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Title: Nelson Mandela Author: Michael Schmidt Date: December 10, 2013 Language: en Topics: Nelson Mandela, South Africa Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/26519
A frail multimillionaire dies peacefully in bed at the grand old age of
95, surrounded by a coterie of those who love him and those with an eye
on the inheritance, an event that would in the normal course of events
be seen as natural—but the man concerned has been treated
internationally as more of a supernatural entity than an ordinary man.
The unsurpassed hagiography around Nelson Mandela, who died in the
über-wealthy enclave of Houghton in Johannesburg last Thursday night,
the famous prisoner turned global icon on a par with Mohandas Gandhi is
upheld by most observers of South Africa as a necessary myth of national
unity, and not least of the triumph of racial reconciliation of over the
evils of segregation.
I had the privilege to meet Mandela several times during my career as a
journalist, watching my country’s dramatic transition unfold on the
ground, with all of its tragedies and triumphs; on most occasions he was
all business; I only saw him once in the relaxed and smiling mode in
which he was best known and so beloved, for he had taken a huge burden
on his shoulders and was mostly all business. He was by turns
frighteningly stern and disarmingly charming, rigorously strict and
graciously forgiving, a fierce revolutionary and a conciliator, a
formidable intellect and a wisecracker, austere and chilled. Though a
complex figure, he is justly considered as a colossus of global stature
for sacrificing his life to inspire the South African masses to push
forward to the irreversible defeat of the last white supremacist
regime—and in doing so to inspire other popular struggles against
injustice worldwide.
But in a country where the promise of a more egalitarian democracy has
decayed with shocking rapidity into an elitist-parasitic project, where
those who raise concerns over the loss of our period of grace under
Mandela are often silenced by murder, a state sliding inexorably back
into a fog of paranoia and forgetting under the control of Stasi-trained
“democrats”, I’ve had to somewhat nervously consider my critique of the
deliberate sanitising by all factions of power of Mandela’s period in
office because his deification has resulted and in the creation of a
fanatical de-facto state religion that tolerates no heretics in its
pursuit of unfettered partisan power. The slipping of South Africa, once
hailed as a lighthouse of progress, in the rankings of several gobal
institutions which monitor public freedoms is of concern to all
freedom-loving people, and not just we anarchists.
I need to be explicit: this is not a full obituary of Mandela because
his life story is so well-known and has been repeated widely over the
past week in the media; rather it is an analysis primarily of his
presidency—the five years in which he was directly answerable to each
poor woman who paid tax on every loaf of bread she bought—and of the
unfortunate cult that has sprung up around him. I do not focus on the
unquestionable legitimacy of his anti-apartheid struggle including its
armed facet, nor on the long travails of his jail-time, nor even on his
latter career as elder statesman, but rather on his presidency because
that was the period in which he was responsible to South Africans as a
paid civil servant. In other words, all his intentions before and after
ascending to power need to be weighed up against his actions while in
power.
The scion of the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa tribe, nick-named after
the British imperialist warlord Admiral Horatio Nelson, he escaped rural
torpor and an arranged marriage, becoming trained in the industrial
heartland of Johannesburg as a member of the first black South African
law firm, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela would have been almost predestined
by his class status for leadership—though that was hardly a given under
a system dating back through three hundred years of colonialism that
allowed for only a handful of black leaders (apartheid did raise up a
clique of wealthy black Bantustan leaders, though Mandela to his credit
echewed that comprador path). The story of the rise of this obscure
lawyer to the leading charismatic figure of the century-old “terrorist”
African National Congress (ANC), and thence via decades of incredible
hardship to the highest office as the country’s first democratic, and
more to the point, black, president—in what remains today the world’s
most racially divided and economically unequal society—is remarkable,
powerful and revealing.
It is remarkable as many personal tales are in this country for its
trajectory from ghettoised exclusion to the corridors of power; as a
transitional society, there are many personal ties—links that would be
highly unusual in more established societies—between the new elite and
those who shared their childhoods in dusty townships and Bantustans. It
is powerful for its morality tale of the ascendancy, against one of the
most militarised Cold War states, of a poorly-armed people with only the
justice of their cause and the weight of their numbers on their side. It
is sadly revealing for the ways in which the socialist traditions of one
of the world’s oldest liberation forces was dismantled in its encounter
with the realpolitik of running the state and its capitalist economy.
