IT IS EASY enough to dismiss Farid
Esack as a professional odd-man-out — he is the male Gender
Commissioner, the progressive Muslim, the liberal comrade. He certainly
can seem a quirky and paradoxical figure, inclined to charge
quixotically at any current controversy likely to lend him publicity.
Last year, for instance, he published an impassioned and nearly
incoherent plea for leniency towards Allan Boesak; got involved in
defending Colleen Lowe-Morna, then chief executive officer of the
Gender Commission, in a sort of B-movie version of the Helena
Dolny-Land Bank affair; and continued his long-running and highly
public battle with Islamic conservatives over the rights of women
within Islam. The new century has started with his suing the Citizen
for allegedly publishing a defamatory letter about him. He is always
popping up, passionately demanding fair play.
Not that Esack is averse to the limelight or that he cannot be utterly
wrong-headed. His article in the Mail & Guardian (March 26, 1999)
about his comrade the Reverend Allan Boesak, for instance, was written
in a white heat of rage and shows it. It is absurd to suggest, as Esack
did, that because Boesak made an "immense contribution to the struggle"
and that he was tried by a white judge and a judicial system that
carries the "baggage of complicity" in apartheid that he should be in
some way excused of fraud. The entire piece is an object lesson in
windy rhetoric and emotive special pleading and was exposed as such by
Rhoda Kadalie, the former Human Rights commissioner and UDF activist,
in the next week’s edition.
But the story does not stop there. Esack’s article did not just
irritate liberals and other enthusiasts for the rule of law; it also
struck a deep emotional chord in some very senior figures in the ANC.
Two cabinet ministers telephoned to thank him for putting into words
what they had been feeling — how painful it was to watch one of their
own, who had been brave and inspiring during the heroic days of the
struggle, condemned by relics of the regime they had fought to
overturn. This seemed one of the highest prices they had to pay for the
negotiated settlement. As Esack says, "the amount of money that the
state had to spend on defending Magnus Malan was less than the total
stolen by Allan Boesak." At an emotional level, it just felt horribly
wrong.
If Esack were a standard-issue ANC politician he would, no doubt, have
been utterly delighted with this response. He had, after all, been
praised from on high for an emotive attack on "apartheid relics". But
asked to comment on the Boesak article now, he says "Many people
thought it was a terrible article — and they were quite right. It was
poorly written and pathetically argued. Rhoda Kadalie’s response was
brilliant." What is more, he admits that a lot of the anger in his
letter was misdirected. He thinks now that he really felt angry with a
lot of his fellow comrades — and with himself — who had known for some
time that Boesak was going off the rails, but did nothing to stop him.
As Kadalie put it in her letter, "his friends gossiped endlessly about
his newfound opulence, his self-conscious vanities and his
affairs."
Esack’s commitment to liberation politics and his critical distance
from it are the product of a most unusual life. He was born in the Cape
Town suburb of Wynberg in 1959. His devoutly Muslim mother, abandoned
by two husbands, worked long hours in a nearby steam laundry struggling
to support her six boys. This background makes Esack one of relatively
few senior struggle veterans whose origins are among the poorest of the
working class. As he recalls, his very passionate commitment to the
redress of injustice was formed by "just looking at my mother. She was
a woman who was literally — and for me this is not a cliché — under the
triple oppression: patriarchy, apartheid, capitalism. She really
slogged, and she died at the age of 52. And the only thing that she
ever got back was a measly box of chocolates at the end of the year."
Esack vividly recalls the hunger and cold of his earliest years,
scavenging in the gutters for apple cores and running rather than
walking to school to try to stave off frostbite.
This background, however, did not lead Esack to adopt the Trotskyite
hard-left position still to be found in small patches — like some rare
and endangered species of fynbos — on the Cape Flats. He calls himself
a member of the "soft left" and does not think that socialism can be
achieved in his lifetime. In fact, he is not at all sure what socialism
would mean in practice beyond the existence of a social democratic
welfare state; he is an admirer of the German cradle-to-grave support
system. The only two things he is certain about in this area, he says,
are that unbridled capitalism continues to wreak havoc and that his
confusion mirrors that of all honest socialists in this
post-ideological age.
