R.W. Johnson’s Anti-Politan Speech
Dereligionisation Of South Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI3iI4YYuNQ&t=5s
(from BizNewsConference6, by the youtube transcript-autogenerator)
0:00
good morning everybody uh what I want to
talk about is what I’ve called the
secularization of sou African
politics uh which is a long-term process
we’re only part of the way uh first of
all what do I mean by secular
politics uh I I really think of the
definition given by the most famous
American political scientist of the last
century Harold lwell and he said that
fundamentally politics were about who
gets what when and how in other words
politics is an endless distributive
struggle between different groups all
pursuing the maximum material and
symbolic rewards for their group now
0:47
that is indeed and of course that
process tends to follow the business
cycle so that growth is obviously good
for parties uh in power uh recessions
are bad and so
forth uh and I think that that of course
is part of all
politic for example in the ‘ 50s when I
first uh arrived in South Africa and the
parted was at its height when I look
back at that period now and I think you
know why Earth did people put up with it
we so Dreadful and I think the reason is
frankly that economic growth was very
rapid it was over 5% ranom and everybody
I mean literally everybody was getting
better off off every year even Africans
1:32
were because the number of jobs was
increasing year after year after year so
that more and more could come to the
cities and get
work uh and I think that was as it were
the underlying secret of a in that
period now secular politics is I what
prevails in most countries certainly
countries which have any lengthy
Democratic history but it’s not been the
case of South Africa let me just give
you the example when I was young I was a
keen supporter of the Progressive Party
and we certainly then saw elections as a
morality contest the parted was evil uh
we were fighting for non-racialism and
2:15
against racial
discrimination but our fervor which was
likely a moral fervor was at least
matched by the Africana nationalists
their party was bound together not just
by who gets what but by a passionate
commitment to their language to their
culture to a common religion and a
powerful and shared sense of History it
was perfectly normal to meet africon
nationalists who would quickly start
telling you about how their grandmothers
had been in concentration cup and there
was a bitterness and and a passion it
was a holy cause and it was certainly
not just about who gets what there was a
lot more going on
3:00
and that was clear from the way the the
National Party vote
behaved uh normally as I say you would
have expected the vote to oscillate in
terms of the economic cycle but it
didn’t their Peak uh performance in
elections was in
1977 which is 29 years after they came
to power which is remarkable
fact so it was no ordinary political
party and it certainly wasn’t just the
secular
one uh but of
course uh there were other kinds of
politics so when I went to Britain again
in
1964 I immediately found myself in the
middle of the election in which Harold
Wilson became prime minister and I was
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amazed as were other South Africans I
knew to find the election was
dominated by Wilson’s promise to bring
interest rates down to three and a half
or even
3% now none of us in South Africa had
any idea what the interest rate was and
it certainly didn’t feature an election
so we were completely puzzled by this
very different style of politics but it
was of course about who gets what when
and how the key bit thing being that you
know British politics was class politics
and The Great Divide was between those
who own their houses and those who were
um forced in effect uh to rent usually
casual houses
4:30
and that was the great sort of class
divide now every young couple wanted to
buy a house whether or not they could
depended on mortgage rates which of
course depended on interest rates in
general so what Harold Wilson was really
doing was he was promising young
couple that if we get into Power you
will be able to buy your own
house in other words you will become
part of the house part
of the
population and that of course was very
powerful stuff and certainly helped him
win uh but of course that was we didn’t
understand it because that was secular
politics going on in the classic way and
5:16
went from South Africa we were simply
weren’t used to that sort of
thing now
um as I say uh nonsecular politics tends
to be about things like religious
ethnical racial
loyalties po moral passions social
solidarities usually language or
cultural
cleavages it doesn’t mean of course that
the distributive politics doesn’t matter
but it’s an underlying
thing now what happens of course is that
over time this nonsecular politic gets