Mandela’s story captivated the world: a man who had served 27 years in
prison for treason, breaking rocks in the brutal little prison on Robben
Island, tantalizingly close to Cape Town, emerged a reconciler this most
bitterly divided society to lead it through its first democratic
election in 1994. It encapsulates in one man the dominant narrative of
South Africa’s transition from global polecat to “Rainbow Nation”—and in
the light of the corruption endemic under fourth democratic-era
president, Jacob Zuma, represents what many feel was the apogee of
social cohesion across all races and classes. It remains a unifying myth
of enduring power that seems to, in the figure of one man, represent the
euphoria of the entire world’s post-Berlin Wall epoch which saw the
collapse of Red dictatorships in Russia and Eastern Europe, of one-party
rule in much of Africa, and of rightist authoritarian regimes in Latin
America, East Asia, and not least, South Africa.
And yet behind that myth of racial unity, it is conveniently forgotten
that for 74 years until it opened all ranks to all races in 1986, the
ANC was a racial-exclusivist party, dedicated specifically to the
national liberation of the “Black”-classified majority (alongside the
other oppressed races, officially classified into 18 ethnic groups, but
in effect, mixed-race “Colored,” and “Indian”). Still, motivated by the
Atlantic Charter of 1941, which held out the promise of
self-determination for the colonised world, the ANC was the black
organisation which, alongside its white (mostly Communist), Indian and
Coloured sister organisations drafted the 1955 Freedom Charter, a text
of blended liberalism and social democracy which in essence declared for
all races access to the country’s resources (land, education, housing,
etc). Yet when a young Mandela first came to the fore as an ANC leader,
establishing the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1944 as a kingmaker faction
within the parent party, his orientation was explicitly black
nationalist.
We’ve recently seen a worrying resurgence of this de facto racist strain
within the ANC: with the right-wing populist Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF) breaking away from the ANCYL this year; with the revival of tribal
factionalism within the parent ANC, especially antagonisms between the
Zulu ascendancy represented by Zuma, and what was nicknamed “la Xhosa
Nostra” represented by Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, ousted by
Zuma’s faction in a palace coup in 2008; and with racist relocation
threats uttered by ANC leaders against ANC-unfriendly populations of
Indians in KwaZulu-Natal and of Coloureds in the Western Cape. I’m not
laying these later developments at Mandela’s door, but it is worth
recalling that he once thought and acted similarly, helping ensure the
longevity of this tradition within the ANC, a tradition recalled in 1999
by Andrew Nash in a piece on for the socialist journal Monthly Review:
Nash correctly concluded his piece by saying that Mandela’s “ideological
legacy—in South Africa and globally—is startlingly complex” and this
complexity is reflected in the diversity of the leaders who spoke at
Mandela’s state memorial service today: US President Barack Obama, UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,
Chinese Vice-President Li Yuanchao, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee
and Cuban President Raúl Castro (the choice of Ban probably relates to
his international status, while that of Obama seems to be based both on
US power and on Obama’s own tale of ascendancy over racism, while the
India, Brazilian and Chinese choices relate to SA’s strategic partners
in the developing world—but the Cuban dictatorship appears to be a
purely ideological choice).
In traditional black tribal societies here, praise-singers are poets who
declaim accolades for their leaders—but praise-singers are not mere
propagandists; they also perform the roles of both court jester and
protected critic, ensuring that those being praised don’t get too
big-headed about their achievements. In line with this ethic, it is
worth reading some of the more nuanced obituaries written this week,
starting with South African writer Rian Malan, author of the seminal and
very influential book on his Afrikaner family’s intimate role in
building and enforcing apartheid rule, My Traitor’s Heart (1990), in his
obituary for The Telegraph, available online at
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/10502173/Nelson-Mandela-he-was-never-simply-the-benign-old-man.html.
Malan rightly highlights Mandela’s immense courage in standing up to the
apartheid authorities, in taking up arms against an overwhelmingly
powerful enemy, and of going “eyeball-to-eyeball” with the “fascists”.
He credits Mandela as being the architect of South Africa’s “Rainbow
Nation” and in particular of its centrist economic policies, and
stresses the often-neglected fact of Mandela’s revolutionary fervour.
Academic Patrick Bond, author of Elite Transition, returns to that
book’s theme of economic continuity rather than change in his obituary
for US investigative journal CounterPunch:
www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/the-mandela-years-in-power .
