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In the first of the Nelson Mandela Foundation's In Conversation With series to commemorate the former statesman's 90th birthday, Njabulo Ndebele talks to Tara Turkington about leadership, citizenship, the level of public debate and creativity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele

TARA Turkington: The Nelson Mandela Foundation would like to use this year as an ­opportunity to ­reflect on how far we have come as a ­democracy, and to think about where we still need to go. You are so many things at once – novelist, academic, political commentator. Do we need to encourage our citizens of the future to think and act in a wide variety of ways?

Njabulo Ndebele: The South ­African of the future will most likely be a multidimensional person who cannot be easily pigeon-holed. That was the problem with our past: there was a concerted attempt to define ­individuals and groups.

The South African of the future will live comfortably with uncertainty because uncertainty promises opportunity, but you have to be robust about it, you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to contemplate it to get the full richness of it, and I think that is the challenge of being South African: to run away from unidimensional and definitive characterisations of ourselves.

TT: In your new book, Fine Lines from the Box, I loved the ­essay for the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, where you sat down and wrote a few words without knowing where it was going, and how the words that came randomly helped you to form a metaphor for South Africa of going boldly into an unknown future.

NN: When I look back at how some problems have been resolved, one thing emerges – when there is a crisis, no one knows how it is going to end. At the precise moment that you admit you don’t know which way it will end, you open up your mind, your ears, your eyes and yourself to imagined solutions. Where you do not wait for that moment and you impose a solution before it comes, there will almost always be a continuing problem.

There is an act of faith involved. But you’ve got to be open to experience, open to different interpretations and then formulate at the precise moment exactly what needs to be done. I think this is a leadership skill that is learnt over time.

It’s a disposition that is counter-intuitive. When there’s a problem, we want to solve it. But you’ve got to be open to the messages that the problem itself will send you. Mandela came to such an understanding as a sum total of his own experience. In a sense, he paid his dues to arrive at an understanding of conflict resolution that includes the ability to identify common purpose embedded in a situation of conflict. Common purpose can emerge under the most unlikely circumstances.

TT: How do we get from the personal, learned skill of leadership that you’re talking about to the understanding as a nation that we don’t have to go head to head every time there is a problem?

NN: I think it’s learned in the schooling system, in the family ­environment. I don’t believe we have invested enough time, energy and resources in fundamentally changing our schooling system so that it becomes a means by which the values of our new society are transmitted to new generations.

TT: In your book you talk about corrupting situations and systems. It’s not only about individuals it’s about transforming cultural systems.

NN: I’ve watched people who I knew were not corrupt or immoral but they get into this company and: “Oh, I can get a car, I can get a bonus of five million! It’s all happened overnight and I have needs, it’s the first time I’m going to have a house!” Trade union officials have forgotten they are part of the labour aristocracy. They are emulating the bosses of old in the focus on getting more.

We didn’t spend enough time talking about incentives, about how to motivate in a situation of scarcity, where we are not going to provide houses for everyone in the next 10 years. We’ve promised all these things and the only way we can make them available is to work with the incentive schemes that we have inherited, which have caused the problem in the first place.

The capacity of the country to ­imagine the future depends on nurturing imaginative thinking from the beginning of a child’s life right up to the end of life. We’ve somehow given all that up along the way.

TT: As South Africans, are we too hard on ourselves sometimes? We have come a long way.

NN: We have to continue to be hard on ourselves to ensure our survival. We should constantly be saying we are not actualising our Constitution enough , what should we do? We have these enormous disparities of wealth. How can we do it ­better? We must constantly set ourselves high standards. My instinct tells me that the current battle for leadership is not about higher standards, it’s not about the ­demands we are making on ourselves, I think it has become a contest over limited objectives.

TT: Personal objectives, would you say?

NN: Yes.

TT: If all citizens adopted the academic principles of striving constantly for new knowledge, striving for excellence, wouldn’t it be a much better country?

NN: We have the potential to do that if we take advantage of the technological developments in the world today.

I think South Africa should be driven by the objective that public services must be cutting edge.

I think that’s what we fought for, that citizen A, B and C can go to any public institution, such as a hospital, and feel “I’ve got the best care”.

TT: Arguably, some of our most creative work came from a time when this country was the most oppressed. What is your view of creativity and liberation?

NN: I think that it is true to say oppression led to a lot of novels, ­drama and so on, and that after 1994 we got confused. Now there’s fresh writing coming up, I think, in ­response to basically two things.

One is the possibilities that ­democracy has opened up: the growth in the individual, the ­expressive possibilities.

But then possibilities create their own constraints, which bring about frustrations which artists have to respond to. One of the biggest ­frustrations is the sudden realisation that our ­democracy is now ­facing its biggest threat. We have been ­seduced by the incentive schemes and reward systems of the capitalist.

I have just finished reading Niq Mhlongo’s novel, After Tears. It’s a story of this young law student and he goes home, and he’s got a new nickname, Advo, short for advocate. He goes home and they say, “Advo is back, he’s got a degree!”

But he says, “I can’t get my degree because I owe so much money and they won’t allow me to graduate.” Which is a lie; the truth is that he failed.

He lives with this lie and his ­mother sells the house to pay for him. He lets her do it; he doesn’t say anything until, right at the end, they’ve lost everything and they ­discover he has been lying.

The opportunities for lying in this world of money, of making it, living the life, are enormous. I think that novel is an act of bravery.

I see a lot of posturing in some of our public debates, as if people hold the truth totally.

You put aside the fear that you don’t know, by projecting an all-knowing intelligence. I think the writers, the artists, the dramatists are increasingly focusing on these sorts of things and that’s to the good of us all. That’s the second thing that I think is happening.

TT: What about public debate? We don’t know what any of the leaders really think about certain issues. Can we get people to engage with our politicians and hold them to account?

NN: We need to develop the ability to embrace uncertainty from a position of intelligence and imagination. The more of us who admit to our vulnerabilities, the more trusting the public space.

I’d like a leader who will say: “Oh, on that issue, I really don’t know and I’d like to find out more.”

The world is so big and complex you can’t know everything.

But I’d also like a leader who is not afraid to be asked questions. Frankly, I know more about what President Mbeki wants on a range of things. I really don’t know what Jacob Zuma wants about anything.

The fact that he is riding on a popular wave is not his fault entirely. It’s the people who are pushing him. Why? What do they want? They are not saying.

Poet, novelist and essayist

PROFESSOR Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele is the vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town and chairs the Southern African Regional Universities’ Association. He also serves on the boards of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation.

Ndebele is a poet, novelist and essayist whose works include Fools and Other Stories, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Bonolo and the Peach Tree, and South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. His latest book is Fine Lines From the Box: Further Thoughts About Our Country.

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