routinized and gradually loses its power
power and secular politics tends to take
6:02
over and that’s certainly what happened
with the Africana
nationalist how does that process
work the key is the loss of
Unity by 1966 the split between Vera and
ver trumpter was quite public and
thereafter africanas could choose which
faction they like by 1969 herok had
already formed the hnp by 73 tobl had
had launched the
AWB and in 1983 trinic LED away the
conservative party so there were more
and more varieties of Africana
nationalism to choose from it was no
longer the single powerful
force secondly there was a growth of
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corruption and Scandal which were
particularly bad for a calvinist
party various MPS were caught stealing
the Smiths got murdered there was
information Scandal and perhaps worst of
all
niik diix the State president who had a
huge Swiss bank account having switched
gold sales from London to zuo once the
president is a crook then you know
there’s not much is
sacred so the national body Coalition it
held together for a long time but it
became increasingly Hollow and you could
tell that after
1990 from the fact first of all the
National Party itself felt a bit very
very quickly and
7:30
disappeared as if you know now you
wouldn’t have expected that but also
frankly the Dutch Reformed Church became
a shadow of what has had been before so
these various elements of that Coalition
which had been strong all together
quickly fell apart and you could see it
culturally the very success of Africana
nationalism and the upward social
mobility of produced meant more and more
African speakers spoke
English uh and old celebrations of
things like the great Tre and bu musique
and folk spieler they all became
suddenly very old fashioned in the age
of Television so all of that gradually
lost its power now as we know in 1990 to
8:18
94 the whole political system was begun
all over again on a new
basis uh and the was greatly expanded
new Constitution and so
on most dramatically there was a new
voting system based on proportional
representation the most extreme form of
proportional representation I have ever
seen anywhere in the world now a system
like that is like a bong which will blow
up any po system for it will encourage
the atomization of politics creating the
incentives for the creation of Rise
number of small parties a Tower of
9:00
Babel and kaleidoscopic
coalitions but that did not happen right
away because once again we had a
hegemonic nationalist party it didn’t
have many of the things that the
National Party had had it did not have a
Common Language or a culture or a common
religion or a common history but there
was an overall there somewhat artificial
sense of racial unity and it was for
many a sacred
cause just as many nationalists during
the second world war had ended up in
camps like coffee fontain and suffered
for their beliefs so there were people
who had fought for their whole lives in
the
struggle some had endured beatings or
even torture for the sake of their
9:46
beliefs and their solidarity with their
comrades so it had a very strong
nonsecular appeal quasy
religious in the early days everyone
talked throughout them having the moral
High ground and Mandela was magic the
the mediva
magic uh clearly sort of nonsecular
factors are very
powerful and it defied the normal
political rules because despite the
electoral system it vote went up from
election to election it peaked in
2004 very nearly
70% uh thus defying the uh the pr
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system’s
power but of course thec has been
experiencing secularization as well now
the term of course comes from the
sociology of religion because uh
churches have undergone something like
this long
before Brian Wilson who wrote a religion
in secular society which is probably the
most important study of this charted the
rise of sec
ization and I remember when that book
came out many critics said oh yes what
you say is true that the anglicans and
the Catholics and so on they’re all
losing ground and few few people and so
forth but you know you’re still wrong
because you get the rise of all these
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big tent preachers not just only Billy
Graham but lots of other charismatics of
one sort and another and that they’re
all very much alive and
growing and I remember Brian Wilson just
laughing
and saying don’t you see that the
proliferation of those sects is part of
secularization because when religion
really mattered back in medieval times
and later people died for it they
tortured people for it they burned
people at the stake for it you could
only have one
religion the very fact that now it’s all
right to have lots of religions tells
you how much ground they’ve lost and the
growth of all theal sects is part of
12:03
that once you accept the plurality of
