Congress of the People: a political obituary

I NEED to collect my black suit from the dry cleaners today because I am attending a funeral service tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit tender, however, so I am not sure I’ll have the strength to attend. But it is going to be a huge funeral service and as someone who was not very close to the deceased, I might, at the risk of sounding macabre, get away with not being missed.

The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).

His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.

Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.

COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.

The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.

Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.

My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .

So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:

On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.

For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....

The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.

Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.

COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters