One damn thing after another - How are we to make sense of 2014?

WITH untypical clarity, philosopher Slavoj Zizek captured the banal character of everyday life: "Our daily lives are mostly a mixture of drab routine and unpleasant surprises."

And so we woke up each day in 2014 - going to work, or to church on Sunday, watching news in the evening, followed by bedtime as usual, waking up to go to town as we usually do on weekends.

Suddenly our routine was rattled by the unpleasant surprise of newly elected EFF parliamentarians entering Parliament clad in red overalls. "What the hell!" some among us exclaimed.

A few months later the red parliamentarians shocked us yet again, chanting "Pay back the money!" in a fashion considered un-parliamentary by some.

And the rest of the year continued to unfold, in a characteristic, Zizekite wave of routine and surprise.

How, then, can we justify the scorn we pour on South African newspaper columnists who, acting like mirrors, simply tell us what we already know about life in 2014?

In the drabness of routine life and its unpleasant surprises, there is something Zizek is missing: the hazily appearing cogs that turn the wheel of history in particular directions.

The problem with the notion of life as a "mixture of drab routine and unpleasant surprises" is that it, necessarily, leads to the idea of history as "just one damn thing after another".

In this sense, a turning wheel is not viewed in the context of the forces that propel it, or why it turns in this - not the other - direction.

Such parochial observers do not allow themselves the necessary distance to view things in their bigger contexts.

If they did, history would acquire shape, character and meaning - not the illusion of one damn thing after another.

How, then, are we to make sense of the year 2014 in South Africa, as a segment in the course of history proper?

There is nothing profound in reminding ourselves that we had elections this year. What matter are the future implications that flow from the outcomes?

We went into the elections with a ruling party led by a president limping from one embarrassing scandal to another - from Guptagate to Nkandlagate.

Even as polls were predicting an overwhelming majority for the ANC, there was a sense among the literati that, given the moral repugnance of the prospects of a leader like Jacob Zuma, the ruling party deserved a significant decline.

It did not happen. The ANC got more than 60% of the vote. That the voters have confidence in the ANC is more than obvious.

Of significance, is that the character of South African voters as people who don't care about the personal weaknesses of leaders was revealed.

A hundred years from now, posterity will read about Zuma's scandals and conclude that the people of SA in 2014 constituted a collective of people who could not distinguish right from wrong.

The banal suggestion that Zuma was a popular figure will by 3014 have evaporated into the atmosphere of irrationality, gone with all its malevolent advocates.

On the other side, Julius Malema will most likely be included as further evidence of the idea of a defective South African electorate of 2014.

All the stories of Malema owing millions to the taxman from government tenders in Limpopo and yet managing to hoodwink many people into believing that he is an electable leader of a new opposition party will be astonishing - a hundred years from now.

The other school of thought also likely to exercise the intellectual energies of future generations is the strength of the ANC in 2014.

"It surely must be a very strong ruling party that managed to muster such a majority in the face of as morally defective a leader as Jacob Zuma," posterity will likely muse.

Given the history of the ANC in the liberation struggle, it will not be difficult for posterity to fathom the strong position of the party in 2014.

Indeed, the ANC will be analysed in the context of the collective weakness of opposition parties.

Looked at from the vantage point of the future, almost all opposition parties that are currently represented in Parliament will appear like little political fragments with no historical significance.

Should the EFF eventually take the same detour as COPE, history will dismiss the party as yet another aborted attempt by a minuscule splinter party from the ANC.

It is highly unlikely that, a hundred years from now, a storm-in-a-tea-cup party like Agang will be remembered. For what?

That Mamphela Ramphele was once a vice chancellor of a university, or that she once was an employee of the World Bank might not even be mentioned as a footnote in grand narratives.

In any case, there will have been many women vice chancellors of universities and many failed black female politicians a hundred years from now.

Perhaps the people looking through binoculars in 3014 will be able to spot the DA from South Africa's political map of 2014.

While the party's gains in this year's elections might not mean much, its significance as the leading opposition party in Parliament might merit a mention; even as questions about the DA's disproportionate whiteness will most likely arise.

What of issues? To a historian looking back on 2014, a hundred years from now, what issues will appear to have driven public discourse?

The typical post-1994 big issues will certainly figure: race, poverty, unemployment, corruption and, lately, load-shedding and its attendant undermining of the ability of black people to govern.

All these political events and issues may look like a mixture of drab routine and unpleasant surprises to the uncritical disciple of the philosopher Zizek, but they are 2014's contribution to the shape, character and meaning of history. What a year!

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