Mantashe and Visagie are united in irrationality

IRRATIONALITY and intolerance are vices that do not discriminate. They are both colour-blind and apolitical. Over the past three days, for example, they befriended both a member of the African National Congress (ANC) , Gwede Mantashe, and a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), Andre Visagie.

These men, who quickly became drunk on their friendship with irrationality and intolerance, displayed embarrassing resistance to reasoned debate and tolerance of an interlocutor. After all, reasoned debate and tolerance are enemies of irrationality and intolerance. Both Mantashe and Visagie were on the vicious side. Even good old patriarchy made a cameo appearance, as we will see. Intellectual virtue, it would appear then, is not for our politicians. They prefer personal attack over demonstrating weaknesses in another’s evidence or their reasoning.

The first incident happened at an ANC press conference on Wednesday. Gwede Mantashe, the secretary-general who interacts with the media almost nonstop, and so should know better, dismissed a question from a black journalist by hurling the insult that she was a coconut. The journalist from AFP asked, “Why, after 16 years, is Julius still singing the song ‘kill the boer’?” Mantashe fired back, “I don’t know why Julius should be explaining that song ... I call that a coconut approach where you have a black face, but your interest is white.”

This response is irrational. Being a coconut — whatever that might mean — is no bar to asking a valid question or putting a persuasive argument on the debate table.

Mantashe was also being intolerant. The subtext of his rude dismissal was, “How dare you imply we may be wrong? How dare you, particularly as a fellow black?! And a fellow black woman at that??” This does not count as a rational or tolerant response to the question or its embedded argument. This would be no different to saying that someone who argues that the Equality Act is possibly unconstitutional must be on a Malema payroll. Only a response dismantling someone’s logic or their evidence is good enough.

Of course it is human nature to see the vested interest that someone might have in the conclusion they are arguing for. If I, as a black man, argue for black economic empowerment (BEE), and I am a businessman to boot, it is tempting to focus on the likelihood that I am motivated, at least in part, by the material benefit I stand to enjoy if BEE continues to be implemented. But so what? Vested interest and sound logic are not inherently opposed to one another. We need to stop obsessing about people’s backgrounds, their material or ideological interests in a debate or their personal motivations for arguing this or that. Instead, we should engage the content of their arguments.

The second incident involved Visagie who stormed out of an eNews studio during a recording of this week’s Africa 360 hosted by Chris Maroleng on Wednesday. When an exchange between Visagie and another guest, Lebohang Pheko, got too heated for his liking, he threw the microphone on the floor, and stormed out. But the drama did not end there. He turned back and menacingly and threateningly walked back towards the other guest, threatening her to not dare interrupt him again. It was unclear how she would be punished. Suitably, no doubt.

Some argue that the host did not play a good facilitating role. Maroleng himself may have been patriarchal in protecting “this poor woman”. That may or may not be true. Set that issue aside for now. Visagie, ironically enough, is also displaying intolerance of a similar kind to that of Mantashe. They are united in their patriarchal rejection of a woman’s right to engage men.

In both cases the confluence of race and gender is clear. Whereas Mantashe displayed the worst kind of black male dominance over black women, on Visagie’s part we saw a baasskap mentality that resisted the illegitimate demand of a black female interlocutor to disagree with the baas’s logic. Who could have thought that an ANC member and an AWB member could be united so tragicomically? The patriarchal history of our society, which finds expression in the political arena, can unite even men who otherwise occupy diametrically opposed positions.

What are the lessons to be learnt? The most important one is that we all have a right to speak. A right to speak should not be earned by undergoing a sex change from female to male or bleaching your skin to become white or burning your opposition party membership card to join the ANC. Senior leaders, such as Mantashe, must set an acceptable example. Else organisations like the ANC Youth League will feel justified in following this resistance to reasoned debate, as they did yesterday when they expelled a BBC journalist from a press conference.

Before we can even talk about the technicalities of the rules of logic and practice them on the airwaves and at press conferences, let’s first accept and respect each other’s unqualified right to be part of the national conversation. Deliberative democracy requires us to see and accept each other as equal partners in the debate arena.