A Revolutionary Without Revolution
The Other Mandela
by BINOY KAMPMARK
The cloyingly sweet tributes to the late Nelson Mandela do as much to undermine the man’s legacy as they do to distort the record as to how various statesmen and their regimes responded to him when he was a full fledged activist. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Mandela was persona non grata to a set of regimes, regarded as a disposable nuisance at best, a dangerous terrorist at worse.
The disbelief would be understandable given the groupie congratulatory phase the late figure has been subjected to. British Prime Minister David Cameron would claim that, “A great light has gone out in the world.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of how, “Mandela was a stranger to hate. He rejected recrimination in favour of reconciliation and knew the future demands we move beyond the past.” National Security adviser Susan Rice spoke of how, “Even as we mourn, we remember how privileged the world was to witness the transformation he wrought by changing minds and hearts.”
Painfully sweet tributes such as Nelson Mandela: the fight for Freedom were aired on networks, scrubbed of history and filled with floss. Little wonder then, that some Twitter twits genuinely believed that Morgan Freeman, rather than Nelson Mandela, had died.
But there were a few cracks in the mirror of perfection developing as flowery tributes filled the halls of remembrance. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott refused to lower the flag to half-mast in commemoration of the man’s passing. A few historical explanations behind that symbolism are worth recounting.
In October 1990, the Australian Returned Serviceman League’s Bruce Ruxton would chastise Melbourne City Council for granting Mandela the freedom of the city. Mandela belonged to a terrorist organisation that, in Ruxton’s view, “paled” before the Irish Republican Army and Palestine Liberation Organisation. Showing his sense of perspective, Ruxton claimed that he spoke for “80 out of every 100 Australians who wanted to trade and play sport with South Africa” (Canberra Times, Oct 23, 1990). Mandela should best stay away from Australia and remain in South Africa attempting to stop the spate of killings affecting the country. “It’s about time that somebody said something abrasive about Mr. Mandela. He is not a hero, he is the leader of one of the worst terrorist groups.”
Ruxton’s views shed a historical light that has rapidly dimmed even as Mandela was being sanctified. In 1975, the future Australian Prime Minister John Howard, then an opposition backbencher, would rise in parliament to express his indignation that, “as a keen follower of cricket all my life”, he wished to “express his great disappointment” at the cancellation of the impending cricket tour. Apartheid would not be defeated by “hermitically sealing off South Africa”. In April 1986, as opposition leader, Howard would reiterate the policy of the coalition on trade sanctions against South Africa: “We remain of the view it is a short-sighted, negative policy.”
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to eat her words after a period of condemning Mandela as a terrorist, and the ANC as a terrorist organisation. In July 1990, she would tell her fans in South Africa to put their trust in Mandela, implying that some terrorism did have its benefits. “I think it is absolutely vital, because he is a reasonable person and can see the force of argument.” Thatcher had made it clear she was no fan of anti-apartheid trade sanctions, or the ANC, during her time in office.
It would take Thatcher’s acolyte, the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, to claim that Thatcher was wrong to have been sceptical of Mandela. Yet Cameron was happy to travel to apartheid South Africa in its last days. As anti-apartheid activist and former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain reminds us, “just on the eve of the apartheid downfall [1989], when negotiations were taking place about a transfer of power, here he was being wined and dined on a sanctions-busting visit.” The Tories of Cameron’s vintage used to boast “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges, much of this described by James Hanning in Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative Party (2009).
The greatest hypocrisy of all should be reserved for the United States, whose government supported the apartheid regime in the hope that it would defeat communist movements in Africa. Washington and Pretoria backed the brutal insurgency of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). It took failures in Mozambique and Angola to drive Pretoria’s white regime to the brink, a corner where transition would have to be considered.
Robert Parry, a veteran student of the Reagan period, even goes so far as to suggest being told that Mandela’s arrest in 1962 may have been prompted by a CIA officer’s tipoff, though agreement within the organisation about its role remains unclear (Consortium News, Dec 6). Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in The American Prospect (Dec 19, 2001), would find among the columns ofCommentary, National Review and The Wall Street Journal a line sympathetic with the white government in Pretoria and suspicious of black militancy. Such commentary came in three stages: perceived black inferiority in the 1960s, the problematic necessity of apartheid in the 1970s, and the dangers of communism in the 1980s.
