl
PS: If this is the first time you’re reading strategy, soul, & self you can subscribe here.
PPS: Langa ends his book with these words in his acknowledgements, “Lastly, a huge thank you to the late Oliver Reginald Tambo, the best president South Africa never had. May his spirit guide the consciences of our leaders.” If you’d like to know more about him, Luli Callinicos’ Beyond The Engeli Mountains is an amazing account of one of Africa’s greatest leaders.