Esack is probably as, if not more, interested in the fate of
particular individuals as in the structural issues that command the
attention of the orthodox left. "I do understand people like Blade
Nzimande and the SACP and I do understand that it is simplistic to take
a very personal, bleeding-heart attitude. But one of the major problems
that we have with the left in South Africa is that the structural
nature of injustice becomes the big thing that they are obsessed with.
And when you become obsessed with the structural nature of things you
often lose what had originally moved you: the deeply human, the deeply
personal." For Esack, at the core of the "deeply human" is his
inherited commitment to a version of Islam that places great value on
individual freedom and responsibility.
All three of the oppressions under which Esack’s mother laboured
intensified when she and her family were forcibly removed to
Bonteheuvel under the Group Areas Act, though he is careful not to
romanticise Wynberg before it was "tidied up" by apartheid’s callous
social engineers. The streets where coloured people lived were crowded,
dirty and achingly poor, but there was a strong sense of community.
Muslims had three mosques conveniently nearby. There was an old-age
home. Conditions in the laundry may have been unpleasant and the pay
low but at least it was close to home. When the very young Esack went
begging for bread in the nearby white neighbourhood, chances were that
he would be given some. Bonteheuvel was less crowded than Wynberg and
their new house had running water, but Bonteheuvel was a human
dumping-ground rather than a community. A mosque had yet to built and
the nearest Muslim neighbours lived some distance away. It was also
alienating, dangerous and gang-ridden. He has one especially traumatic
early memory of Bonteheuvel: "I just remember my mother coming into the
house covered in blood." She had been raped. There is no mystery about
the origins of Esack’s commitment to defending the rights of
women.
Given the poverty and deprivation of his background, it is astounding
how early and how far Esack’s intellectual gifts developed. Equally
noteworthy is how quickly his exceptional talent was recognised and how
it was valued within the Islamic community. From the age of seven, he
wanted to be a priest. At nine, when many of his generation began to
turn to the fellowship of gangs and the solace of drugs he joined the
international Islamic fundamentalist-revivalist movement known as the
Tablighi Jama’ah, an intensely pious group, characterised by political
quietism and a strong sense of brotherhood among its members. In these
years, Esack’s Islamic faith was intense, personal and orthodox. He
feels now that the intensity of his adherence to the Tablighi Jama’ah
can be explained partly by his search for a substitute father. By the
age of ten, he was a teacher at the local madressah (Islamic school.)
At 11, he was briefly acting head of another madressah. By the time he
turned 15, he had won a scholarship to attend a seminary in
Pakistan.
What made him unusual among his Muslim brothers was that he did not
share their tendency to ignore secular politics and to think that the
solution to all problems was to be found in greater religious devotion.
The year after he joined the Tablighi Jama’ah, he was first detained by
the security police. Before leaving for Pakistan in 1974, he had become
the chairperson of National Youth Action, a vocally anti-apartheid
group. He also briefly flirted, as was the style of the late sixties
and early seventies, with black consciousness politics. An anecdote
from the period which he particularly likes, and which he still thinks
is very significant, concerns an exasperated question addressed to him
during one of his many detentions by the much feared "Spyker" van Wyk
of the security police, a man whom Esack describes as the "incarnation
of evil" in the Cape at the time. Van Wyk, unaware of Esack’s dual
affiliation, wanted to know why this politically troublesome teenager
could not be more "die mense met die lang jurkies, by which he meant
the robed, devout and politically inert members of the Tablighi
Jama’ah. The teenage Esack took off his robe when engaged in National
Youth Action and put it back on again when involved with his revivalist
brotherhood. Later he found a way to fuse, as it were, his activist’s
t-shirt with his Islamic revivalist’s robe.
This combination of first-hand knowledge of the coloured poor in the
Western Cape, Islamic faith and gang culture gives Esack insight into
Pagad (People against Gangsterism and Drugs). Although strongly and
vocally opposed to this group and its violent activities, he
understands its supporters’ world view — where they are coming from.
