TOPIC: THE TRAGEDY OF JACKIE SELEBI’S DEATH.
At the height of Jackie Selebi’s unimaginable personal pain, political humiliation and judicial conviction, whilst he was behind bars – lonely, ill, abandoned by the world as he had come to know it, and almost despairing of life itself in a Pretoria jail – I wrote a tribute to him under the title “The tragedy of Jackie Selebi”, which appeared on Politicsweb of 07 February 2012.
In the article, after lauding Selebi’s great, undoubted personal qualities and immeasurable contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, I pointed to his glaring failings, flaws and his fall-from-grace tragic situation of being a jailed criminal in democratic South Africa he fought so hard and for so long to bring about.
Writing and saying something positive at the time about Selebi was frowned upon and seen as fraternizing with the criminal, Mafia world of alleged mobster Glenn Agliotti.
I ended the article by declaring that Selebi was “…like one of those deeply flawed but transformational heroes from Thomas Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History”.
I further quoted Carlyle when he declared about his heroes that “…their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection”.
I was reminded of this quote from Thomas Carlyle today upon hearing the sad breaking-news announcement on radio of the passing on today of Ambassador Jackie Selebi, which news was broken by Lindiwe Zulu, the Minister of Small Business Development.
Today, in the wake of Selebi’s death, it has again become commonplace to sing praises to Jackie Selebi, although his bitter haters retain their loathing of him as before.
As in life, in death Selebi is becoming a divisive figure, with the divisions to continue in debates about the essence of his legacy.
Immediately following the news of Selebi’s death, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with messages of heartfelt condolences and commiseration, on the one hand, but also with messages expressing hardnosed ambivalence about the legacy of Selebi, as well as with outright condemnation of his moral standing in our society, owing to his conviction by our courts for corruption, on the other hand.
The vehemence and tone of some of the condemnatory messages following the death of Selebi caught me by surprise, given that Selebi’s body was hardly cold. Some of the condemnatory messages sounded as if they had long been prepared, memorized, rehearsed and canned for this specific, sad occasion, like a dagger which is kept sharpened and at the ready for the right moment. They sounded like they were ready-made and were just re-heated in the micro-ovens of political hatred and racial bigotry for today’s instantaneous public propaganda consumption. There was surprising but unmistakable velvet elocution in some of the condemnatory message on radio broadcasts, and some boastful and self-indulgent cadence, in the mist of death.
If death is often a surprise and always comes unannounced, how come the Jackie Selebi haters’ condemnatory wailing appeared so effortless and flawless?
It is this harsh and unforgiving nature of some of the vindictive messages about the departed Selebi, which flooded radio stations, Twitter and Facebook, that reminded me of the memorable words of Ossie Davis, the African American who delivered an historic eulogy to one of America’s greatest all-time heroes, the venerable Malcolm X:
“There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain – and we will smile. Many will say turn away – away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man – and we will smile…And we will answer and say to them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we honor him”.
Of course like Jackie Selebi, Malcolm X had been involved in and caught doing crime. And like Selebi, Malcolm X had done jail term. And like Malcolm X, there are those who now do not want us to utter a single good word in the direction of the deceased Jackie Selebi; and, yes, there are those who want to convince South Africans that Selebi was nothing but a demon, a monster, a subverter of our criminal justice system, a mobster even, and an enemy of the black man and the founding, constitutional values of democratic South Africa – and nothing else. They want us to turn away – away even from the presence of Ambassador Jackie Selebi’s memory.
Many of the Jackie Selebi haters and defilers will ask as to what it is the ANC, ANC Youth League, the Tripartite Alliance and our country’s mass democratic movement find to honor in this stormy, controversial, bold but ultimately broken and tragic captain.
And we too should smile.
They want us to celebrate only Jackie Selebi’s fall from grace, his criminal conviction, the utter humiliation of serving jail time for corruption, his physical withering away, literally, as a result of a terminal disease.
In his tweet on the passing on of Selebi, one of South Africa’s favorite puppets, Chester Missing @chestermissing wrote:
“Jackie Selebi has passed away? RIP. Matter of hours before someone in the DA tells us it’s a ploy to keep out of jail.” (The Citizen, 24 January 2015, page 4).
But it is simply not true that Comrade Jackie Selebi’s long, heroic life was completely devoid of positive meaning, of any catchet.
This blue tissue of a lie is being spread around the world by the haters.
And there are those with hearts so full of fury, of savagery, of hatred, of vindictiveness, and of absolute lack of compassion, even in the event of death, who demand forgiveness for themselves but dare not forgive others like Selebi. They are the hard men and women of South Africa’s national, everyday life, lurking around every corner in our country, waiting to do character assassination on those they intensely loath, and capable of being moved only by their narrow ends of life, by their selfish interests.
But did many of these defilers of the memory of Jackie Selebi – these Jackie haters – get to meet him in person, to speak to him, to touch him, to see him smile, to listen to him and to greet him with a handshake, to see him in love with Ann Selebi, to see him doting on his children?