religions is normal then a huge and
irreversible step has been taken towards
routinization and secularization instead
of being the way the truth and the light
a religion is now just another
CH now the same sort of process applies
to the
ANC the anc’s Mystique the depended not
only a Mandela but the idea of the ANC
is a huge and indivisible Force which
was not only strong but frightening and
clearly right away in the ’90s people
were often very scared of falling foul
of
12:45
thec in particular the Press was very
scared and deferential in it seldom
criticism as the about
anything now the first crack was the
Breakaway of the udm B Amisa but the big
shift came with the falling out of Omi
and Zuma in
2005 almost
immediately there were two anc’s the eki
ANC and the Zuma ANC and the Press was
immediately free and so if you go back
and you look you find this absolute sea
change in the Press of that time because
suddenly they could criticize freely
because now there were two a Inc and
there was no United powerful group to be
fight for
13:30
and real press freedom in this country
begins at that moment now uh we’ also
had of course since then uh the same
sort of process of uh increasing
variance that
me uh so we’ve had cope we’ve had the
eff the African Congress for
transformation the African
transformation movement black first game
first
uh sorry black first land first MK in
this election and even due Zar Zuma’s
party called The Game Changers though I
haven’t noticed them changing the game
yet um but the big the key thing is that
the Mystique deriving from this Mighty
14:16
United movement has now gone because
you’ve got so many possible
variants and it clearly would’t come
back uh remember that thec never had a
lot of the for es on its side that the
theats
did in effect the struggle gave them
this artificial racial Unity which had
now
spint and with Humpty Dumpty Off the
Wall there’s no way of putting him back
to together
again now the results of this
secularization are visible in many
ways perhaps must obviously in the open
contempt for the aenc expressed almost
daily in many sections of the press it’s
perfectly obvious Toc politicians that
15:01
they’re no longer popular or
respected the almost pathetic attempts
by Rosa and otherc politicians to
associate themselves with the Triumph of
the rugby
springo showed all too clearly how
conscious they were of their popularity
deficit I I should break in to say that
I’m looking at the data for the big
ETV uh election survey which I put in
the field few weeks ago and I won’t
we’ll bring that out this weekend but
um it’s very very clear from that that
uh I I did something similar in
2019 and it was clear on the data then
that Rosa was worth something like 11%
15:48
extra to thec there were that many
voters who said that they were so put
off by corruption that they were not
going to vote ANC but because of ram
opposer they would now that’s completely
disappeared it’s no longer there in the
data at all and indeed um I I found that
when you ask people uh who are you
favorable to and unfavorable to Rosa
ties he doesn’t even quite tie with
Zuma they are equally popular so that’s
quite something when you think of how
what about press zoom’s had for the past
however many years
16:30
the fact is that very few African
nationalist parties had to live with a
free press and thec certainly didn’t
have to do that before
1994 moreover the situation is bound to
get worse for them uh if you take the
deputy president
masate who is clearly the
future he got no real National profile
he extremely unpopular I can tell you
that again for the data he played no
part in The Liberation struggle he’s a
purely provincial politician and he’s
already attracted a great deal of
criticism for his lavish lifestyle
because of the Godfathers to WHIO
favors similarly the UHC Secretary
General fil M balula attracts a great
17:15
deal of ridicule and has already
publicly boasted of lying to Parliament
to protect Jacob
zooman it’s extremely hard to see how
thec can regain respect or popularity
under leadership like
that now the secularization of the
political system is of course going on
across the board it doesn’t just affect
thec so you can see again for the da
that they used to have that space to
themselves but now there’s action South
africable the freedom from plus rise on
zansi build one South Africa good
patriotic Alan and
so there less than three of those
parties are led by da
breakaways
so again they two are fighting that’s
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the problem and it’s very noticeable
that when uh John steeven was asked
about these crossovers people going
moving away from the da to other parties
he dismissed it as part of the Silly
Season like the transfer window in
soccer that is to say a routine and
relatively unimportant phenomena now in
the old days when the prags saw