Speaking for myself, I recognise—as the world at large has (even
including a friend of mine who is a former apartheid Military
Intelligence officer)—that Mandela’s firm commitment to peaceful
negotiation, and his magnanimity in eschewing the bitterness that could
have resulted from 27 years of incarceration, instead forgiving his
enemies so as to build a democratic country, provided the country’s
people with the watershed required to break with the past. This
forgiveness is usually cited as his greatest attribute and the
foundation of his status as a great statesman, as was his prodigious
memory which enabled him to remember by name everyone he met, laying the
foundation of his reputation for intimate knowledge of and care for
those he interacted with in an attitude of humility. Regardless of the
pragmatism that obviously underwrote Mandela’s opposition to igniting a
race-war, or a revolutionary war, for that matter—for such a war would
be unwinnable and would decimate both sides—this achievement, which
enabled a peaceful first democratic election for all races in 1994 is
rightly hailed as the high-water mark of my country’s history.
So what did the re-emergent South African anarchist
movement—syndicalists of all races having built the first trade unions
for people of colour in 1917–1919—of the mid-1990s have to say about
Mandela and his guided transition? This was and remains a tiny minority
revolutionary movement far to the left of the ANC, and yet which
likewise claims deep roots in the socialist tradition and which worked
hard to both ensure the universality of its politics—and its ability to
address real local issues. Reduced to a rearguard of democratic
socialism during the 1950s, then its syndicalist ethics producing an
important “workerist” strain during the consolidation of the ANC-aligned
revolutionary trade union movement in the 1970s, the explicitly
anarchist movement re-emerged thanks to the alleviation of apartheid
repression after Mandela’s release in 1990. Since then, it has always
been an active part of the extra-Parliamentary left, with a commendable
consistency in its class-line politics, but an increasingly multiracial
presence in poor areas, and an advancing sophistication in its praxis.
The foremost point to make is that this small movement welcomed with
great enthusiasm—and critical concerns—the coming of democratic
governance under Mandela in 1994. While it did not focus on the man
himself, it rather focused on ANC policies, in particular its economic
developmental strategies. It is worth quoting from the first edition of
Workers’ Solidarity, journal of the majority-black anarchist working
class Workers’ Solidarity Federation (WSF), forerunner of today’s
Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), the editorial under the
headline 1994 Elections: a Massive Advance for the Struggle in South
Africa:
“Legalized apartheid is finally dead. For the first time in 350 years
Black South Africans are not ruled by a racist dictatorship but by a
democratic parliament. Along with this capitalist democracy came a whole
series of rights we never had before. We have guaranteed freedom of
association and speech. We have the right to strike and protest. We have
some protection from racist and sexist practices. These changes did not
come from the benevolent hand of the National Party [apartheid
government]. They are the result of decades of struggle. We broke the
pass laws. We broke the ban on African trade unions. We broke the racist
education system. We broke the Land Act of 1913.
“However, the legacy of apartheid is still with us. 2.3 million South
Africans suffer from malnutrition. Only 45% of Africans live in houses.
Only 2 in 10 African pupils reach matric [the final year of
high-school]. Even though South Africa produces 50% of Africa’s
electricity, only 30% of the population has electricity. At the same
time 5% of the population own 80% of all wealth. Whites on average earn
9 times more than Africans. The ANC’s RDP [Reconstruction & Development
Programme] has set itself very limited goals to redress this. For
example, it aims to build a million houses over 5 years. This will not
ever deal with the massive housing backlog facing Black people. The RDP
also places a heavy reliance on the market mechanism. The RDP only aim
to redistribute 30% of the land to Blacks. But most of this will be
bought through the market. Why should we pay for stolen land? White
farmers will also be compensated for land unfairly acquired after 1913
even when this is returned. In any case, the RDP’s ability to deliver is
doubtful. The RDP will not be funded by increased tax on the bosses.
Instead the focus is on make “more efficient” use of existing
resources...
“The only way we can force the new government to deliver its promises is
through struggle. This is the only way our needs will be heard above
those of the bosses who are in a business crisis. It is only through
keeping up the fight on the ground that we can force the State to give
in to our demands. Force the bosses to deliver! But we need to break out
of the cycle in which the needs of the majority take second place to the
profits and power of the bosses and their State. We need to attack and
destroy the system of capitalism that caused our hardships and racism in
the first place. We need a society without bosses or governments. A
society based on workers and community councils which puts people before
profit. Build for working class revolution!”
By the final edition of Workers’ Solidarity in late 1998, the tone had
become more critical, as the ANC under Mandela shifted rightwards, with
the editorial titled South Africa’s Transition Goes Sour:
“In 1994, people danced in the streets after the results of the
elections were announced. How far have we come in the five years since
that time? Not far enough. The elections were a great victory because
they ended legalised racism in South Africa—the oppressive laws created
by the bosses to ensure an endless supply of super-cheap Black labour.
