Thinking of Brett Murray as the artist who made The Spear is a bit like remembering Ludwig von Beethoven as the composer who wrote the tune for Ode to Joy. It’s not untrue but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the trajectory of Murray’s artistic articulation, The Spear is not a particularly significant or definitive work of art, and, in point of fact, it very nearly did not make it onto the 2012 ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition in the first place. There were other pieces – in the artist’s own assessment – that seemed to fit as well with the overriding themes, and, as Murray recalls, it was little more than an eeny-meeny-type selection that saw it, finally and fatefully, hung on the walls of the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in early 2013.

Let me hasten here to clarify: this is not a judgement about quality. I am not saying that The Spear is inherently bad, flimsy, or even unfocused or unresolved. Nor, for that matter, am I intending to say it is particularly good. The issue is different: simply that The Spear stands at something of an angle to the dominant stylistic logic running through the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition – what one might think of as its cutting edge.

This cutting edge is most definitively present in two sub-groupings of work on the show: a series of faux-heraldic emblems that Murray has made in a satire of the aspirations of South Africa’s new political elite, on one side; and a series of savage parodies of revolutionary-type political slogans, on the other.

The first can trace its genesis at least as far back as the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibitions of 2007 and 2009. In these Murray developed a register of irony in which decorative frivolities and incidental curlicues, evocative of the pre-revolutionary French court at Versailles, morph into quasi-heraldic devices, featuring motifs like preposterously manicured (and sometimes lewdly coupled) poodles, ignobly substituted for the griffins, phoenixes and stags of medievalising heraldry.

To similarly parodic – and ultimately bathetic – effect, though in a different register, Murray deploys iron pyrites (colloquially known as ‘fool’s gold’) along with paint and silver leaf as a material in groups of intricate metal cutout portraits. Here the traceries of elaborately rendered periwigs – the effect sometimes abetted by extravagant millinery creations – play off against mask-like simplifications, in blackface, of the human visage. This is Versailles rampant but pointedly transposed to darker Africa: a world in which the frippery maketh the man.[1] In Marie Antoinette’s world the filmsiest and most decadent of whims becomes the motive force of history: the fous fous maketh the woman.

It adds up to a pretty devastating critique of the political history of South Africa under the governance of the ANC. Very explicitly in two sequences within the exhibition – titled Now and Then and Continuity and Change – Murray rehearses – but this time with subjects in blackface – portrait images recalling the pre-revolutionary French rococo in order to lampoon an outrageous new elite that has bedevilled and despoiled the transition to democracy. [2]

It comes down to the meta-political imponderable: ‘To storm or to own the Bastille?’ – as Murray asks in a metal text on the wall of the exhibition. This is the question that post-democracy history in South Africa poses. The answer, for Murray, is given in 4X4s, BMWs and designer labels, Breitling watches and rare-blend whiskies that cost more per bottle than many people earn every day. More than this, in the realpolitik of praxis, the answer is given in ownership of the means of production and, more particularly, in keeping a grip on the reins of power to ensure the continued flow of unequal privilege. It is a realpolitik that increasingly has seen government at loggerheads with the lumpen masses of the people, and had the police firing live bullets at striking workers at Marikana.[3]

Such simmering class tensions – de-racialised in the democratic South Africa – raise very pointedly the question posed by the existence of the Bastille as a place of incarceration sustained by the self-serving apparatus of the ancient regime’s law. At the end of the day the question is one of political philosophy. Must the institutions and the intentions of state be transformed if they are to be experienced in qualitatively different ways by the populace? Or is it enough – in order to avoid the same difficulties that were experienced previously – that different hands hold the keys?

Murray does not pronounce directly on the issue. But the range of imagery he invokes throughout the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, and indeed beyond it too, especially in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ shows, is articulate enough – and replete enough with ironies, absurdities and obscenities enacted through the overlay of the imagery of Versailles on gritty twenty-first-century South African realities.

In an expressive tactic – which finds Murray’s point of artistic engagement riskily close to the precipice of poor taste, if not outright racism – the elaborate periwig, at one and the same time the vanity of the royalist European upper classes and the universally inherited symbol of judicial authority, frames stereotyped blackface visages. The effect is uncomfortable, not least because the silvery profusions of curls that make up the standard wigs are culturally very specific. They were designed for wearers of Teutonic complexion and are encoded with a very specific set of conventional signifiers to assert and embody a set of class relations. Against African skin tones, physiognomy and social codes, they tend inevitably to the deconstructive and read as simply ‘wrong’ and frankly bizarre.