I also believe that if these haters and defilers had had such an opportunity, they would know why we too honoured Jackie Selebi during his life, and are honoring him upon his tragic death. In fact, some of us had the good sense and fortune to honour him during his darkest hour, when he laid prostrate and sick in his jail cell in democratic South Africa, two years before his death.
As our outstanding musician Sipho Gumede would sing, “when the hour is dark, friends are few”.
So precise. So true.
Deeply anguished to observe that it seemed that at that darkest hour of Jackie Selebi in a jail cell, even his long-standing ANC comrades of many decades seemed cowered by the shrill public opinion and calculated calmny around Selebi and seeming to have abandoned him for good, as if he were a skunk they did not want to touch in public, not even with a bargepole, I wrote in my ‘The tragedy of Jackie Selebi’ that:
“It is of no little political interest to note that to date, there is no major ANC and government leader who had publicly supported Minister Mangena’s mercy call.”
This was after the former president of AZAPO and former Minister of Science and Technology in the previous Thabo Mbeki government, Masibudi Mangena, went public with a Pretoria News article calling on South Africans to show mercy and have Selebi released from jail, on account of his terminal illness.
Ossie Davis and the progressive American community were able to soberly evaluate the enduring and ever-lasting positive contributions to America’s politics, racial tolerance and world peace of Malcolm X, despite the latter having dabbled in crime in Harlem and having spent several years in jail as a result.
Today we can all see that fifty years after the assassination of Malcolm X, history has largely vindicated Ossie Davis’s eulogy to Malcolm X and its correct historical portrayal of the eminent and enduring Malcolm X as “our Prince”, who has found a first-rate place of honor in the pantheon of America and the whole progressive world’s all-time heroes.
South Africans also should be able to do the same regarding Jackie Selebi and his huge, ever-lasting contribution to the emergence and consolidation of democratic South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and in line with all of the immortal Freedom Charter’s clauses, without a single exception.
In doing so, we shall not be denying that Selebi was like Thomas Carlyle’s “flawed heroes.” We shall be merely affirming, as Thomas Carlyle wrote, that we know that we and our own world are morally imperfect and thus incapable of producing morally perfect individuals, such as many Selebi haters and defilers seem to have unreasonably expected Jackie Selebi to have become.
This is not too big an ask. I truly believe that we should not be afraid to publicly declare, from rooftops and treetops, loud and clear and into the chambers of eternity, that Comrade Jackie Selebi was and remains one of our freedom and democracy struggle’s immortal, heroic “Princes and Princesses”.
I believe that history will be kinder to Selebi and will ultimately judge that 80% of his life was dedicated to right, ennobling causes for the benefit of freedom, democracy and the unity of South Africa, Africa and the world, and that only 20% of his life, which tragically got him imprisoned, was dedicated to unworthy ends which resulted from a lapse of his moral and ethical judgment, and from unpardonable fraternization with the base criminal underground.
Most importantly, all South Africans, even those who deeply despise Selebi, in death as in life, should be able to marshal at least a modicum of human decency – African Ubuntu – to commiserate with his grieving family, close relatives, as well as with members and leaders of his long-time political home, the African National Congress (ANC), and especially his grieving, doting and dutiful wife, Ann Selebi.
The remarkable strength, commitment, dignity and sheer human doggedness with which Ann stood by her ailing and frail husband, Jackie Selebi, to the every end, is truly moving and remarkable. She was like the Bible’s Hannah to Jackie Selebi, right to the last minute of the latter’s life. Theirs is an unheralded great love story born in the burning crucible of the ANC’s struggle for freedom and dignity in South Africa. It stood the bitter and back-breaking tests of time. Only death could conquer it. And maybe not even death should rejoin in its momentary triumph over their love life.
Watching Ann Selebi on TV as she stood or sat every day silently by or behind her husband as he attended his court case, reading about her as she visited him at the Pretoria prison, and lastly as she nursed her terminally ill husband after his parol and release from prison, I was often reminded of these touching words of Jennifer Homans, the loving and dutiful wife of Tony Judt, the great, towering American Jewish philosopher and historian, which appeared in The New York Review of Books of 12 March 2012, under the title ‘Tony Judt: A Final Victory’, and which are worth quoting at some length, as they assist us to articulate the tragedy and pain of Ann Selebi as she watched life flowing out of Selebi, her husband and the man she loved dearly.
Wrote Jennifer Homans about Tony Judt:
“I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010…When Tony was diagnosed with ALS, he knew he would die, soon. He knew before any doctor told him; and he continued to know it even as we pursued every possible alternative explanation and cure. He knew it because it was happening to him every day: hands, arms, legs, breathing passed out of his control with terrifying speed. It was difficult to keep up a dizzying and exhausting time of doctors and tests and determination; of anger, grief, desperation, and love…As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world; everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power operated but he had no way to steer it) and – not least – the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand…He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison cocoon that would house his deteriorating and entrapped body”.
Jennifer Homans was, in a morbid sense, – sorry for the unintended pun -, somehow luckier to observe “…the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.”