“But while the law has changed, conditions on the ground have not.
Working and poor people have been increasingly impatient with the slow
pace of “delivery” of the goods and services promised in the 1994
elections. Worried about its election prospects, the ANC has done its
best to excuse the broken promises. It has manipulated the loyalty of
many workers to blame the failure of delivery on unnamed “forces” who
want to return South Africa to the past. It has done its best to label
critics anti-patriotic or right-wing. And it has asserted its domination
in the Tripartite Alliance, demanding that COSATU and SACP toe the line
and stop criticising ANC policies. Of course, there are right-wing
forces in South Africa. But the NP left the Government of National Unity
years ago. As for the other big conservative group, the IFP, the ANC is
hinting of a merger between Congress and the IFP.
“The real blame for the ANC’s lack of delivery lies in its GEAR (Growth
Employment and Redistribution) policy. GEAR [an openly neoliberal policy
which replaced the RDP] is an attack on the jobs, incomes and social
services of the working class. It is based on the idea that the bosses
must be allowed to make more profits from cheap labour. So instead of
taking money from the bosses and using it to benefit the Black working
class majority, the ANC policy tells the bosses to become richer,
promising the poor that crumbs from the bosses’ banquet table will fall
to them.
“However, we do not see the solution to GEAR as a new party to replace
the ANC. The ANC did not adopt GEAR because it was “bad”. ANC adopted
GEAR because the bosses—who include many top ANC members and funders-
demanded GEAR. We live in a time of class war—war by the employers
against the working class. The only solution can be mass struggle, not
elections. The Union is your Party, the Struggle is your Vote.”
Since those appraisals during Mandela’s 1994–1999 presidency, it is
obvious to all observers that (apart from events such as Mandela’s death
and memorial service), the unity that the Mandela myth was supposed to
ensure has rapidly unraveled. South Africa today is riven by entrenched
racial hatred, is the world’s most unequal society, and is currently
ruled by what can only be seen as a syndicate-criminal cartel which is
actively blurring the lines between private interest, party and state,
recreating and reviving many aspects of the terrifying apartheid
securocrat state including the notorious old National Key Points Act and
the new Secrecy Act.
The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) has been campaigning
without success for the ANC to honour its 1989 agreement that once in
power it would amend or throw out some one hundred statutes that
prevented the free flow of information in the country. Only the most
obviously odious racist and separatist laws were thrown out.
South Africa shockingly remains a state firmly committed to
race-classification, except that instead of apartheid’s 18 different
ethnicities, the ANC only recognises four: White, Black, Asian—a
catch-all of everyone from Indians to Chinese—and Coloured, a mixed-race
category into which Obama would fall, were he a citizen; the indigenous
Bushmen simply do not exist, despite Bushman cave art dating back at
least 30,000 years. As a white man who played his tiny role propping up
apartheid as a conscript into the old army, I don’t personally give a
damn that I’m classified white, but it’s a tragedy that our “born-free”
children are still forced to take their chances with this racial Russian
roulette—victims of a bureaucratic game supposedly tracking “change”.
In my first South African book, Under the Rusted Rainbow: Tales from the
Underworld of Southern Africa’s Transition (BestRed, Cape Town, due in
July 2014), I will argue that the ANC’s primary strategy position, the
so-called “National Democratic Revolution” fell so far from the heights
of manufactured grace of the Mandela myth to the sleazy swamp in which
they now wallow precisely because the ANC was the midwife of continuity
rather than of true transition from the apartheid state, despite its
vigorous propaganda campaign to the contrary.
I introduce my book with a comparative analysis of the transitions from
autocracy to democracy in South Africa and Chile. South Africans have an
irritating habit of avoiding learning from such comparisons as to do so
would undermine their claim to special status because of their
supposedly unique history. But I demonstrate that our “transition” was
far from unique: in both countries, it was a socialist-led combine (the
Tripartite Alliance in SA, and the Concertación in Chile) that enabled
the exploitative structures of the state and capital to make the move to
democracy almost unaltered, their repressive and exploitative functions,
honed by centuries of colonialism, intact.
Notably, right across South Africa, the geographic separation of
apartheid continues to hold sway, with even black-dominated ANC town
councils building new housing developments for the black poor literally
on the wrong side of the tracks, far from goods, services and jobs. This
despite the fact that the working class spends the largest chunk of
their pitiful incomes on transport; 40% of the country simply languishes
in poverty as their leaders swan about in jet-planes and motorcades.
