Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble

Are we frogs in a boiling pot, or a stressed but resilient nation trying to make sense of bizarre times? Are we being ruled by an African liberation movement or a 14th-century Italian church? In his new book, Is It Me or Is It Getting Hot in Here? Great Expectations and Boiling Frogs in South Africa, columnist and political commentator Tom Eaton looks at these and other uniquely South African preoccupations and dilemmas.

- Liesl Robertson

We’ve all heard about the infamous boiled frog experiment. Chuck a frog into a pot of boiling water and he’ll leap back out again. But if you put him in a pot of cool water and heat the water very slowly, he won’t realise the peril he’s in until it’s too late. Ergo: boiled frog.

‘For South Africans, it seems a perfect parable for the experience of living in this anxious, angry, unjust country,’ writes Tom Eaton, ‘where every day the dial is cranked up by another degree with the latest corruption scandal, the latest monstrous crime, the latest depressing, numbing statistic about how our country and economy are fading… Right now always feels normal, no matter how hot it gets.’

It’s a great metaphor. There’s just one catch: it’s not true. A German scientist named Friedrich Leopold Goltz spent his time attempting to boil frogs, but, four years and many frogs later, he succeeded only when he removed their brains.

‘That it still has such a grip on our imaginations and emotions suggests a sobering truth about ourselves: we continue to believe it is true because we want it to be true,’ Tom writes. ‘For a metaphor that is usually invoked as a pragmatic warning to stay alert, to be prepared, to plan for the worst – it is, in fact, a bizarrely masochistic plunge into fatalism.

‘I’m not suggesting that this country isn’t a frightening, violent, confusing, divided place. But it is a glaring and current example of the kind of thinking that can take hold of our imaginations and our fears in the absence of a clearer, more informed national conversation.’