For those of us drawn to the Union Buildings, celebrants and curious onlookers alike, we were greeted by scrupulous traders selling impromptu artefacts rejoicing in the new democracy; razor wire too; and large speaker stacks, a people’s stage and the careful gaze of snipers sat atop rooftops. Watching the scaffolding housing the speaker’s rock precariously as more and more people clamoured up them to gain a better view, the heady immediacy of the day rendered historical truth somewhat indistinguishable from the light-hearted farce so much a part of the fanfare.

Standing on the expansive lawns of the Union Buildings, in the midst of history experienced as real life, we were quite unaware that another parallel history was noisily being birthed too. Quite unwittingly though we freely embraced it at the time, hardly aware that the words we occasionally chanted as expressions of our joy was actually part of some new vocabulary, one that over time would become common parlance in a future South Africa, today’s laissez faire democracy. To say that Joe Mafela is to blame would be rather unfair.

Mafela, the one-time advertising mascot for the Chicken Licken franchise, was master of ceremonies on the people’s stage. Cajoling us with humour and wit as we occasionally fell into lulls of disbelief, he would repeatedly chant that humble advertising slogan so much a part of his personal munificence. “It’s good, it’s good, it’s nice.” Each time that the chant went out, people smiled, the words warmly resonating within. After all, everything was good and nice, as simple as that. To this day, however, I remain quite unsure whether we were eulogising a chicken, or actually the new democracy about to take shape the moment Nelson Mandela was officially sworn in. What however remains undeniably true of that momentous day is my memory of a democracy so palpable one could almost taste its crispy fried essence.

Consider the logic of Naomi Klein’s argument, from her rather voguish yet nonetheless incisive book No Logo. “The products that will flourish in the future,” the Canadian activist writes, “will be the ones presented not as commodities’ but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle.” Seen from this perspective the events at Pretoria’s Union Buildings are invested with renewed significance, Joe Mafela’s cheery chanting inadvertently having given the tangible chicken wings, the squawking take-away free to float transcendent over the crowds, a metaphor of fulfilment – like the new democracy.

Situated in the present tense that is now, we are more than a few years adrift of the heady triumph of May 1994. Yet somehow the significance of Joe Mafela’s humble chant haunts us. It haunts because in many ways we have increasingly resigned ourselves to the fact that advertisers are the praise singers of the new democracy. One need not venture much further than Johannesburg to discern the truth of this, need not really avert one’s gaze far from the towering Ponte apartment building with its predatory day-time shadow and pulsing night-time neon display. The Ponte is a triumphant architectural metaphor, one that in recent times has been used to celebrate the brave new democracy with remarkable prescience.

Transformed during the mid-nineties from an edgy metropolitan address into a totemic sales pitch to the brand Coke, the nineties reign of Coke was aptly supplanted by signage for a company that truly trades in intangibility. Promising a privately networked, wireless form of democracy free from the meddling interference of the state, the pulsing display for the cellular service provider Vodacom stands triumphantly resplendent, its pulsing signature colours arrogantly suggesting a cellular company to be the ultimate icon of democracy in a continent founded upon oral traditions.

What a lamentable distance to have come in a mere fistful of years, from those early days spent eulogising chickens through the effervescing days when Coke (in both its liquid and powdered form) added life to the nineties’ party, to now finally seeing cellular phones touted as the splendour of democracy. As if democracy is simply reducible to a list of cleverly marketed commodities: chickens, softdrinks and cellular phones. Little wonder the talk of a growing sense of nihilism, grassroots alienation now an intimate part of the lives of many South Africans.

Dumisane Ncgobo, a psychologist with the University of Durban-Westville’s Social Policy Programme, has written eloquently of the growing sense of nihilism experienced by many black South Africans. Nihilism, as Ms. Ncgobo defines it, refers to the “monumental eclipse of hope, the unprecedented collapse of meaning, the incredible disregard for human and especially black life and property in much of Black South Africa.” 

The pathology of mass psychological depression, personal worthlessness and social despair she describes is undoubtedly linked to abject poverty and criminality that continues to persist, but as Ncgobo is bold enough to point out in her essay “Nihilism in Black South Africa: The New South Africa and the Destruction of the Black Domestic Periphery,” the nation’s burgeoning market culture is equally to blame.“Since status now is largely conferred through material possessions, the struggle for meagre resources has intensified in the Black Domestic Periphery, posing a further element to the nihilistic threat.” Or as I overheard one black youth pithily paraphrase this sentiment to a friend in the precincts of Y-fm, “It’s no longer about the power struggle my friend, it’s about power steering.”

Nihilism as a pathology of South African life has already driven many whites into retreat, daily life for many of its affluent members now lived in access controlled gated suburbia’s and bunker-like retail fortresses. Whites may have long typified the defining tenets of the nation’s new market culture – “individualism, consumerism, materialism, accumulation, objectification and self-aggrandisement” – but, as Ncgobo points out, the diffusion of these values into everyday black culture derives equallyfrom the doings of South Africa’s current black elite.

With many key figures from the ‘liberation aristocracy’ having traded low-income politics for lucrative business careers, South Africa’s burgeoning culture of black cool has been cynically shaped by the sometimes ostentatious, sometimes criminal, behaviour of its more prominent figures. Quoting Frantz Fanon, Ncgobo caustically observes that their “flamboyant lifestyles” are “characteristic of an undeveloped middle class.” As the nation’s “crisis of black leadership” persists, an idea favoured by Ncgobo, marketers have been quick to take over the task of asserting “ownership” – as I heard one white executive crudely phrase it – of young urban black consumers.

This corporate ownership of youthful South Africa is best expressed in a singular word: cool. Cool is BMW X5, or a pair of red leather Converse All Stars worn by a 15-year-old from Langa. Cool is also the desire that justifies shooting this 15-year-old in his knee in order to get that little bit closer to cool, in the process claiming those red shoes as ones own. Once caricaturing the rise of black cool in America, the poet Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) wrote:

“super-cool
ultrablack.
he had a double-natural
that wd put the sisters to shame
his dashikis tailor made
& his beads imported sea-shells
(from some blk
country i never heard of)
he was triple hip .
cool-cool
real cool made me cool – now ain’t that
cool .”

Like this democracy still emerging from infancy, I myself don’t claim to be free of the trappings of avarice, not prone to indiscretions and mistakes. That is probably why most of us forgive the way things are now; in the awkward stumblings of the new democracy and its leaders we see ourselves. Deep down we also probably still believe old Joe Mafela, that the state of this brand new democracy can still be summarised in an advertising pay-off line, “It’s good, it’s good, it’s nice.” Clinging to this fanciful version of the truth, however, probably means that we still believe in the pathos of struggle, not the bathos of cool. Whether this is still a credible position to argue these days I am not so sure.

Sean O’Toole is a writer based in Jozi. He’s also the former editor of the magazine Design Indaba.