Even “Presidential Lead Projects” like the rebuilding of Alexandra
township, east of Johannesburg, have been amputated by the nimby
attitude of the new elite who blocked its articulation with bridges to
their leafy Sandton suburbs a mere five kilometres away.
In anticipation of Mandela’s death, I was interviewed last year by the
journalist Carlo Annese for GQ Italia on this question, I said: “Today
there is a class division that replicates the racial division of the
past... It is truly economic apartheid, in which the poor are getting
poorer, the townships that were to have disappeared are still there, the
workers do not earn enough to buy what they produce, and the white elite
of the 45-year regime has added a wealthy black middle class of no more
than 300-thousand people.
“This is not only the effect of the government in recent years; even
Mandela bears responsibility, but few want to see it. His figure was
almost beatified as a new Gandhi, so that all he has done is sacrosanct,
whereas criticism would help to restore a human dimension, beyond the
myth: Madiba was a party man who succumbed to compromise...”
South Africa and the world, I argued, would benefit from a judicious
assessment of Mandela as a realpolitik politician, an analysis made
impossible by the fanatically rabid insistence by his Pavlovian acolytes
that he be treated as a demigod. There is a foolish argument on the
South African Left, that replicates the delusional Trotskyist argument
around the dictatorial succession in Russia, that Lenin was cool and
right-on, but he was supplanted by treachery by Stalin who was an
outright bastard—and only Trotsky stood up to him as a critic of the
decay of “real, existing socialism”.
The SA Lefty argument goes similarly: Mandela was cool and right-on, but
he was supplanted by Mbeki who was an outright bastard—and only Zuma
stood up to him as a critic of the decay of “real, existing democracy”.
Unfortunately for these partisans of wishful thinking, it was Lenin, not
Stalin, who reintroduced capitalism via the New Economic Policy, Lenin
who established the Cheka—and it was Trotsky who ordered the Kronstadt
Revolt and the insurgent Ukraine, which for almost five years defended
Red Moscow from the White reactionary forces, destroyed.
Likewise, sadly for ANC allies the tiny South African Communist Party
(SACP, membership about 14,000 at the time of the 2008 split in the
Alliance) and the massive Congress of South African Trade Unions
(Cosatu, membership about 1,8-million) who tried without success to find
a “socialist” in current SA President Jacob Zuma, it was Mandela who
scrapped the quasi-socialist RDP and substituted it for the outright
neoliberal GEAR policy, the same Mandela who, it was only admitted after
his death after 50 years of denials, was a member of the SACP’s Central
Committee at the time of his arrest. So Mandela, who served as ANC
president from 1991–1997, having joined the party in 1943, was
simultaneously a communist revolutionary, a social-democrat and an
outright neoliberal?
How are we to make sense of such a personal/party political mélange?
Where did Mandela truly stand ethically, politically and economically;
what did he believe in? This is of pertinent interest today and not
merely a historical curiosity, because South Africans are continually
exhorted to “live by Mandela’s values”. His birthday on 18 July,
unofficially nicknamed Mandela Day, when such exhortations reach
fever-pitch, is likely to be made a public holiday. So what are those
values; what does the hagiography obscure?
Of assistance in cutting through the fog of the myth is a recent debate
in the letters pages of The New York Review of Books between Rian Malan
and reviewer Bill Keller. In essence, Malan, who Keller calls “the
heretic,” argues that the influence of the SACP on the ANC has been
grievously underestimated, and that an abiding centralising instinct and
Stalinist anti-democratic practice has been its most damaging legacy:
“during the struggle years (1960–1990) the SACP reeked of Soviet
orthodoxy, and the ANC reeked of the SACP. As a journalist, you had to
be very careful what you said about this. The civilized line was the one
ceaselessly propounded in The New York Times—Nelson Mandela was
basically a black liberal, and his movement was striving for universal
democratic values. Anyone who disagreed was an anti-Communist crank, as
Keller labels me...
But, Malan continued, “New research by historian Stephen Ellis shows...
that SACP militants found themselves in an awkward position in 1960,
when their secret plans for armed struggle encountered resistance from
South Africa’s two most important black politicians—ANC president Albert
Luthuli and SACP general secretary Moses Kotane. Rather than back down,
these militants co-opted Nelson Mandela onto the Communist Party’s
Central Committee and tasked him to ‘bounce’ the mighty ANC into
agreement with their position. The result, said veteran Communist Roley
Arenstein, was tantamount to ‘a hijacking’ of the mighty ANC by a tiny
clique of mostly white and Indian intellectuals.”
