FANAKALO DEMOCRACY: ARE WE THERE?

A South American scholar, Unger, defines democracy as the arrangements by which society agrees to govern itself or each other. In this definition, he introduces the notion that if it fits that society, it is its democracy. The Chinese, on the other hand, have, over centuries, been thinking and designing a democracy that would be able to hold their society together, notwithstanding its size and diversity. In this pursuit, the Chinese have developed a vertical democratic system whose stability is anchored by its refusal to allow a horizontal review of its decision-making process.

For some time, democracy has been about incorporating and integrating others into a governance construct whose outcome is coherence and identification. The lens through which the crafting of democracy is examined is a national or, rather, community-specific one. The stability of a democratic order lies in the organisation of institutions that will shape and protect the arrangements to govern each other. 

Humanity has made its civilisation the anchor platform upon which its nationhood, and by extension, its form of democracy, will be based. Civilisations are generally about ideas on human relationships, society, and the ordering of co-existence with nature, the economy, resources, and production systems. What has successfully captured a civilisation, besides the institutional power of the state to enforce it, has been its soft enforcement through language as a collection of culture codes that are algorithmic to how society interacts and transacts with itself.

As an in-community network, language serves as the conduit through which religion, political ideas, art, literature, and technologies are shared and passed along. It is not just a means of communication but an abstraction of a society's mind, playing a pivotal role in shaping relations, particularly power relations. It dictates what is acceptable as lingua franca tones, what will be acceptable as a value system, and, thus, a way of doing things.

Human emancipation begins with how we imagine it. We develop images of that emancipated self, remove artefacts of a pre-emancipation era from the imagery, and then deploy a language to sustain emancipation. In this process, we must be mindful not to undermine the language that sustained oppression but to harness its cohesive power to make aspects of exclusion from being emancipated abnormal.

In the character of 'some amongst humans', there will be those who will define themselves as superior to others. In othering themselves as exceptional, they will develop cultural tools to reorder society and position themselves above the rest. This might include using access to technology, inventing a lingua franca that codes a hierarchy, and developing concepts that cognitively arrange these hierarchies. Protocol, a language of power, is deployed in such situations to create invincible walls and gates of access that can only be opened by understanding the interior of the language.

 

Consequently, establishing democracies as arrangements agreed upon by society to govern itself will be capitated to notches allowed by those with the power of ideation about relations in that society. Before and after emancipation, leaders of society will be saved from being tools of trade in the enterprise of continued hierarchies if they were saved from being 'fluent' in the language that conditions hierarchies.

 

Fanagalo is a language developed as a grammatically simplified means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It provides a platform upon which the exigencies of the production process can be negotiated in a differently constructed hierarchy. Its vocabulary and grammar will thus be limited to the needs of what defines its needs. Constructed out of different languages, it will import as a cultural relic the ethic and ethics required to fulfil the intents interior to those in control. Its nativity includes enslaving one by the other through the soft infusion of hierarchy to create an order incentivised differently. When its users master its intents, society finds itself in a quicksand of an oppressive system organically sustained by the fluent in a Fanagalo type of language. 

 

Fanagalo has been used as a language of control and order in South Africa. It defined hierarchies such as 'makhulu baas', 'boy', 'bruru ka wena' (meaning a bobejaan spanner, more accurately Bob Jones spanner), 'kaffir klap' and many other demeaning terms whose use in that context normalised oppression. 

 

Without passing any judgment on our context, it might be worthwhile to interrogate how deep a fanakalo is in our democracy when we see new versions of 'Makhulubaas' disguised as FDI and related terms. How fluent in fanakalo are our current leaders for us to trust their intent when deep in shafts that make our economy turn? 

These are the systemic questions we have never dealt with. The extent to which the prisoner status of Mandela for 27 years propelled his celebrated reconciliation path, was he a tamed leader or a genuine human with an inherent reconciliatory spirit. These and many other questions seek to find out the extent to which being oppressive is a learned virtue for Africans given how our leaders can, and in a stroke of funding, reverse gains of decades-long struggles,