They are not just — or not only — a group of corrupted vigilantes. They
are, he thinks, primarily fuelled by anger against a secular state that
seems indifferent to their needs as coloured people and contemptuous of
their most cherished beliefs as conservative Muslims.
Esack spent the nine years 1974-82 in Pakistan, where he studied a
range of Islamic and other subjects, qualifying as a Muslim cleric, a
mawlana. He also completed his secular education, gaining a degree in
Islamic theology and sociology. Today his critical distance from the
consensus-seeking, loyalist mainstream of the ANC may be partly due to
his geographical distance from the exile communities of Eastern and
Western Europe and Africa in those years. His life in Karachi also
moulded him in different ways from the cell on Robben Island in which
he would almost inevitably have ended up if he had stayed in Cape Town.
Although he retains a strong affection for many Pakistanis, he found
Pakistan — an authoritarian Islamic state — a difficult place to live.
The religious and political atmosphere of the college where he studied
did not always suit him. As he wryly remarks in the introduction to his
book On Being A Muslim, "This was, after all . . . an institution that
was to produce some of the leading figures in a group which later made
a rather embarrassing appearance on the stage of political Islam, the
Afghan Taliban." In contrast to most of those South African Muslims who
romanticise Islamic states as ideal societies, Esack has actually lived
for a long period in a country ruled by Islamic principles. He knows
from personal experience that this is no better for people than
sticking to any other excessively narrow ideology.
Esack was equally disturbed by the way in which Christians and other
religious minorities were systematically disadvantaged. Unlike most of
his Pakistani classmates, his family had experienced mutual support in
their shared poverty with Christian neighbours. The older, more
intellectually and theologically sophisticated Esack simply could not
accept an Islam which condemned his mother’s closest friend and
neighbour, the devout Catholic Mrs Batista, or even the patient Jewish
debt-collector, Mr Frank, who repeatedly extended their family’s
credit. As he puts it, "Many people can actually live with the idea of
a God who is unjust as this. I cannot." Some of Esack’s most important
contacts in Pakistan were, therefore, among the Christian community of
Karachi, which required him to make room in his theology to respect and
to value "the religious other". The Pakistani Catholics he met in the
seventies also introduced him to Christian liberation theology, at the
core of which is the idea that religious belief is most fully expressed
in commitment to the political liberation of the oppressed and the
social upliftment of the poor.
When Esack returned to South Africa in 1982, he and some friends — the
best known being his cousin Ebrahim Rasool, now leader of the ANC in
the Western Cape — formed the religious-political group Call of Islam.
Originally a small discussion group for anti-apartheid Muslims who
wanted to relate their faith to their politics, Call of Islam grew into
a significant sub-organisation of the United Democratic Front and Esack
took up the life of the eighties South African political priest. He
marched, Tutu-like, beneath an SACP banner, the Qur’an clutched to his
breast. He addressed, by his own count, over a thousand protest
meetings. He conducted many of the political funerals which
characterised the period and became involved in international
inter-faith organisations opposing apartheid, eventually becoming a
senior figure in the World Conference on Religion and Peace.
In 1990, Esack’s intellectual and religious side asserted itself
again. He left South Africa again, this time to read for a doctorate in
Qur’anic interpretation, spending the next five years in Britain and
Germany, conducting doctoral and post-doctoral research. He was not,
therefore, involved in the drama and compromises of those years, which
did so much to define the political loyalties and identities of most
South African politicians, and certainly most ANC members. These years
saw a struggle for position with many activists achieving high
position. It was a struggle from which Esack voluntarily absented
himself. Instead the publications resulting from these years have made
Mawlana Dr Farid Esack one the leading academic interpreters of Islam
in the world. He is hugely in demand at international academic
conferences on religion in general and Islam in particular. His
writings on these topics blend a sophisticated and pluralist faith with
a detailed knowledge of traditional Islamic thought and a mastery of
modern western theological technique. He knows what it is like to
believe passionately in a Qur’an which is literally the word of God and
to study it as such; but is also strongly influenced by Christian
liberation theology and by the sceptical, secular-minded, contextual
study of religion dominant in Western universities.