Keller’s riposte was that: “I part company with... Mr Malan on the
significance of this evidence. Malan... seems to believe that it
discredits Mandela, and that the alliance with the Communists damns the
ANC as a Stalinist front. That is simply Red-baiting nonsense. Nelson
Mandela was, at various times, a black nationalist and a nonracialist,
an opponent of armed struggle and a practitioner of armed struggle, a
close partner of the South African Communist Party and, in his
presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists. In
other words, he was whatever served his purpose of ending South Africa’s
particularly fiendish brand of minority rule.”
In a country where the sources of political party funding are not
required by law to be declared, the ANC’s shady connections to a varied
range of dictatorial regimes (not least those of the late unlamented
Muamar Gaddaffi, of the Castro brothers, and of ascendant
corporatist-capitalist China) need to be investigated in order to
properly critique the ruling party’s supposedly democratic credentials.
Mandela reportedly personally received funding from General Sani Abacha,
the military dictator of Nigeria (1993–1998) despite the fact that
Abacha was a friend of Louis Farrakhan, leader of US race-hate group the
Nation of Islam, and that Abacha’s regime was responsible for gross
human rights violations. Writing in London’s The Guardian newspaper,
David Beresford claimed Abacha had in 1994 donated £2,6-million
(R35,7-million) to the ANC, with The News of Lagos reporting the
following year that Abacha donated another $50-million.
Mandela blithely took the cash, despite Abacha’s bleak human rights
record, being responsible for the execution in 1995 after a rigged
military tribunal of writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni
activists, for the suppression of free speech and association, and for
the charging in absentia of world-famous writer Wole Soyinka with
treason. Abacha is believed to have siphoned between $2-billion and
$5-billion out of Nigeria’s treasury during his five-year tenure, which
begs the question of what the ultimate source of Mandela’s money was,
and how much went into party coffers and how much possibly into his own
back pocket; none of this has ever been subject to public audit, but
with mansions in Houghton, Qunu and Maputo, and with his children
squabbling publicly over their inheritance, he certainly did not die a
poor man.
In 1997, President Mandela reached what should have been internationally
condemned as the ethical low-point of an already checquered career,
giving South Africa’s then-highest order, the Star of Good Hope, to
neo-fascist dictator Mohamed Suharto of Indonesia, whose bloody rise to
power at the head of what became his militarised “New Order” state
(1967–1998) was facilitated by the mass murder of between 500,000 and
1-million people during his coup and purge over 1965–1966 (a 2012
documentary puts the death toll at between 1-million and 3-million).
This bloodbath, orchestrated by Suharto’s army and carried out by
interahamwe-like civilian militia, was profoundly both anti-Communist
and anti-Christian, but also had elements of genocide in that ethnic
Chinese were also targeted for slaughter. Rivers in parts of Indonesia
were so choked with bodies that their flow was dammed.
Suharto’s regime still engaged in bouts of mass-murder of thousands of
people well into the 1980s, so Mandela’s endorsement of a man who ranks
down there with Pol Pot is hard to understand: until one realises that
in honouring Suharto, Mandela was thanking him for a cash donation to
the ANC (not to the SA state) of some US$60-million; the ANC admitted
only that Suharto “gave generously”. Suharto is estimated to have
embezzled a staggering $15-billion to $35-billion during his reign, so
the cash given to Mandela can only be seen as blood money. In this
light, the most honest monument to Mandela is his face’s slightly
mocking grin and hooded eyes on the new Rand bank-notes.
Even in those early days after his 1990 release from prison, there was
something Janus-faced about Mandela, who spoke a hard, revolutionary
line to a hungry black majority, and who performed a blackface act for
the whites who commanded the heights of the economy, charming them with
his informal zoot-suit style, his trademark slow “Madiba jive” dance,
and perpetual toothy smile. That’s how the white elite liked their
blacks: smiling, dancing, entertaining—and he cynically played the role
perfectly, while all the time flexing an iron fist on the levers of
state, a state barely altered in its essentials from the apartheid state
(no-one should have been surprised that our remilitarised police force
committed the 2012 Marikana Massacre of 34 striking miners).
So I can only agree with Keller in that it simply does not matter
whether Mandela was ever a Communist, the most telling point being
rather that he was a consummate opportunist, with a lawyer’s nose for
the money. Initially an anti-Communist youth, feared for illegally using
his boxer’s training to beat up Reds and break up their meetings,
Mandela was also in turn a virulently racial black nationalist who
argued fervently against fighting apartheid arm-in-arm with other races
in the 1940s, but then swung over to the Communists in the 1950s and
1960s, when the USSR was offering funding; and then he flipped again in
the 1990s, becoming fascist-friendly, when Indonesia’s New Order gave
him money. That’s a tough set of values of live up to, if only because
I’m sure most of us are not personal friends with any communist
oligarchs or neo-fascist dictators.