themselves as a moral cause no
Progressive Party leader would have said
anything like that if if anyone left the
party they would bet traying this cause
but quite clearly for Mr Steen Hazen
politics no longer has moral consent in
that sense uh the the routinization and
secularization is affecting them as well
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now it still has some way to go with
this process uh and of course thec will
work uh as hard as it can to try to keep
the old forms of appeal going
but it’s very difficult uh they will try
to dry dry uh drive out the secular
factors by appealing to the struggle
blaming everything on a part A and so
forth but it cannot really work for
various reasons I mean first of all you
know if the Mandela family is selling
off these effects even his ID then not
much is saer it anymore is it uh I mean
pretty clear
19:30
and Jacob Zumer used to be so confident
of the anc’s enduring emotional appeal
that he said thec was in power until
Jesus come he obviously doesn’t believe
that anymore cuz founding a rival party
to thec is based on the opposite
assumption but there’s something else
about this too which I should make clear
which is that it trying to dry on
out seph fact s by appealing to those
things it doesn’t really
work the key factors again this is no
secret jobs electricity water cut off
social
grants uh these things uh you can’t
20:15
really get over failures by just blaming
everything on a party and it’s it’s for
two reasons really one is that every
time that you you know if a building
catches fire and you jump up and say
it’s the fault of a party
said well you are always trying to
explain away a failure and you know the
voters notic the failure uh you can’t
really be surprised by that what what it
rather reminds me of is uh after the
second World
War uh journalist went and interviewed
number of Japanese say you know how did
you know what was going on because
everything the media in Japan was
completely controlled and so forth and I
remember they interviewed this old
21:01
Japanese peasant and he said no that’s
true all they ever talked about was how
we had won these wonderful glorious
victories from P Harbor
on but you couldn’t help noticing he
said that each victory was getting close
to
Japan that’s what I mean you can’t
really hide the failures you know the
more that you you try to do it that way
people will spot the failure and that of
course is what’s been going on now of
course
secularization is always more pronounced
in both religious terms and political
terms in uh Urban environments for
obvious reasons so of course the
election is largely this time about the
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fight for the three metropoles in the
most urbanized provinces K Western Cape
and K of
that and of course as thec falls back on
the rural area
it is increasingly a Homeland party and
it’s increasingly dependent on a very
strange inversion which I I saw in
Zimbabwe uh what happened in Zimbabwe is
that zopf would turn around and Bully
the voters by intimidation torture even
killing and so forth in order to more or
less force them to support zanu Pier so
instead of a party courting the favors
of the voters the party turns around and
22:30
Bullies them now something similar is
beginning to happen here because when
you depend
on I thec is in fact increasingly
dependent on basically threatening
people that if you don’t vote for us you
won’t get your Social
Grant and secondly in the countryside on
they reliant on the chief who make it
clear that if you don’t vote for thec
then there’s trouble coming your way so
again this sort of bullying Force is is
now becoming common uh in in the anc’s
appeal but as I say it will only work in
a in a rural environment I don’t think
you can make it work in an urban
environment so it’s not going to help
too
much
23:16
now notice also
that uh
when uh and balula was shocked by Zuma
defected he said but we lied for you we
said the swimming pool was a fire Po and
again notice what that means it means
now that the meaning of solidarity is
covering up somebody else’s corruption
that’s that’s not what it was all about
before you know so what I’m really
trying to say is that we are involved in
this process of secularization it’s
affecting all
parties and it will mean that
the power of the electoral system to
fragment the politics of this country
24:02
that it won’t be
counterbalanced by nonsecular factors
anymore so it will happen more and more
and that’s actually my one of my worries
about the election that you’re going to
get more and more small
parties not always competing quite often
just wanting to be bought off but they
play that
game and I I don’t think that this
process can be stopped uh and it will
have benefits in some ways but not at
all but there we are okay well let me
stop there and I’ll I’ll take any
questions that people
[Applause]