Murray exploits this lack of fit to satirical ends, of course, in his corrosive depiction of the new black elite – whether the self-important new-order potentate, or the matron with more false hair than face. But at the same time there is an oddly haunted and alienated quality in Murray’s subjects. It is partly because of the extreme stylisation of gesture and expression that one reads the figures as essentially non-volitional tokens of a real life that is happening elsewhere – in the writhing of the incidental detail, to be precise.

In this mode, Murray turns his scrutiny to his own image in two photographic self-portraits on the theme of the Renaissance Man, with the periwig turned to metaphor: Murray as heir to fripperies and the vanities of Versailles; as heir to the ideas of the Enlightenment; but, equally, in evocation of former President Thabo Mbeki’s much-vaunted but ultimately flawed and woolly African Renaissance. The images have Murray in blackface to offset the elaborate coiffure, though ‘white’ from the chest down. In the first he looks directly and confidently at the camera. In the second, he is tending his ‘land’ – wielding weed-eater on handkerchiefs of lawn.

He is a ridiculous figure, part inheritor of the European tradition, part African, part white, but, as a white who identified with the cause of black South Africans during the struggle, also the inverse of the so-called coconut of racial stereotyping: Africans perceived as black on the outside but ‘white’ in their values and life experience. He is also the figure he explored in sculptures both before and after the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, which has stylised African-sculpture proportions in the body and a spherical vacancy – or as, in Citizen, a large outdoor piece made in 2013, five spherical vacancies, to be filled by history and circumstance, piled in a tower on the shoulders.

What is highlighted especially in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition is the artist’s alienation from, and disgust with, the course of history in the new South Africa. These are not new themes, either for Murray or for progressive artists in general, but the particular strategy – the shadowed vanity that Murray highlights as the satirical reference in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition – is as crucial to his expressive language in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions as the homily painstakingly written to President Jacob Zuma in the framed wall text:

Every time
I hear you sing
The machine gun song
I want to find one
And stick it up
Your fat arse

The immediate stylistic references in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition are overwhelmingly not those of the decadence of the Versailles court, but rather of the narcissistic excesses of Soviet-style socialist realism. Even so, there is one group of works that develops the theme of the grand wig and its diminished wearer. Cued in by a wall relief entitled Legacy, the series moves on to four nearly identical images of ‘His Wives’, namely Mrs Amandla, Mrs Comrade, Mrs Kickback and Mrs Viva-Viva. All are done as depersonalised cartoons, dominated by a stylised schoolgirl version of a coiffure.

The old world of the ancien regime is recalled in almost plausible classically heraldic devices – griffins, lions rampant and the like, insistently counterpointed with crowns in reference to the new royalty of the post-struggle. But the force of such signification is systematically undercut by the protrusion of details like phalluses or the referencing of savagely inappropriate slogans. Thus Traditional Weapon has a club-wielding stylised lion cutout in which the hindquarters have evolved into a massive penis-and-testicles arrangement. In Glory as well as Morning Glory and Crown Jewels, a crowned griffin terminates in a cruciform and decoratively developed phallus, disembodied somewhat like the Sacred Heart, in sustained ridicule of Zuma’s notoriously priapic presidency.

At the same time the heraldic theme as played out in ‘Hail to the Thief’ is enriched by the evocation of communist-style party badges in stylised iconography recalling, and simultaneously undercutting, the galvanising imagery and sloganeering of South Africa’s recent revolutionary past.[4] In one of them, intricately stylised sheaves of corn or grass – conventionally symbolic of plenty – frame the rays of a rising sun above the revolutionary rallying call ‘Amandla’. But lurking over all is the dollar sign transfigured in triumph. Another, similarly composed, aligns the single star of socialism with the ubiquitous dollar and the stridently galvanising cry of ‘Viva Viva’. Another again, this time playing off gold leaf and Stalinist red, has the map of Africa superimposed on a light burst and a hovering socialist star above the emblematically developed double entendre: Mine.

Other pieces on the show are more specific in their reference and hardly less damning in their critique. Chancellor House is styled as a kind of corporate logo for the ANC’s investment arm of the same name. It has some leonine mythical beast prancing in triumph as it licks its lips amid droplets of blood falling from tooth and claw. In a matched pair of works, the ANC logo is treated as real estate, one marked ‘For Sale’, and the other ‘Sold’.