In 1998, I covered two stories that demonstrated the capitalist and
imperialist values of the ANC under Mandela’s presidency. The first was
the weird tale of the Mosagrius Agreement, signed in May 1997 by Mandela
and his Mozambican counterpart Joaquin Chissano, which paved the way for
hundreds of white South African farmers to settle in Mozambique’s
largest and poorest province, Niassa. The deal was promoted by the South
African Chamber for Agricultural Development in Africa (Sacada), but
engineered by the white right-wing Freedom Front (FF) party. In terms of
the agreement, the Mozambican government granted a 50-year renewable
concession for 220,000 hectares for agriculture, cattle-ranching,
fruit-farming, and ecotourism to the farmers who also got tax exemptions
to bring in supplies like farming equipment and medicines.
The entire agreement was worked out in secret and “rammed through”, said
reports. The head of rural extension services in Niassa province
admitted locals were not consulted: “But the ministers who design
national policy know local people’s needs”. Alarmed Niassa peasants
disagreed and organised themselves in response to what they feared was
outright land-theft, enclosure and dispossession by Mandela’s cohorts.
They feared that they would end up as landless labourers or tenant
farmers, dependent on white farmers for food and housing where
previously they had been self-sufficient. The agreement amounted to
grand theft terra in the old British imperial tradition of the enclosure
of the land and the indenture of the peasantry; a more reactionary land
policy is hard to envisage.
The other 1998 story was the invasion of Lesotho in August of that year
by SADC forces comprising armoured columns, helicopters and paratroopers
of the SA National Defence Force, supported by a small Botswana
motorised force, supposedly to “restore democracy” (tell me where you
have heard that chilling phrase before?). According to South African
Foreign Affairs, a story maintained to this day, a faction within the
Lesotho Defence Force staged a coup attempt, so SA and Botswana
intervened under SADC mandate to crush the coup and restore the elected
government.
But that just wasn’t true: I was in Lesotho at the time, covering the
invasion for Sunday Times, and it was clear that there had been no coup
attempt, but rather a pro-democratic mutiny, not aimed at seizing power,
but rather at ousting corrupt military brass whose allegiance had been
bought by politicians with gifts of farms in the Free State. Although
the mutineers put up brave resistance, we killed 40 of them for the loss
of eight paratroopers.
Mandela was conveniently out of the country at the time, with Inkatha
Freedom Party (IFP) leader Mangosutho Buthelezi as Acting President, but
the invasion had been planned three months in advance and as
Commander-in-Chief, Basothos were well aware that it was Mandela who
bore ultimate responsibility for an action that had more to do with
shoring up SA water and investment interests in our weaker neighbour,
and that in doing so, Mandela had supported the corrupt status quo. On
another visit to Lesotho in 2003, I was intrigued by the expressions of
utter hatred expressed for Mandela, voiced by everyone from taxi-drivers
to nurses, people who assured me that the weapons taken by the mutineers
were well-cached and would be used again one day.
Fast-forward to 2013, and a democratic South Africa that in 1994
foreswore aggressive military interventions in Africa is still to be
found embroiled in firefights abroad, this time in the Central African
Republic (CAR), allegedly, according to some sources, to prop up Mbeki’s
private uranium-mining interests. The corruption and anti-working-class
violence of the current SA government stems directly from Mandela’s
compromise. I will argue in The Rainbow Regime that the Mandela regime
(and those who got stupendously wealthy off it including Tokyo Sexwale,
Patrice Motsepe and Cyril Ramaphosa) was the logical culmination and
realisation of the strategy of the old PW Botha regime: that so long as
real, structural apartheid kept the unwashed poor apart from the
precious classes—and the continuity under the ANC of Group Areas-styled
town planning is breathtaking—the Nationalists had achieved in Mandela
and the ANC what they were incapable of achieving themselves because of
their lack of a popular mandate under apartheid. In the ultimate
recognition of their doctrinal similarities, the New National Party
(NNP) was absorbed into the ANC in 2005.