Unfortunately, Ann Selebi had and has to deal with the truly “unbearable”, horrifying, openly-expressed ill-will of Jackie Selebi haters and defilers, who are in a party mood over Selebi’s death, and who do not want to understand anything about the terminal illness which ravaged her husband, and who even this late afternoon are asking as to why Jackie Selebi didn’t die much earlier or few days after he was paroled, in a puzzling, macabre public display of hatred and bigotry.
Yet the suffering, pain and endurance test which married women like Jennifer Homans and Ann Selebi are made to go through when they are impelled by circumstances to become the only pillar of support in life on which their terminally ill, famous husbands depend, should move us all when they are visited on white, privileged American women like Jennifer Homans, as well as when they are visited on black African women like Ann Selebi.
Our humanity should demand nothing less from all of us.
Even in his death, the Selebi haters are demanding a pound of Jackie Selebi’s flesh, in a baffling necrophobic outburst against even the remaining mortals of Jackie Selebi, not bothering to wait for their burial.
Haters will always do the hating best.
In a nation which boasts about its world-acclaimed national capacity to forgive the horrendous crimes and sins committed during apartheid by racist regimes of the time, this hatred for and vindictiveness by some amongst us towards Jackie Selebi – this stoic unpreparedness to forgive Selebi’s lapse of moral and ethical judgment, even for a moment of silence, even if posthumously so – does take one’s breath away. Totally.
Many Britons openly celebrated the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It would seem some amongst us will be throwing braai pool parties this coming weekend to celebrate the news today of Jackie Selebi’s death.
This is really the tragedy of Jackie Selebi’s death.
It damns the cruelty and false pretense of our key national trait – the readiness to forgive past sins, only selectively so, apparently, and evidently only if you happen to belong to the race group with a particular dose of melanin.
This should not be so. This is the worst imaginable discrimination in a democracy.
Is this because Selebi was black, whilst the majority of the leaders who committed crimes against humanity under apartheid to uphold white racial superiority and were forgiven for their steering political roles in enforcing it were white, that our sense of forgiveness is so choosy, so discriminatory?
It makes you ponder.
Even those of us – many bitter Jackie Selebi haters – who do not have an idea of what Ann Selebi went through from the moment Selebi collapsed upon hearing the news that the Supreme Court of Appeal had upheld his conviction for corruption, right through to Selebi’s hospitalization and incarceration and release from jail by parole, right to her daily administering dialysis on him every day, several times a day, to the loneliness she felt as she and Selebi were trapped in the Waterkloof house and haunted by Selebi haters and the media, unable to do normal daily family walks befitting a paroled convict, we should at least soften our cruel hearts a bit by reading what similar terror Tony Judt’s wife went through during his last two years as he also battled a terminal disease.
We can let go our manufactured anger and self-righteousness against Jackie Selebi, now that he is no more.
How Tony Judt and Jackie Selebi died from a terminal illness is a fate none of us – including implacable Jackie Selebi haters – should wish on their worst enemies.
This is especially so because Jackie Selebi, like Malcolm X and Tony Judt, had contributed so much to the cause of human freedom and progressive political thought in his country, which for centuries suffered white racialist colonialism and Apartheid’s legislated race-based discrimination.
In my Politicsweb article mentioned above on Jackie Selebi, which even then attracted its own barbaric hoards of Jackie Selebi haters and unrestraint nasal scorn in the comment section, I wrote the following about arguably Selebi’s singular, greatest contribution to democratic South Africa and the precious freedom we all enjoy today:
“Alongside former Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, former Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, and the ever intellectually irrepressible former Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad, Selebi was at the forefront of re-integration of South Africa into the fold of community of nations following the end of apartheid in 1994…He was also at the forefront of the international community’s sterling efforts to develop post-Cold War normative standards in such diverse diplomatic fields as human rights, nuclear disarmament, conventional chemical weapons, anti-landmines treaty, WTO negotiations, WEF annual Davos meetings, and the Geneva-based WIPO’s intellectual property protection efforts…Jackie Selebi was SA diplomatic pioneer of great note, and arguably post-apartheid South Africa’s most successful multilateral diplomat so far.”
There is nothing that has happened since I wrote the Politicsweb article ‘The tragedy of Jackie Selebi’, which would make me re-assess my opinion of Selebi’s great contribution to democratic South Africa’s globally-respected and admired diplomacy.
Today the huge diplomatic spear of an eminent global multilateralist has fallen.
But, hopeful, his tragic death will make the claque of his bitter haters and defilers to mellow a bit, so as to hopefully allow it the much-needed opportunity to slightly re-assess Jackie Selebi’s legacy in less judgmental and less damnatory, even if not wholly positive and constructive, terms.
This would be the final victory of Jackie Selebi, the South African freedom and democracy struggle’s Prince of Tides, to borrow from the title of Pat Conroy’s moving, eponymous novel.
And that would also be our nation’s best epitaph to the great and heroic contribution which former National Police Commissioner and former Interpol President Jackie Selebi made to our abiding and ongoing national Freedom Agenda and our National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
RIP our Prince of Tides.
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15th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
25 January 2015
Written by:
Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
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