I've been having conversations about anger a fair amount recently. Anger gets a bad rap you know. Sometimes rightly so. However, if we take our affective states seriously and assume that our emotional responses sometimes are better indications of our relationship to the world and our responses to it than our thinking is, then all anger cannot be bad. Acting on anger without reflection is not so good. Being driven solely by anger is not so good. But so is ignoring anger.
There are different ideas about anger: anger being fear turned inside out; anger being a pathological response or a primitive response. Cultivating anger is to not follow the laudable Ghandi; not be a Nelson Mandela - the later version, the post-prison version. To be angry is to undermine the demonstrations of the natives' capacities for tolerance and to fail at the civilising mission.
If one thinks Mandela's and Ghandi's movements through the anger of a denied justice to the people they both served, with continuing poverty as an indicator of success or failure (depending on what you think blacks and Indian's deserve), then, well, the question is exactly what is so persuasive about what they did? Even Archbishop Tutu has been roused to glorious anger (by Mandela's movement's legacy).
Both these legendary icons, Mandela and Ghandi, transcended the idea of the native: vile, primitive, angry, destroyer and disrespecter of white civilization, misunderstander of the marvelous education at the hands of the refined whites who are genteel, and tolerant and loving. White racism is especially loving when they whip you for your edification. Or infantilise you to remind you of their advanced sensibilities and thus assert the injunction to learn at their soft unlaboring hands. Or when they ever so delicately shudder to think that the shitty hovels the majority of blacks live in is not good enough for their cousins/sisters/random white-faced person. Yet the civilised well-meaning white will declare with certitude that blacks could better themselves or, worse, that they are used to and like those living conditions. Or, well, my favorite evidence of loving, kind whiteliness are those presumptions that the mansions their struggling white selves are living in has nothing to do with the corrugated-frequently-burnt-down-scraps-of-nothing the majority of 'citizens' in this country live in; nothing to do with being maintained by normalised traditions of black hands and sweat at such great cost to the baas and madam; nothing to do with the fact that it would be impossible to have such a life without the cheap black labour. That's why comrade Malema's joke about white maids so tickles us. Now some of us living this fantastic whitely life bequeathed to us by Mandela, we know that our lives are maintained by the self-same cheap black maids, nannies and gardeners whom we pay just enough to move back and forth betwen their hovels and our magnificent residences.
Why, we - and yes it is we blacks, hell yea - we especially really need the reflection of genteelness and steel to correct that unlove we learnt at the white breast the Mandelas and Ghandis bring to our natural tendency to be caterwauling carnival clowns jumping around maniacally popped up on our primitive rages while tsotsing for basic dignity. Aren't Mandela and Ghandi just so comforting for whites and the new black madams and masters, mostly in their ability to be better than the context that produced them expected, to become the modern-day secular Jesus with cheeks just waiting to be slapped by the non-angry crazy white people who created the conditions in the first place?
Even our new black governement hates that the enraged are not being Mandelaesque and are continuing traditions of protest that allowed him to be Mandela. And really why should they dare to do that, seeing as how the tolerant freedoms didn't turn their families into royalty with treauries to boot or forget that: the genteel un-angry negotiations of freedom didn't even turn them into citizens, except for election years, that is, and that should be enough, a nice cross like all literate people do is a wonderful gift.
Suppressing anger willy nilly without allowing its productive capacities to engender new possibilities to rouse oneself to those moments when your boundaries are transgressed, is to live without a meter of your self-worth. This anger isn't indiscriminate. I met an angry young man in December, one I haven't been able to shake. His anger was ugly. It was unreflective, as if he had forgotten the most basic premise for living, that wherever events occur in his life, he is part of the event, not outside of it. I recall that all he saw was the offence, his abused rights, his trampled dignity. Not once did he pause to accord that same right to dignity to the people room. Not once did his anger and so-called humiliations open the potentials of empathy to ask of his others: "what can I learn from you, even if it is to destroy an ugliness about me that you dare to say"? The funny thing is, he had more than he could ever experience, but his anger had blinded him to the reality of his privilege. He was more powerful than he could imagine, yet his anger rendered him powerless. He was beautiful to look at and compelling to hear if not for what his charisma was directed at. And what his anger produced was an epistemic kind of violence that built progressively and contaminated the room. So that is not the kind of anger I mean: unchanneled, misdirected and self-serving.
Biko seemed angry to me: it was a productive anger. It might have gotten him dead anger, but then he would rather have been dead and proud and klapping policemen back so that oppression would not be an easy task for the oppressor. We don't know how the years might have softened his anger or swelled it, we just don't. But he did get to leave us a legacy of dead and proud. Anger wasn't about fear for Biko. Nor was it about the threat of humiliation.
Anger was about right and expectation and the certainty that to be human meant not accepting the klap and turning the cheek. About the fact that to be human meant to understand the right to dignity, the right to recognition and mostly and, so reductively, that anger was about marvellous, wondrous and a deep, deep self-love, self-respect and an affirming kindness to the self.
For Biko anger was, and for me anger is about giving kindness where it was, is, due; anger is about making alliances across boundaries of injustice to practice self-love and love for an other that too has been trained in traditions of self-hate and disparagement. Anger is in service of love without forsaking the fury and rage in the places it belongs: with those who are hateful, with those who are unwilling to love and care based on dermal evidence, with those who need to make a superior/inferior self through hateful Apartheid ideologies.
It seems an awful choice for us mere humans, if our anger only enables us to be martyrs or secular prophets. No, I think we need to learn that middle-ground. We need to learn to both value and control our anger so as to marshal its productive capacities. There really is more than enough room for raging against the machine. Why aren't more of us angry? I love Mandela still, but I can't understand how he brought us here.
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