Surviving Survival

What follows is a short piece I wrote for the local campus newspaper. A bit of fun really. The URL for the online version of the paper (in case anyone is interested is http://www.puk.ac.za/opencms/export/PUK/html/studentelewe/wapad/sitelib/Home/Wapad.html


The nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Tylor coined the term ‘survivals’ to designate elements of earlier social arrangements that no longer have a function in social life. Chuck Norris has, for example, lost his role as heroic symbol for the potency of the US and the righteousness of their global imperialism.

Chuck, however, lives on by showing that survivals are survivors too; by proving that the function of survivals is transformed rather than lost. Ironically mocked (proportionately to his fall from celebrity) as an (im)potent ‘law unto himself’, Chuck is transformed into a metonymical critique of the ‘cowboy’ US foreign policy he once served on screen. His nobleness thus restored in this inversion, Chuck now functions as a vehicle for expressing resistance to, and suspicion of, US imperialism.

But unlike Chuck, not all survivals are good, and without reinvented heroes like Chuck, these survival baddies keep popping up even after they have been voted out. Although the white tribe of Africa spoke a monosyllabic “yes” in1992, the ideas the apartheid ideologues nurtured have refused to shuffle embarrassedly away from the tribal council along with the portly old politicians in their Woolworths suits and surreal hats.

Leading this ‘survival sit-in’ is an idea of ‘culture’ – volk. In the reification and essentialism of this ‘culture’ concept, racism lives euphemistically on. Locally as popular – but by no means as positive – as ‘survival’ Chuck, ‘survival’ racism brings us informal racial segregation in PUK residences through the fallacious (not to be confused with the more salacious homonym) argument that people will be more comfortable living ‘with their own culture’. This is not the society that Chuck returned to fight for.

The jury is still out regarding Chuck’s successor. Two candidates are leading the race: the pinoccioesque Riaan Cruywagen – largely plastic from all the surgery it took to keep his steadily growing nose in check while he read the news during apartheid; and the rough and (ever)ready Steve Hofmeyer.

As metonymic of an Afrikaner masculinity that secured its past dominance through the ‘culture’ euphemism I refer to above, I hope that their succeeding Chuck as symbols of (im)potency rings in a critical rejection of the survivals from the apartheid order that should never have survived, in the same way as Chuck rang in the rejection of US imperialism.