While U.S. President Ronald Reagan expressed dislike for apartheid, he disliked the ANC even more. On July 22, 1986, he vetoed a bill that would have imposed economic sanctions on Pretoria. He reserved his harshest criticism for those “Soviet-armed guerrillas of the African National Congress” accusing it of having “embarked on new acts of terrorism within South Africa.” Instead, Reagan urged further involvement with the apartheid regime, seeing the “Western business community as agents of change and progress and growth.” Congress was not of the same view, and enacted the sanctions bill by 78-21.
George Orwell warns against the embrace of any cult of saints. To be a saint, you probably had to have been a rather serious sinner. Revolutionary figures, as Mandela was, embraced their share of diplomatic means and revolutionary violence. He was a serious combatant to the White regime of South Africa. Its officials knew that. Many outside South Africa knew that, and anti-communist regimes were particularly troubled.
The fable makers prefer another Mandela, the historical figure one extracts from books as a precedent; the convenient prop for any historical cause one is defending; a gentle, smiling creature who found peaceful solutions, wished no harm and inflicted none. It is that Mandela that will prove to be the least attractive of all, the revolutionary deprived of his revolutionary dress.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Art and Artiface
Mandela and the Politics of Immortality
by FARZANA VERSEY
I saw a dead Nelson Mandela in 2010 for the first time. The symbolism of and reactions to his corpse in a work of art then and to his demise now make for an almost eerie comparison.
December 10 Tuesday’s memorial service held at a stadium saw thousands, and many more who watched the live broadcast in three stadia in Johannesburg. 11,000 troops took care of the security arrangement, as several heads of state and government paid tribute. His body will lie in state until the funeral on Sunday. As reported, “Each morning, his coffin will be carried through the streets of the capital in a funeral cortege, to give as many people as possible the chance to pay their final respects.”
There is choreographed precision, for this would not merely be about homage but ensuring immortality, a fumigated immortality. Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani – leaders with politics quite different and negating what Mandela represented – were at the same place consolidating the pragmatism of denial. Obama has worked within the circumference of the racism apologia. Rouhani signifies a moderate stance where power brokering replaces ideology. Benjamin Netanyahu canceled his plans at the very last minute. An Israeli official said he changed his mind after learning about the high cost, as well as special “security challenges”. It goes without saying that he is an opponent of Mandela’s stand on a free Palestine. Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro has become another one of those messiah miracle moments that appeals to the infantile concept of angels flying overhead to clear the air.
Immortality is in many ways about the longevity of status quo. In some cases, death by martyrdom ensures that. Mandela is probably the first political mystic many of us have watched, and now the sinners will canonise him. The process started when he became the first Black president of South Africa. The civilised world could not accept just another black, so he was honoured as the ‘man of peace’; the person they called a terrorist had to be whitewashed as a democrat. During the 27 years that he was imprisoned, the struggle had continued. It must be mentioned that Winnie Mandela, his wife in all those years, was also imprisoned and tortured. Rather ironically, to make certain that Mandela’s posterity remains untarnished, her three decades of effort to keep his heroism alive have been sacrificed. Her black against blacks political moves are certainly more nuanced and expose the one-dimensional narrative that we would like to imbue Mandela with.
Robben Island, where he was imprisoned, is now not just about prison bars echoing with cries and defiant raised fists; it is a guest book of purple prose penned by many a suited establishmentarian. Nothing establishes it better than the effort in Obama’s speech to disabuse the notion of Mandela as someone “detached from the tawdry affairs of lesser men” only to consecrate him as a ‘higher man’. Notable was the pre-emptive strike of the ‘higher plane’ on which he himself stood: “Like America’s founding fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations – a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power.”
Using the language of wisdom, he sneaked in references to how “Madiba disciplined his anger” and, rather opportunely for Obama himself, how “he showed in painstaking negotiations to transfer power and draft new laws, he was not afraid to compromise for the sake of a larger goal”. Icons are often the creation of others’ self interest and self-indulgence.
To add to the mythology, it helped that Mandela took his own final breath unmasked by oxygen. The last breath transformed a political sage into a death-defying prophet. That Soweto, the arena of the violent uprising, enshrined this Biblical moment is not without irony. Public sentiment is quite unlike the rehearsed obituaries that seek to gain historical relevance by default. That the leaders would return to order their armies and polish their weapons is the real post-mortem of the déclassé, a deliberately bourgeois reference to underline the pugnacity.
