Not the mama

It’s 6.30 on a Sunday morning and I’ve made it to my desk for the first time in what feels like weeks. I’ve been here during the week for other things (house admin and the like) but to sit and write? It feels like never. Part of my resistance is the clutter that’s everywhere. Piles of books that don’t fit onto the bookshelf. A couch filled with paper. There’s the fax machine, scanner, camera, printer, a box of books for the charity store, a replacement heating panel, a picture that needs to be hung on the wall. This is not a restful room. This is a place that reminds me of things not done and things still to be done. It’s a daily subtle criticism of my lack of good organisation skills. My desk chair is missing a wheel and it’s impossible to replace it (or it seems so) but the chair itself is comfortable enough that I don’t want to replace it. So we carry on with four out of five wheels.

I’ve got several good books on the go at the moment but I don’t want to mention any of them until I’m finished. I’ve already had to revise my estimates of books read this year. Halfway through the year and I’ve finished a total of eight books. That’s less than one book every three weeks! So what have I been doing rather than reading? Well there’s the small matter of the pie

And speaking of the pie, yesterday I was just lamenting the fact that Baby F hardly every smiles at me anymore. She’s four months old and sleeping through the night like, well a dream. We put it down to her being a girl. She feeds well, sleeps well. And while I’m sure that she smiles and gurgles to L much the time, yesterday she was looking at me as though I am someone she does know but she’s not sure what value I bring to this whole enterprise.

L said something sensible about how we don’t have kids to get things back from them. And Baby F does give me those heart-melting little laughs of hers. She’s taken to blowing little milk or saliva bubbles. When you make lip noises back to her she thinks it’s hilarious. But at other times she will look at me with these big serious eyes as if to say “Who are you again?” And then I’ll do a little tap-dance and smile and laugh a little manically and sing a little song and she will look unmoved.

“You’ve got to do better than that, whoever you are with the odd face that isn’t Mom’s and no boobs.”

I keep remembering the little dinosaur baby going “Not the mama! Not the mama!’ before braining his dad with the frying pan.

“It’s me, daddy!” I plead. Nothing. A raised eyebrow perhaps. A slight frown.

But it’s true that most of the time I don’t need anything from her. I’m not in this for smiles and giggles. I do love that baby smell and the feel of baby hugs. And even when she drops her lip in a little pout it’s sweet. But knowing that she’s healthy and well looked-after is good enough for me. And I need to take whatever opportunity I get to just sit with her (or walk with her) and read to her. Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl. Christopher Robin. The Gruffalo and so on. Last Saturday I got a CD of nursery rhymes from the library as well as “Daddy Hug” which has the wonderful sequence: “Daddy squeak, daddy chirp> Daddy hiccup, daddy burp!” which was the perfect excuse to let rip with a belch myself. If it’s good enough for Baby F, I thought, then it’s good enough for me. The first few times L laughed as well but then she’d had enough.

“Please don’t do that out of respect for me!” was L’s comment yesterday. She didn’t need to add that I’m not the second baby in the house and so I shouldn’t expect a “Good one!” in response.

How to respond to Julius Malema?

I want to fire off an educated and considered response to the shock of Julius Malema’s latest outbursts but I find I’m too cold, too distracted by other things and I find the situation too depressing. (To non-South Africans, Julius Malema is the newly re-elected ANC Youth League president and they have just called for the nationalisation of the mines and the banks and for land expropriation without compensation. They have backed this call with strong-arm bullying of the ANC leadership to the effect of “support us in this or you’re out next year”.)

How to respond to something like this? I think many middle-class South Africans might well respond with catastrophising. I commented to L that I was really worried that the South Africa that Baby F’s generation will grow up in will be worse than the country that we grew up in. And that is saying a lot if you consider that we grew up under apartheid. The message which I got from the ANCYL conference was this: You (whites) benefitted for too long under apartheid. It’s taking too long for us (blacks) to get rich and so we are just going to take the main drivers of the economy. It’s a powerful strategy and it plays into white guilt and black anger. How can we deny that whites benefitted under apartheid? Or that for many, many people the government has failed to deliver in 15 years what they promised? Should we blame whites for that?

