Love at the End of Time - E-book - ePub

This novel is the sequel to Jo'burg: Sex, Love and Marx. The protagonist Josh bids farewell to his wife Millicent who is immigrating to Canada. After Millicent leaves, a love affair develops between him and Gazala, his post-doc student. Following the successive waves of the Covid pandemic, South Africa undergoes an apocalyptic collapse due to the exorable processes of what Josh refers to as zombification.
Excerpt:'.. Like in John Updike's book "Toward the End of Time, " in which we could imagine a quantum mechanical universe unfolding in an endless series of bifurcating, branching, or forking processes with respect to alternative realities, splitting at each branching point into alternate binary versions of possible realities. We could imagine the following bifurcation of reality: the permeability of racial boundaries versus the hardening of racial boundaries and identity.
Yet we live in a world divided by binaries of separation and difference, such as settler and native, colonizer and colonized, Black and White, foreign migrant and citizen, poverty and privilege, segregation and integration, apartheid and post-apartheid, past and present, and present and future. Would post-colonial Africa have had a better chance of flourishing socially and economically, if there had been no great heroes or gigantic personalities or big men or charismatic leaders or supreme liberators dominating the stage of political power, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Keita, Sylvanus Epiphanio Olympio, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, Idi Amin, José Eduardo dos Santos, Robert Mugabe, Jaalle Mohamed Siad Barre, Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi, Ian Smith, Daniel François Malan, Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, Balthazar Johannes 'B.
J.' Vorster, Pieter Willem Botha, and so on. The last four men who were White presided over the social, economic, and political institutionalization of apartheid. Like the White leaders (Smith, Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd, and Vorster), all the other African big men, had also to varying degrees displayed contempt for any kind of constitutionality based on checks and balances and the rule of law. Above all else, they preferred exercising unrestricted personalized and centralized political control through the vehicle of the single-party state and democratic centralism.
Starting as populist-nationalist leaders with mass support, having won the battle for political supremacy, they institutionalized the neo-patrimonial state and mode of governance, through the development of vast systems of patronage to accumulate and preserve absolute personal political power and entitlements, mostly for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the masses. Ruling as powerful oligarchs over a hierarchy of political and social domination they controlled the lines of patronage that radiated out from the centre to regions, districts, cities, towns, and villages, exercising control and power through the distribution of rewards, resources, entitlements, favours, jobs, contracts, and benefits to a vast and intricate web of smaller 'big men' at every level who in turn become politically beholden to the Big Man sitting at the top of the pyramid.
The Big Man rules as a sovereign over a state, which has been re-purposed or re-geared solely for the extraction of wealth through corruption, looting, fraud, and theft, for the benefit and self-enrichment of an entrenched political elite. Post-colonial Africa has fulfilled the negative prophecies of Franz Fanon. Old social hierarchies have been replaced by new social hierarchies. Nothing changes, always the repetition of the same, the eternal return of the same old patterns, the same ordering of things, the same discourse of power.