The Autopsy of Nelson Mandela by Yiull Damaso.
This is where the dead Mandela of 2010 in a painting seems so relevant now. Johannesburg artist Yiull Damaso strove to “confront a subject that remains almost taboo” – the future death of Mandela. Mortality is no message. However, as a metaphor for dying ideals it is significant.
Parodying Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’, the artist had painted Mandela covered in a loin cloth, watched over by world leaders Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Jacob Zuma and former presidents F.W. de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki, and a 12-year-old boy who died of AIDS.
He explained it thus: “The politicians around him are trying to find out what makes him a great man. Nkosi Johnson, the only one in the painting who’s no longer alive, is trying to show them that Mandela is just a man. So they should stop searching and get on with building the country.”
The African National Congress found the ‘autopsy’ revolting. A party spokesperson had said: “It is in bad taste, disrespectful, and it is an insult and an affront to values of our society. This so-called work of art is also racist. It goes further by violating Mandela’s dignity by stripping him naked in the glare of curious onlookers, some of whom have seen their apartheid ideals die before them.”
South Africa has seen a great deal of suffering. Mandela stands for overcoming racism and the onlookers are perhaps made to watch not his literal death but to understand what the movement he represented was about. Using a child, an AIDS orphan, who died of an illness that requires extreme caution, stands for the diseased parts of the system that has no moorings.
The almost naked form reveals a man without any encumbrances, and the loincloth is at a very basic level both tribal culture and childhood. As dress has become our mode to judge civilisation and hierarchy, it might appear to be racist at some level. But the ANC, by referring to the work as “a foreign act of ubuthakathi (bewitch), to kill a living person”, indulged in convenient sorcery by ignoring the leader’s long tenure as the ‘living dead’.
The painting was displayed in a mall, where nuance would be lost to consumerism. Whether it was intentional or not, this too comes across as a potent message. The symbolism of hawking Madiba as a shining hope, by subverting the essentiality of his tribalism and history, has been an egregious pastime of the intelligentsia.
Nelson Mandela in a glass case has indeed become a work of art and not a bad investment for the glory-seekers.
Historic Opportunity Missed
Obama Failed To Deliver Long-Overdue Apology To Mandela
by LINN WASHINGTON JR.
When Barack Obama, the first black president of America, delivered remarks Tuesday during a South African memorial service for that country’s first black president, he muffed a historic opportunity to right a grave wrong done by the American government – one that helped send Nelson Mandela to prison for nearly 30-years.
Obama, during his remarks at a Johannesburg, SA memorial service for Mandela, who died on December 5 at age 95, recalled how that world-revered leader had endured “brutal imprisonment.”
But the U.S. president conveniently excluded the fact that America’s CIA had helped South African agents capture Mandela, leading to the very imprisonment that Obama and other world leaders were decrying during that service.
A few miles from the soccer stadium where that memorial service for Mandela was held is the house in Soweto where Mandela lived before he went underground in the early 1960s to ramp up the fight in his homeland against apartheid – that racist system modeled on U.S. segregation laws.
That small four-room house on Vilakazi Street in Soweto’s Orlando West section is now a museum commemorating the life and sacrifices of the man credited universally hailed as the ‘Father’ of modern South Africa.
Included among the abundant memorabilia inside that museum is a June 1990 letter sent to then U.S. President George H.W. Bush Sr. by some state legislators in Michigan asking Bush to apologize to Mandela for the U.S. CIA’s role in helping South African government agents capture Mandela in August 1962, leading to his long imprisonment. Mandela was finally been released from prison in February of 1990. 1990.
Bush Sr., a former CIA Director, brushed aside that request. His cold-shouldered non-response to that request continued the stance among legions of American governmental and corporate leaders who aided-&- and abetted South African apartheid right up to the negotiated end of white supremacist rule and the 1994 election of Mandela. The U.S. government had backed South Africa’s white minority government economically, militarily and diplomatically for decades.
Obama, during his eloquent memorial remarks, could have apologized specifically for that CIA role in Mandela’s arrest or he could have at least acknowledged America’s decades-long stance on the wrong side of the anti-apartheid struggle. Instead, he took a pass, even at the point when he urged persons who attended that memorial to “act on behalf of justice.”