To the extreme irritation of most orthodox South African Muslims, he
is able to bandy Qur’anic quotations with the best of them, but does so
to defend a version of Islam which tolerates religious diversity, which
demands equality for women and which is intended as a justification of
soft left politics. It is one thing for the left-wing secularists of
the Gender Commission to have demanded that the Johannesburg
fundamentalist radio station Voice of Islam allow women’s voices to be
broadcast, but when Esack does so, it is more difficult to ignore and
provokes greater anger. He gets a lot of death threats. "The passion
with which I feel things is a bit too strong for me to ever be a
well-loved and a well-accepted son of a minority community or a
community that believes it is under siege." But he wishes he could be
more welcome in the community that he still feels is his real
home.
Esack’s current political perspective is strongly analogous to his
religious one. As the Boesak story illustrates, he understands —
emotionally and intellectually — the perspective of those who remain
within the broad alliance and those temporarily or permanently
alienated from it. Take, for example, his attitude towards the dispute
that led to the departure of Colleen Lowe-Morna as chief executive
officer of the Gender Commission in November. His analysis of the
causes of this affair is frank and fair-minded, emphasising both the
structural and the personal causes of the dispute. As CEO, Lowe-Morna
was the only person at the commission who was financially responsible
to the Treasury and to private and foreign donors: "She was the
accounting officer. Good treasurers in any organisation aren’t popular
people." It was Lowe-Morna’s unfortunate duty to have to explain to the
commissioners who appointed her why they could not always have the
money to fund a particular pet project or excursion. This made some
commissioners angry. And, as Esack explains, they were not angry simply
because they were being thwarted. He believes that for many blacks,
unconsciously at least, one of the main points of the struggle was to
make sure they were never bossed around by a white person again.
As he says, Lowe-Morna "was appointed by the commissioners, but she
had a say in whether we could spend on this or that. If she said "no"
you didn’t re-examine the nature of your claim. You didn’t say "Oh my
god, I shouldn’t have hired a car, or I should have hired a group A
instead of a group C vehicle." You didn’t look at that. You said she’s
white and I’m black. If you didn’t say it openly, you went and
whispered." However Esack emphasises that there were other factors
involved — one of the gender commissioners who took the strongest
possible dislike to Lowe-Morna is white and he also insists that the
racial complaints never rose above whispers. But he cannot help feeling
that some people with a struggle pedigree are developing the wrong
attitudes. While he thinks that people who were involved in the
struggle, whites as well as blacks, are entitled to make claims, "there
is a whole sense of ‘this belongs to us because we are black’." Such
attitudes, from Esack’s point of view, are totally illegitimate.
His views on the relationship between the executive part of government
and the watchdog bodies established in Chapter 9 of the Constitution —
the Human Rights Commission, the Gender Commission, the Public
Protector and so on — are provocative. He explains the unpopularity of
these bodies among some senior politicians thus: "The liberal democracy
that our country has is really a very expensive one. And so when
government seeks to cut corners, you have a convergence about the
elements that irritate and the sheer economic imperative of making ends
meet. Sometimes I think that many of the politicians themselves do not
really understand what the checks and balances in the constitution are
for. If you come from a trade union background, what kind of patience
do you have towards notions of the independence of the judiciary?"
Equally someone who comes from an entirely gender-activist background
and is legitimately angry about a rape sentence, such as the seven
years Judge Foxcroft passed on a man who had raped his own daughter,
could forget that the whole human rights ethos is an interwoven one.
Take action against one judgment in the short-term and in the long run
the the whole independence of the judiciary can unravel. "You can’t
separate one part of it from another," he says.
But Esack’s defence of the commissions as they exist at the moment is
not total. He knows that a lot of commissioners do not seem to be doing
very much. He would like to see individual commissioners publish
monthly reports detailing their activities. To be fair, some
commissioners work very hard indeed. The Gender Commission’s work
includes far too much in the way of bureaucratic activity, but
commissioners do also deal with complaints from the public about the
violation of their rights by government or private employers, provide
informed comment on proposed legislation and work on the commission’s
own practical initiatives to improve people’s lives.
