The Big Read: I want no part of God or Naledi



Homo naledi is a racist plot using pseudo-science to link Africans to sub-human, baboon-like creatures. It sounded mad, and Mathole Motshekga and Zwelinzima Vavi were jeered on social media for expressing it. I joined the chorus, because gigantic ignorance should not be tolerated in our leaders. But I can also understand where such paranoia comes from.Even as Facebook reacted, racists gloated over pictures comparing Naledi with Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma. It is dangerous to discount the theory of evolution, but it is also understandable when most of your contact with the idea of primitive, dark-skinned knuckle-draggers has come not in the form of scientific debate based on our common humanity but as the poisonous barb on a white supremacist insult.It made sense. But the more I read the arguments, the more I realised that only some of the objections were bound up with the awful legacy of racist European pseudo- science. The rest, it seemed, were religious, and bridged both class and race. It turns out that a huge number of South Africans, perhaps even a majority, reject Naledi as an ancestor because they believe that a monotheistic god created them in its own image.It forced me to imagine their experience of our country and our world. What, I wondered, is your average day like when you believe that science is either a racist tool or simply wrong? What kind of relationships do you form with people if you believe that they are God's most perfect creation, or, as claimed by Motshekga, they were created before the universe existed?I can't speak for my compatriots, but I think if I believed those things, I would feel the most delicious entitlement. To know that you are the reason for all existence, that everything in the universe is a prop for you to use in the God-scripted drama of your life - ye gods, how glorious!To an atheist like myself, who believes that the theory of evolution is currently the best explanation we have for how we got here, it all starts feeling a bit mad. But I also concede that many of my beliefs would seem bonkers to millions of my compatriots.This month we are being urged to reflect on something called "heritage"; to collect a bundle of historical and culture goodies we have inherited and to show them off to each other as some sort of morale-boosting exercise. The assumption, of course, is that these goodies are real: concrete truths, sensible beliefs and practices, true histories. But how real is any of it when we live in a world saturated with fantasy and projection, where contradiction masquerades as conviction?In South Africa, you don't have to wander far before the ground under your feet turns to quicksand.Our leaders talk democracy, then hand over the podium to feudal kings who talk about blind allegiance.Revolutionaries call on us to be suspicious of non-African influences, in the same breath that they quote a German philosopher and adjust their berets, modelled on a Cuban and made in China, before driving to church in a Japanese car to worship a Jewish Palestinian who was put to death by Italians and whose life story was written by Greeks, preserved by Irish monks, and eventually brought to Africa by English blokes.Meanwhile, gloomy whites urge blacks to "get over the past and move on" while jealously tending the flame of their resentment over the Boer War or the treachery of FW de Klerk.Next week the country will suffer a carcinogenic corporate kerfuffle called "Braai Day", based on the assumption that we need to share common values because we occupy the same country. Which, of course, relies on the assumption that South Africa is actually a country. Cue more contradictions: passionate opponents of colonialism have killed to protect its borders when, for example, Southern Africans from the imaginary place called "Zimbabwe" have crossed the imaginary line into the imaginary place called "South Africa".Perhaps this is why Homo naledi seemed like something worth celebrating, because it felt like a piece of truly common history. And yet if you believe in evolution, is this really a win? Nothing that is good about modern Africa existed in those desperate little animals. They might have been (almost) human, but mostly they were food. We can't begin to imagine how little they knew about their world, or how abject their short lives were. They passed on almost nothing to their children except their DNA and their fleas.When it comes to heritage, I'm as confused as the next naked ape. But I know I'm not going to celebrate Naledi as part of my human heritage. Instead, I'm going to celebrate that I have absolutely nothing in common with that ancient prototype. I'm going to celebrate inventors, philosophers, artists, even a few warriors. Above all, I'm going to pop a peer-reviewed headache pill, wash it down with pasteurised milk and celebrate the scientists who try to drag us out of the muck despite our determination to return there.One day humans will cure brain death. When they do, they will look back at us and perhaps see us more clearly than we see ourselves: as a small flame flaring in the dark, briefly casting shadows on the wall - an illusory panorama of phantoms and projections - before we flicker out. They will read our assertions about where we've come from, and hear their true meaning; that we declare "I am this!" because we know that one day we'll be like Homo naledi: nothing at all.