In parallel with these concerns, Murray develops a body of work that parodies more directly the revolutionary posters that once galvanised the revolution. This enterprise – referred to above as the second aspect of the exhibition’s cutting edge – is one that Murray has explored and honed since the earlier 1990s, but it came especially to the fore in his eccentric interrogations of the role of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in the exhibition ‘Sleep Sleep’ and the group of works named Golden Truths. Here, language is treated as object, deconstructed, interrupted, alienated from its usual condition of communicative virtuality by being given form and dimension on the gallery walls. In this way the heroic banality of such pronouncements as ‘Oprah says live life deliciously’ or ‘But Oprah will cry for us’ is transfixed in deconstructionist acidic focus.

In ‘Hail to the Thief’ , however, Murray goes further, developing a typographic aesthetic dimension, with idiosyncrasies in lettering sometimes loosely evocative of Cyrillic script, sometimes of Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood and sometimes of the rough-and-ready lettering of do-it-yourself mass mobilisation woodcut printmaking. In this way The Kleptocrats is heroically advertised, along with The Untouchables, as a blockbuster coming to a theatre near you, as it were. Chillingly, the heroic sentiment of the usual ‘Biko lives!’ is brutally inverted in the thud of ‘Biko is dead’.

By means of both these tendencies in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions, Murray maps out an abstract terrain in post-modern register – one in which languages of communication, both visual and verbal, rather than mere appearances, are rendered as zones of signification rather than simple carriers of conventional communication, becoming in this way the deeper subject matter of his artistic enterprise.

At the same time, and in the same process, Murray engages a virtuality – the ghosting presence of remembered images (his corrupted texts and propaganda images in their pristine incarnations) – in our reading of his works. We need to be familiar with the Johnnie Walker ‘Keep Walking’ advertising campaign, and indeed with the copyright jaunty walker logo of the brand, to appreciate the ironies in Murray’s appropriation of the revolutionary exhortation ‘Forward Comrades’, attributed by implication to a new South African elite much taken with conspicuously expensive consumption. By the same token we need to recall the hanged freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu’s poignant message to ‘Tell my people that I love them and they must continue the fight’ to understand the sarcastic force of Murray’s substitution of ‘the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs’.

It is especially in these groupings of work in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions that the centre of gravity and identity of the shows reside, and the developmental logic of Murray’s practice as an artist in the twenty-first century is to be discerned.

A series of bronze sculptures, familiar in their bulbous and cartoonish simplifications of form, do little more than revisit, from the perspective of a new set of dominant concerns, an already familiar set of plastic solutions. They do not extend the language of Murray’s art-making. And then there are two pieces at an angle to the dominant tendencies, in that they are more specifically targeted in their mockery, both featuring the (more or less recognisable) visage of President Jacob Zuma. In one – which interestingly escaped protest by the defenders of Zuma’s dignity – the President stands gesturing out over a stylised industrial cityscape under the merchant’s credo ‘Cash is king’ – echoed in a signage piece on the same show reading President & Sons (Pty) Ltd.

The other is The Spear, where the (not very closely observed or convincingly rendered) face of Zuma is transposed on the familiar heroic sculptural image of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin striding into the future and a thousand poster variations of the same. Fatefully, the image is further modified by a drawing, so crude as to be virtually a graffito, of a penis appended to the shadowed area of the crotch. As I have pointed out before, the portraiture on the basis of which the image has been connected to President Jacob Zuma is not particularly convincing, [5] and indeed some observers have suggested it looks as much like Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi as Zuma.[6] Regardless, possible misattribution was never offered as a defence in relation to the artwork, and there was never much doubt in the public mind about who was being referred to – certainly not in the collective mind of the ANC and its allies.[7]

My point here is that if the claimed impairment of dignity had gone to court, Murray might well have argued that the connection to Zuma was more specific to the mind of the beholder than the maker intended – and the complainant would had his work cut out to prove the association on the basis of what was actually given in the artwork. Such recourse – though notionally available in a court of law – was, in the event, however, not open to Murray in his pleadings before the court of public opinion, particularly as orchestrated by the ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu and the man who would emerge as prosecutor-in-chief, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande.

There was no doubt in the Nzimande’s mind – or that of the dominant faction in the ANC’s Luthuli House – that the President’s dignity had been near-fatally impaired, and Zuma family members were trotted out in a procession to express outrage and distress. Church leaders queued to comment on the erosion of social values. And, perhaps most distressingly of all, a subtext came into focus in which The Spear was seen as an icon of unregenerate and deviously subversive ‘whiteness’: the race card, the populist trump of all trumps.