Esack also worries aloud about the independence of the Chapter 9
commissions. As he points out, appointments to these and related bodies
are, in effect, completely within the gift of the ANC — a list of
nominees is chosen by a simple majority in the relevant parliamentary
committee, from among whom the president makes his choice. He would
prefer the process of deciding who gets picked to operate in a more
independent way. At the moment, the department of justice funds the
commissions, meaning that justice minister Penuell Maduna gets to
decide which commissions, if any, will be given enough money to
function effectively. Esack would prefer them to be funded directly by
Parliament. His message on the watchdog commissions to the ruling party
can be summarised as "give them enough money to work effectively as a
check on abuses of power, including your power. Resist the temptation
to turn them all into lapdogs." Expressing such opinions is not the way
to win friends and influence people in high places, but nor does it
chime with the view held by many in the opposition camp that the
Chapter 9 commissions are no more than some of the plusher carriages on
the gravy train.
Is Farid Esack a liberal in all but name? Certainly, some aspects of
the liberal world-view are very important to him. His attitude towards
the Western Cape coalition government is particularly revealing. He
would prefer to see the ANC included in the provincial cabinet of the
Western Cape on grounds of "representivity" and because he believes
that it is the only party that has demonstrated a serious and sustained
commitment to gender equality. Nevertheless, he is quite clear that the
ANC — and in this case, remember, he means his cousin Ebrahim and
colleagues — were "bad losers" and that they acted in a way which
revealed intolerance of the "pattern of democracy throughout the
world".
"Liberalism in the classical sense has an enormous amount to offer
South Africa," he says. In particular, he values the liberal commitment
to "the independence of the different arms of the state, in a country
that has never known this." What is more, he strongly shares the
liberal commitment to the defence of individual autonomy against the
state. And, although he is not "ambiguous about justice and justice
issues", he deeply values the principled doubt and the scepticism about
all-embracing answers and total solutions which characterises liberal
thought: "Ambiguity flows through all my thinking. I think it’s a
value. Certainty belongs to God."
But, he points out, this liberalism of checks-and-balances, and of
human rights no majority can alter, is not an integral part of the
ANC’s political instincts. "The ruling party is committed to it, but
its commitment doesn’t come from its own origins. It comes far more
from our interaction with international liberation movements and
international solidarity movements and the fact that many of us were in
exile." The experience, for example, of going to an anti-apartheid
solidarity conference in Amsterdam hosted by gay couples had a
broadening effect on the minds of activists. But that sort of encounter
was not as formative for the political instincts of the ANC’s leaders
as decades of experience in a highly centralist, authoritarian and male
dominated organisation. The absence of deep liberal roots in the
struggle means that "We came up with this really brilliant constitution
but it is not entrenched in our own psyches. Liberalism has a valuable
role to play in the sense that some of these notions are far more
intrinsic to the liberal agenda."
But he also feels that in South Africa, liberalism and white
conservatism march too closely together, while many of the liberals’
policies are too Eurocentric. Liberals, he believes, often play their
role "in a really arrogant fashion", in a manner which is both
patronising and tinged with a strange half-denied guilt. They have an
obsession with retaining their own privileges, which is antithetical to
the broader agenda of transformation, certainly socioeconomic
transformation. They also want to be the guardians of constitutional
rights — which, he says, they are entitled to be, but unfortunately
this defence is too much of a knee-jerk "they can’t be trusted"
attitude. This results in people disparaging the entire liberal agenda,
"including the laudable commitment to individual freedom and individual
rights".
With his robustly individual opinions and tireless buzzing about on
missions of good works Esack admits that he irritates a lot of people.
He is sometimes maddening, but he is always unusually honest. But in
these drearily conformist times, gadflies are more than welcome. South
Africa has become, once again, a place where loyalty is rated far above
competence. From the ruling party’s point of view, Parliament is
increasingly a forum for the rubber-stamping of the cabinet’s bills,
spiced up only by the opportunities it provides to insult opposition
politicians rather than to listen to them. Dissent and plain-speaking
are hard to find and tend to be frowned upon when they are detected. In
this atmosphere, which seems to be thickening every day, it is good to
meet someone who combines "struggle cred" with independent
thinking.