Mandela’s earlier rapprochement with the Nationalists in the 1990s,
albeit a thorny path with many switchbacks, meant he was not always a
unifying force within the ANC. I well remember the murderous
faction-fighting in Bhambayi, KwaMashu, on the outskirts of Durban on
the eve of the 1994 elections between pro-Mandela “exile” and
anti-Mandela “internal” factions of the ANC—the last assignment of
photojournalist Ken Oosterbroek outside of Joburg before he was killed
on the East Rand. The two sides were at each others’ throats over what
the internals perceived to be the hijacking of the struggle for
democracy by exiles who had lived comfortably abroad while the internals
died in their thousands at the hands of the police and proxy forces,
exiles who moreover were committed to the rescue of the apartheid
capitalist state which had lived for 46 years off the cheap labour of a
black underclass it considered to be little more than draft animals.
On 26 July 1990, barely months after the icon’s release from prison, a
secret signal from Ambassador Bill Swing at the US Embassy in Pretoria
informed US Secretary of State James Baker III that a US intelligence
source reported that in an interview with SACP leader Mac Maharaj on the
very morning before he was arrested for Operation Vula, Maharaj
confessed that “Plan B” of Vula, should it fail to insert an insurgent
leadership into South Africa, was “to assassinate Nelson Mandela to
provoke a national insurrection.” Maharaj flatly denied this to me in
person, but it was clear to all observers at that time that Mandela’s
conciliatory approaches towards the Nationalist government were deeply
distrusted by many in the SACP and ANC. It is ironic not only that the
ANC and NNP merged but that Maharaj was the gatekeeper who presided over
Mandela’s final days.
Between Mandela’s 1990 release and the first democratic elections in
April 1994, some 15,000 people were killed in an orgy of internecine
violence, largely between the ANC and its black opponents—and no, I
don’t mean only the Zulu nationalist IFP, but also progressive forces
such as the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo), and the
Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). We all recall with a chill Mandela’s wife
Winnie Mandela endorsing terror by the ANC’s favoured “necklace” method
of torture-murder, placing a rubber tyre around the shoulders of a
victim, pouring petrol over them and lighting them up like a Roman
candle. My anarchist comrade Bobo Makhoba, who lived in Dlamini, Soweto,
a former Azapo stronghold, told me of walking to school, terrified by
the corpses of Azapo members left lying at the roadside after the
previous night’s bloodletting by the ANC. In some areas, the party
literally murdered its way to power, and members still regularly resort
to murder in holding on to such power-bases.
So how are we to assess his legacy? Listen to the voice of one of our
non-voting youth, Tina Sizovuka, writing this year: “Nelson Mandela has
become a brand, ‘Brand Mandela,’ his image, name and prison number used
to generate cash and to promote the legend of Mandela. In July 2012, for
example, the 46664 clothing line was launched (all ‘Made in China’).
‘Brand Mandela’ is more than just an opportunity to sell stupid trinkets
to tourists and celebrities. It is also a dangerous myth, based on
Mandela-worship, promoted daily in the public imagination to serve far
more sinister interests. The myth of Mandela is used to give the vicious
South African ruling class credibility by association, and to legitimise
the ruling African National Congress.”
Sizovuka challenges the ruling party’s “using the image of Mandela as a
living saint,” saying that the Madiba myth “has been a decoy to obscure
the far less heroic story of the ANC in power... Like any other
nationalist propaganda, Brand Mandela has been used by the rich and
powerful to perpetuate a rotten class system—a system the ANC helps
maintain through its neo-liberal policies, elite ‘empowerment’ deals and
police massacres. A system that has caused misery for the millions of
poor South Africans Mandela is said to have ‘liberated’.”
In their June 2013 Youth Day press release, Abahlali base Mjondolo
(Movement of Shack-dwellers), wrote that “Freedom and Democracy was
supposed to be for everyone. Today it is for the rich. Rich people are
getting the multi-racial education and the poor still have the
third-rate education which back then was known as Bantu Education. Rich
people get jobs. They have cars. They have nice houses. They can get
married and move on with their lives. They are safe. This is Freedom to
them. The poor have to survive as we can. We go in circles and not
forward.
“We live in shacks. We live in shit and fire. We are evicted. We have no
safe and easy transport. The police treat us as criminals. They beat us
if we try to organise. If you are young and poor you are treated as a
threat to society and not as the future of society. Hector Peterson,
Chris Hani, Steve Biko and other comrades who died for our Freedom and
Democracy did not die for this. We do not respect their sacrifice by
accepting that this is Freedom.” Sizovuka ended her piece saying that it
is important to put the record straight: “Mandela was not the one-man
author of the country’s liberation—even if he played an important
role... For the advances made in 1994, the black working class majority
and its allies of all races, have only themselves—their own collective
strength and solidarity—to thank.”