The ANC was, according to a 27 May press release (more passionate than grammatical), ‘extremely disturbed and outraged by the distasteful and indecent manner in which Brett Murray and the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg is displaying the person [sic] of Comrade President Jacob Zuma’. It went on to talk about ‘this disgusting and unfortunate display’ and to indicate it had instructed lawyers to approach the courts to compel Murray and the Goodman Gallery to remove the ‘portrait from display as well as from their website and destroy all printed promotional material. We have also detected that this distasteful and vulgar portrait of the President has been displayed on a weekend newspaper and its website, we again have instructed our lawyers to request the said newspaper to remove the portrait from their website.’ Justifying the intervention, Mthembu continued: ‘It is our view … that the image and the dignity of our President as both President of the ANC, President of the Republic and as a human being has been dented by this so-called piece of art by Brett Murray at Goodman Gallery.’

Though Zuma himself did not pronounce on the subject,[8] his spokesman, Mac Maharaj, was ‘amazed at the crude and offensive manner in which this artist denigrates the person and office of the President of the Republic of South Africa’.

For his part, Nzimande, seemingly on a latter-day Stalinist high, called initially for an outright boycott of City Press, in which a photograph of the image had appeared, and for the enactment of special legislation to criminalise such assaults on the dignity of El Presidente and his exalted office. So damaging was it, according to Nzimande, that the only recourse was to destroy the work once and for all – this after a mismatched pair of self-appointed vigilantes had already essayed a more cosmetic censorship, attacking the artwork with broad brushes and tubs of industrial paint, and the unnamed German collector who bought the work in pristine condition had indicated he was still prepared to take it in modified form.

From the boycotting of City Press in its entirety, however, Nzimande backed down after meeting with City Press editor Ferial Haffajee, softening the call to one of averting the public eye from the offending edition. For her part, Haffajee – no doubt under pressure from the management of the newspaper owners, Naspers, not to mention the very real threat posed by the ANC alliance’s threats of rolling mass action – was led, after initial defiance, to reconsider her stance. ‘As an olive branch to play a small role in turning around a tough situation,’ she wrote, ‘I have decided to take down the image.’ She also made mention of threats to the safety of her editorial team and said that, as a ‘great fan’ of the country, she had been compelled to take stock of the fact that her newspaper had been forced into a divisive role rather than ‘bridge-building’.[9]

Meanwhile, Nzimande’s call for special legislation to protect the dignity of the President – of the kind that would have brought constitutional South Africa into line with such paranoid regimes as those of Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea – apparently failed to find traction in the ANC, and was mentioned again only to indicate that the intentions behind the call had been misinterpreted.[10]

And so it went around and around – with the South African National Editors Forum and academic commentators like University of Cape Town constitutional law authority Pierre de Vos insisting on the inviolable right to free speech and robust satire in democratic South Africa – and fellow satirists having a field day. One memorable take in this vein was given in a Zapiro image of the Union Buildings – distinctive Herbert Baker turret now terminating in a swollen glans penis – with a speech balloon reading: ‘On behalf of my four wives, 22 children, my 13 other children out of wedlock (… or is it 14?) … and my numerous mistresses, I am outraged at being painted as a philandering womanizer!!’ So, too, involuntary satirists like the Film and Publications Board also added their two bits to the real-time surrealism, clearing the work for public consumption, but slapping a 16-year-old age restriction on it.

There is a good deal that is instructive in all of this, but picking it over for nuance falls beyond the scope of the present essay. What interests me here is a more general point: that once the Alliance weighed in, it stopped being about art. The Spear entered the compromised space of political discourse, a space in which things or propositions are as they are used, or as they are held up, and not in any definitive way as their makers intended them. In this register The Spear becomes a site for polemical play, and its identity is a kind of aggregate of the ways in which it has been used rather than of the intentionalities inscribed or structured by its maker within the context of his (or her) practice as an artwork.

To an extent, of course, this process is not unfamiliar within the canon of contemporary art, and is emblematically naturalised in Marcel Duchamp’s designation of selected everyday objects as ready-mades. What distinguishes Duchamp’s snow shovel, hung from the ceiling and titled In Advance of the Broken Arm, from one that is used for shovelling is essentially three things: the fact of its designation as an artwork; the gnomic title; and the fact that it has been removed from its original usefulness. Perhaps a fourth is that it becomes the site of its own history – the conundrum in real time that it poses for the context of art – a history which unfolds in real time rather than the hypothetical time of art-making.