Obama’s immediate predecessors in the White House – George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – also were on hand for the Mandela memorial service. Neither of them had extended an apology to Mandela for the CIA’s role in his arrest, during their respective presidencies. Bush, in 2008, did sign a measure removing Mandela and ANC leaders from America’s ‘Terrorist Watch List’– a labeling left over from the era of federal government backing of apartheid.
Despite an Obama declaration during his remarks that lauded Mandela for embracing the “moral necessity of racial justice” the failures – real and perceived – of America’s current president to practice what he preaches about justice, is precisely what sparked protests against him when he visited South Africa last June.
On the occasion of that presidential visit, protesters blasted Obama for his arrogant and oppressive foreign policy according to press accounts. Protesters castigated his drone wars, his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and America’s continuing support of Israel in that country’s apartheid-like subjugation of the Palestinians. Protesters included leading members of COSATU (the Coalition of South African Trade Unions) and South Africa’s Communist Party. Those two organizations, along with the African National Congress (ANC), form the tripartite coalition now governing South Africa. Mandela once headed the ANC.
Obama, during his Mandela service remarks, assailed the fact that “around the world men and woman are still imprisoned for their political beliefs.” Yet there too, was an element of hypocrisy, since as president, Obama has not pardoned any of the scores of Americans who’ve spent decades in prison for their political beliefs in fighting against American apartheid during the late 1960s and early 1970s – many of whom were falsely imprisoned under the illegal police-state-style COINTELPRO program once operated by the FBI.
President Obama has exercised his pardon powers less than any U.S. President in modern history. As Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted recently, Obama’s has to date pardoned ten turkeys during Thanksgiving but only 39 people during his presidential tenure. None of those pardoned have been America’s political prisoners.
Obama praised Mandela for teaching “us the power of action…” Apparently, though, Obama has not learned a key lesson of Mandela’s legacy: moving beyond symbolic rhetoric to real action.
Obama applauded Mandela as a “giant of history (who) moved a nation toward justice.” Mandela’s death, Obama said, occasioned a “time of self-reflection.”
Ironically, self-reflection would appear to be exactly what this US president needs if he is to improve his record of putting real substance into his too frequent symbolic efforts towards remediating festering wrongs committed by the American government.
LINN WASHINGTON, JR. is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, DAVE LINDORFF, LORI SPENCER and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
A Faustian Pact With Neoliberalism
How the ANC Sold Out South Africa’s Poor
by RONNIE KASRILS
South Africa’s young people today are known as the Born Free generation. They enjoy the dignity of being born into a democratic society with the right to vote and choose who will govern. But modern South Africa is not a perfect society. Full equality – social and economic – does not exist, and control of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of a few, so new challenges and frustrations arise. Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle like myself are frequently asked whether, in the light of such disappointment, the sacrifice was worth it. While my answer is yes, I must confess to grave misgivings: I believe we should be doing far better.
There have been impressive achievements since the attainment offreedom in 1994: in building houses, crèches, schools, roads and infrastructure; the provision of water and electricity to millions; free education and healthcare; increases in pensions and social grants; financial and banking stability; and slow but steady economic growth (until the 2008 crisis at any rate). These gains, however, have been offset by a breakdown in service delivery, resulting in violent protests by poor and marginalised communities; gross inadequacies and inequities in the education and health sectors; a ferocious rise in unemployment; endemic police brutality and torture; unseemly power struggles within the ruling party that have grown far worse since the ousting of Mbeki in 2008; an alarming tendency to secrecy and authoritarianism in government; the meddling with the judiciary; and threats to the media and freedom of expression. Even Nelson Mandela’s privacy and dignity are violated for the sake of a cheap photo opportunity by the ANC’s top echelon.
Most shameful and shocking of all, the events of Bloody Thursday – 16 August 2012 – when police massacred 34 striking miners at Marikana mine, owned by the London-based Lonmin company. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 prompted me to join the ANC. I found Marikana even more distressing: a democratic South Africa was meant to bring an end to such barbarity. And yet the president and his ministers, locked into a culture of cover-up. Incredibly, the South African Communist party, my party of over 50 years, did not condemn the police either.
South Africa’s liberation struggle reached a high point but not its zenith when we overcame apartheid rule. Back then, our hopes were high for our country given its modern industrial economy, strategic mineral resources (not only gold and diamonds), and a working class and organised trade union movement with a rich tradition of struggle. But that optimism overlooked the tenacity of the international capitalist system. From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC’s soul got under way, and was eventually lost to corporate power: we were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry out, we “sold our people down the river”.