But even to enter into the debate seems pointless. Malema and his group do not seem to be interested in the finer details of how to address poverty. They have seized the win-lose model of nationalisation and expropriation. There’s no space here for details, nuances, a consideration of all the efforts that have been tried before. Where’s the Constitution in all of this? A consideration of complexities? Addressing poverty is a hugely complicated thing. It requires a sustained focus on education, government and business incentives, redressing the wrongs of the past, encouraging investment and growth opportunities, regulation, entrepreneurship and also addressing the social barriers to employment such as crime and violence. What the ANCYL are doing is to take the most powerful weapon they have and threaten all and sundry with it. “Do what we say or else!”

And so I was sad and also a bit angry that they seem to get away with their talk of helping the poor while looking after their own political and economic interests first. One commenter on the Times Live site compared Malema with Hitler (and quite aptly I thought):

The policies, views and tactics of Julius Malema and his majority wing of the ANC Youth League sound familiar to those with knowledge of 20th-century European history.
Populism, nationalisation, land policies, the race card, anti free media, anti trade unions, an us-vs-the-rest mentality, “under siege” rhetoric, nationalistic bourgeoisie disguised as new socialism, It feels just like Germany 1939.
Your woodwork is bad, Julius. How is your world history? Theo Martinez

The editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce, (editor of Business Day) had this to say:

It will be hard one day for historians fully to capture the stupidity and spinelessness of Zuma and his administration. Compromised politically from the start, he has so stuffed his cabinet with people he owes political debts to that none of them now has enough authority to stand up and say that nationalisation or land seizures by the state without compensation will never happen. Derek Hanekom made a brave attempt on Twitter at the weekend, but he has no authority.

…

I know that it is fashionable to argue that Malema is a clever chap who knows what he’s doing. But he’s not. Like Zuma, he is an economic airhead with an instinct for politics and survival. No one in their right mind could possibly argue nationalisation and expropriation are cures for poverty and mean it. No one with a smidgen of concern for the destitute could seriously argue throwing a productive farmer off his land and settling the poor on it amounts to a plan worthy of the name.

It’s important to see Malema’s comments in context and that context is that of the ANC succession battle in 2012. Taken at an individual level, Malema’s comments about nationalisation seem to amount to idiocy. But they are not his comments and his policies alone. They are those of the ANCYL and they are designed to strike a chord with the frustrated and poor majority.

As a psychologist I find myself struggling to understand the vast gap between South African political discourse and everyday psychology-speak. In psychology we talk about anxiety and frustrations, empathy, feelings and thoughts and behaviour. In politics it’s all about power and self-interest, rhetoric and point-scoring, image-building, jockeying for position and endless arguments and counter-arguments. If we look at Malema from a psychological perspective it’s tempting to individualise his comments and call him stupid and even evil. But looked at from a political perspective he’s representing a particular group and lobbying for greater power with regards to other groups. As tempting as it is to despair at Malema as being just another “Mad Bob Mugabe”, the problem is much more complicated than that of misguided individuals. It’s a political problem which requires a political solution. The ANCYL have now declared their positions well ahead of the ANC leadership conference in December 2012. Let’s hope that the response from Malema’s opponents at the national level is a powerful one.

**

On the home front, all is still good. By ‘good’ you understand that there are the usual joys, frustrations and anxieties attendant with parenthood. L is going back to work in July and I’ve been practising giving ‘pie’ her bottle. I’m pretty confident that I can hold the fort for the first week until our routine kicks in properly. And both grannies are besotted with pie and are ready to take her two mornings a week each (with B our domestic covering the last day).

What amazes me is noticing the small but incremental changes. Baby F is now four months old and she has just moved over from her crib to her cot. She looks so small and yet so much bigger than she was just a month ago. I look at her 1-year old cousin who is already walking and so much more alert and it’s incredible to think of the developments that are in store.

Incidentally, it was funny to see how A (her cousin) reacted when she saw her on Saturday. She walked right up to the pram, took pie’s blankets off and then took off her pink socks. I was astonished. I know that A has had to become a lot more assertive in relation to her other cousin (who is two weeks older and very busy and assertive) but why remove pie’s socks? Well it was quite simple. She has a pair just like them and she assumed that pie had taken hers! She’s so used to battling for toys with cousin S that she wasted no time in reclaiming ‘her’ socks. L’s sister calmly showed her that the socks were way too small for her feet and she allowed them to be taken away again.

As a photo-obsessed first-time parent, I’m naturally taking hundreds of pictures. Now if we can only find the time to put them all into an album (and then find some more time to finally put our wedding photos into another one!)