The difference, though, is that Duchamp in his designation of ready-mades is presenting the art world with objects that are mute as repositories of the artist’s significant choices in making them – those differential gestures wherein ‘meaning’ is inscribed in the traditional forms of art-making – whereas the second half-life of The Spear is the result of what is essentially a semantic hijack operation.

Whatever Murray’s original intentions, and whatever ambiguities the work might manifest when considered within the context of art and in terms of its position within the discourse essayed in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition, in its appropriation by the ANC and its allies it is crudely but inalienably reduced to being a cipher for a debate around Jacob Zuma’s presidency. As the hijack happened, this second identity played out literally in the deliberate defacement of the work – leaving a final product bearing the significant marks of other hands than Murray’s and a work irredeemably transformed. But even if it had survived in its original form, the real-time uses to which The Spear had been put would still have been determinant of its public identity.

I have in the past (with little regard for the meaning of the phrase in the context of atomic physics) referred in this context to such real-time adventures vis–à-vis the identity of the work in the virtual time of art-making as a ‘half-life’. The point here is that, in general, when the artwork is taken up in the real world, it develops a history over which the artist has little or no control, and in this process becomes the site of a semantic collaboration, as it were. On one level the observation is both obvious and trite and – though sometimes leading into interesting questions around value and meaning, as for example when a formerly nondescript Dutch interior is discovered to be a Vermeer – does little to enrich our understanding of the identity of the work. However, sometime last century it came to be somewhat more to the point, especially as artists came increasingly to work explicitly with scandal, outrage and provocation within their conception of a work of art. To put this slightly differently, the changed theoretical perspective has the artist, to a greater or lesser degree, operating in real time and encoding himself or herself into the artwork as created.

Murray is a particularly interesting study in this regard. While it needs to be emphasised that his work is possessed of a strong internal logic and an impeccable integrity of expressive syntax, it is also true that there has been a consistent preoccupation in Murray’s work with locating the artist himself within the framework of production. As discussed earlier in relation to the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, he casts himself ambiguously as the inheritor of the European Enlightenment and of an Africanness, but the engagement with identity as a theme within his art is far more thoroughgoing than that. I have commented in the past on a quirky recurrence in his oeuvre of a physical type that gives a satirical take on his own appearance – a theme that runs from the stocky figuration of his student and post-student sculptures; through the self-reflective imagery of the ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ exhibition, where his inversions of racial stereotyping are cued in by a photograph of The Artist as a Zulu, Aged 6 used on the invitation; to the memorabilia he collects and locates in relation to the metaphor of Robben Island in the 1997 exhibition, ‘Guilt and Innocence’.

The effect in all of these interventions is to bring himself and his own lived identity into the frame of his output as an artist – and ultimately into the problematic of his art-making, as a real-time rather than a merely meditative element. In this way too, he occasionally goes into a very direct first person in his gestures in the domains of art – rather than the mediated languages of symbolism, persona and reference. Thus, for instance, in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ show, the generally abstracted imagery is interrupted by two wall pieces bearing the same text I quoted earlier: Every time / I hear you sing / The machine gun song / I want to find one / And shove it up / Your fat arse.

Now, as artworks go, this is about as elegant as a ripping fart in public – and, out of context, has about as much artistic merit. In context, however, that is to say as a token of Murray’s presence within the process of art-making, it serves to wrench the viewer back into a real-time engagement with what the work is really and ultimately about.

And here is the point. Murray is a highly skilled and intellectually formidable practitioner, as capable of layering reference and association in his imagery as he is of cutting unkind metals into the finest of filigrees. But at the same time it is central to his project that he exists, as a feeling and sentient being, in the time and space in which he is making the work.

Provocation is not all, but neither is it accidental. As any number of commentators have pointed out, The Spear is far from being (obviously at least) the most provocative work on the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition. Even the ANC’s Jackson Mthembu objected in passing to the presentation of the ANC logo with the legend ‘Sold’ crossing it. He might as well have singled out the simple negation of provisions regarding security, work and freedom contained in the Freedom Charter, or the designation of Joseph Stalin as a Tribal Elder.

And in the face of such provocations, the appropriate response certainly is to take offence and to experience the criticism in a direct and real-time kind of way. In short, while the vehemence of the ANC alliance’s response was certainly not appropriate and threats of doing damage to the artist and his family, and for that matter the hosting gallery, are not to be either condoned or entertained, there is a case to be made that Murray asked for it – at least courted the circumstances in which his artwork was wrenched into the real-life and real-time political fray.

