The announcement that the national cricket captain Hansie Cronje had admitted taking a bung from a bookmaker was made on South African TV and radio stations with the funereal gravity one might expect at the actual demise of a venerated elder statesman. In a way, something had indeed expired – not only in this almost exclusively lily-white sport, but more importantly in the self-image of most white South Africans, who follow the game with obsessive intensity.
It concerns the oldest colonial image of the white man in Africa: one of upright probity against overwhelming odds. As a caricature, it is the English explorer in the bush dressing for dinner to keep up “standards”. In different guises, this preoccupation can be heard nightly at white dinner tables all over the country. It harks back to the old theme: the new black democracy is shamelessly on the make and on the take, while the whites struggle manfully to maintain civilised values. It is a suburban version of the white man’s burden.
In many ways, cricket epitomised this imagined struggle. Unlike rugby, a predominately Afrikaner game, cricket was English, with all its connotations of hallowed tradition and fair play. I have been astonished at the passion with which many otherwise liberal whites, who will accept affirmative action in favour of blacks elsewhere in our national life, reject any such thing in the game of cricket. (Cronje himself threatened to leave the captaincy when non-white quotas were proposed for the national side.) The reason, I think, is because this most closely touches their own self-image as whites in Africa.
Cronje – unusually for a Test cricketer, let alone captain – is an Afrikaner. In his unflinchingly dour person, he thus symbolised the coming together of Afrikaner and English-speaking whites after a century of conflict. This alliance was cemented in the last election when Afrikaners deserted both the National Party and the Freedom Party, their traditional bases, and flocked in large numbers to the Democratic Party, home of the hated rooineks. It was an alliance concluded by mutual fear of a black government.
For many white South Africans, Cronje appeared the very embodiment of this truce: a flinty Afrikaner who behaved like an honourable Englishman. The initial reaction of most whites to the allegations against their hero, which originated from the police in India, revealed the depths of their racial contempt. This is mostly expressed in code in South Africa these days, and its venomous release also suggested that, in unconscious ways, Cronje was widely seen, in his apparently puritanical rectitude, to be shouldering the white man’s burden.
You hear it all the time, the plaintive lament of whites at the erosion of what they see as “standards”. It is an astonishing act of amnesia, wiping out not only the viciousness of apartheid, but also its deep corruption, both financial and moral.
Last weekend, my wife and I were at a dinner, which was all white and included a judge and various lawyers. Soon, they began expressing their fears and prejudices in code. Our hostess announced she knew someone who knew someone who had actually seen a cheque for R5m (about £500,000), drawn on the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, for improvements to the home of one of his daughters. I pointed out that this was an urban myth, which I had first heard five years ago. It was also published in a book of urban legends in 1993, in slightly different form: “The bottom line was always the same,” wrote the author. “Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who with their very own eyes have seen an Operation Hunger cheque paying for Mandela’s medical expenses.”
The evening suddenly turned nasty. Such people would never dare criticise Mandela openly, and instead do so by stealth. But if the grand old man, or his family, is on the fiddle, well – they feel liberated to ask – what terrible villainies are the rest of our new rulers up to?
Chinua Achebe, in an essay on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, wrote: “There is a desire – one might say a need – in western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negation at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.”
At our dinner, before Cronje had been exposed as a liar, people spent much of the evening discussing sport, and “our Hansie” was still definitely in a state of spiritual grace: the epitome of white rectitude.
This is a sham. Some years ago, shortly before I returned to South Africa for good, a prominent Afrikaner editor told me: “Don’t be taken in by talk of black corruption. There’s uncertainty at the moment, and in this vacuum everyone’s on the take – including plenty of my fellow Afrikaners, believe me.”
This is common enough after the fall of an autocratic regime – witness the unbridled corruption in the former Soviet Union. What is special about South Africa is the malignant hypocrisy with which most whites project their own duplicities.
During the last days of apartheid, there was a quote much in vogue among left circles. It was from Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”
In many ways, we are still in this interregnum. There may be a black government, but the whites still largely control the economy. They carry on their lives as if little has changed. Thus, verily, we do indeed see many morbid symptoms – and although Cronje probably doesn’t know his Gramsci from his Grace, he is undoubtedly one of these symptoms. With the confession of Hansie, the favoured sporting son, white South Africa at last stares at its own corrupt face.
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