It is the task that now lies ahead for him as an artist – if he is to maintain the trajectory of his work thus far – to look that particular tiger in the eye, and develop his languages as an artist, so that his engagement with the knotty problematics of art and real-time engagement becomes syntactic within his post-modern practice.

I note, in conclusion, that subsequent to the debacle of The Spear, Murray made a seven-metre-high sculpture for Telesure Investment Holdings’ headquarters in Midrand. It is of a generic figure in the African traditional register with five empty spheres piled up for a head. In this it reprises and develops an enigmatic blankness earlier essayed in the ‘White Like Me’ exhibition of 2002.

The question is: what will move in to fill the brittle vacancy?

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Footnotes

[1] One is reminded of former Labour Minister and Reserve Bank governor, and one-time trade union activist, Tito Mboweni taking offence when his rustic Limpopo retreat was described as a farm, insisting it was a ‘country estate’; extolling the virtues of the ‘curved driveway’ for conveying the gentleman to the front door; and declining to attend any social gathering where a selection of top-end single malt whiskies was not on offer. All this as he and his cronies in the bank voted him a R3.8 million annual salary around the middle of the 2000s.

[2] A theme addressed head on, of course, in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition via a series of naive images in wood and wood veneer, reminiscent of the kind of posters produced by community organisations in the 1980s, where Murray has done nothing more than add a negative to passages from the Freedom Charter, the ANC’s sacred text, so they read, for example: ‘There shall not be work and security. The wealth of the country shall not be shared by all.’

[3] On 16 August police opened fire on striking workers affiliated to an upstart, non-Cosatu affiliated union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, at Marikana in the platinum-rich North West Province, killing at least 44. The mine at the centre of the protest action is owned by British miner Lonmin, whose South African empowerment partner is headed by deputy ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa, a former general secretary of the rival Cosatu-affiliated union, the National Union of Mineworkers.

[4] In this vein the striding worker grasping the future in Progress – where membership of the ‘Tender Party’ is advised as a means to that end – is a stock figure from a generalised cultural memory of a struggle theoretically underpinned by the Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

[5] ‘Outrage is the Medium’, Weekend Argus, 26 May 2012.

[6] There is a possibly instructive irony here: Vavi has consistently been one of the more vocal critics of Zuma’s alleged philandering ways, but in late July 2013 he himself got caught up in a sex scandal, finding himself accused, so to speak, of failing to keep his penis on the right side of his trousers.

[7] This requires some qualification. In fact, we are not talking here about the ANC as any kind of monolith, but as an organisation deeply fractured precisely around the presidency of Jacob Zuma. While many senior ANC (and for that matter Cosatu and SACP members) privately expressed themselves appalled at what was widely perceived to be an assault on key freedoms of expression, as well as on the appropriateness of Murray’s satire in the first place, the question facing such critics, as the populist juggernaut bore down, was whether this was a battle worth fighting.

[8] Zuma is reported to have been initially amused when the image was drawn to his attention, commenting only to the effect that ‘it’ was bigger than that, but in the event he was counselled to express outrage for strategic reasons.

[9] In point of fact, Haffajee later – when it was too late, one fears – went back on her initial decision to back down. Delivering the annual T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture on press freedom, she said the experience had turned her into a ‘fundamentalist’ for press freedom.

[10] Nonetheless, the impulse is instructive in itself. The nagging questions around the response to The Spear arise not so much from the ANC outrage provoked by Murray’s satire as they do from the singling out of what was one of the less confrontational critiques as the focus for that outrage. The answers, I believe, lie in an analysis of the nature and history of Zuma’s presidency, which from the start – a start where Zuma, dismissed as Deputy President in the face of well-documented corruption charges, fought back by presenting an alternative version of reality in which he was the innocent victim of a personal conspiracy. From such beginnings it was orchestrated and swelled as a cult of personality rather than of idea, one in which loyalty rather than truth came to figure as the ultimate good. In this way Julius Malema – latterly, and ironically, now Zuma’s critic – was prepared to ‘kill’ and to ‘die’ for Zuma (note, not for Zuma’s ideas, which to this day remain mysterious) and his followers defined themselves as ‘100% Zuma’. That Zuma himself was defined as ‘100% Zulu Boy’, while it complicated the intentionality somewhat, also served in part to decode the populist surge in the history of South African democracy and its essential appeal to traditionally African, but essentially fuedalist, structures of authority.