What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election. That loan, with strings attached that precluded a radical economic agenda, was considered a necessary evil, as were concessions to keep negotiations on track and take delivery of the promised land for our people. Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, there was no other option; that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses to overcome all obstacles. Whatever the threats to isolate a radicalising South Africa, the world could not have done without our vast reserves of minerals. To lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable. The ANC leadership needed to remain determined, united and free of corruption – and, above all, to hold on to its revolutionary will. Instead, we chickened out. The ANC leadership needed to remain true to its commitment of serving the people. This would have given it the hegemony it required not only over the entrenched capitalist class but over emergent elitists, many of whom would seek wealth through black economic empowerment, corrupt practices and selling political influence.
To break apartheid rule through negotiation, rather than a bloody civil war, seemed then an option too good to be ignored. However, at that time, the balance of power was with the ANC, and conditions were favourable for more radical change at the negotiating table than we ultimately accepted. It is by no means certain that the old order, apart from isolated rightist extremists, had the will or capability to resort to the bloody repression envisaged by Mandela’s leadership. If we had held our nerve, we could have pressed forward without making the concessions we did.
It was a dire error on my part to focus on my own responsibilities and leave the economic issues to the ANC’s experts. However, at the time, most of us never quite knew what was happening with the top-level economic discussions. As s Sampie Terreblanche has revealed in his critique, Lost in Transformation, by late 1993 big business strategies – hatched in 1991 at the mining mogul Harry Oppenheimer‘s Johannesburg residence – were crystallising in secret late-night discussions at the Development Bank of South Africa. Present were South Africa’s mineral and energy leaders, the bosses of US and British companies with a presence in South Africa – and young ANC economists schooled in western economics. They were reporting to Mandela, and were either outwitted or frightened into submission by hints of the dire consequences for South Africa should an ANC government prevail with what were considered ruinous economic policies.
All means to eradicate poverty, which was Mandela’s and the ANC’s sworn promise to the “poorest of the poor”, were lost in the process.Nationalisation of the mines and heights of the economy as envisaged by the Freedom charter was abandoned. The ANC accepted responsibility for a vast apartheid-era debt, which should have been cancelled. A wealth tax on the super-rich to fund developmental projects was set aside, and domestic and international corporations, enriched by apartheid, were excused from any financial reparations. Extremely tight budgetary obligations were instituted that would tie the hands of any future governments; obligations to implement a free-trade policy and abolish all forms of tariff protection in keeping with neo-liberal free trade fundamentals were accepted. Big corporations were allowed to shift their main listings abroad. In Terreblanche’s opinion, these ANC concessions constituted “treacherous decisions that [will] haunt South Africa for generations to come”.
An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil’s pact, only to be damned in the process. It has bequeathed an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the plight of most of our people.
Little wonder that their patience is running out; that their anguished protests increase as they wrestle with deteriorating conditions of life; that those in power have no solutions. The scraps are left go to the emergent black elite; corruption has taken root as the greedy and ambitious fight like dogs over a bone.
In South Africa in 2008 the poorest 50% received only 7.8% of total income. While 83% of white South Africans were among the top 20% of income receivers in 2008, only 11% of our black population were. These statistics conceal unmitigated human suffering. Little wonder that the country has seen such an enormous rise in civil protest.
A descent into darkness must be curtailed. I do not believe the ANC alliance is beyond hope. There are countless good people in the ranks. But a revitalisation and renewal from top to bottom is urgently required. The ANC’s soul needs to be restored; its traditional values and culture of service reinstated. The pact with the devil needs to be broken.
At present the impoverished majority do not see any hope other than the ruling party, although the ANC’s ability to hold those allegiances is deteriorating. The effective parliamentary opposition reflects big business interests of various stripes, and while a strong parliamentary opposition is vital to keep the ANC on its toes, most voters want socialist policies, not measures inclined to serve big business interests, more privatisation and neoliberal economics.
This does not mean it is only up to the ANC, SACP and Cosatu to rescue the country from crises. There are countless patriots and comrades in existing and emerging organised formations who are vital to the process. Then there are the legal avenues and institutions such as the public protector’s office and human rights commission that – including the ultimate appeal to the constitutional court – can test, expose and challenge injustice and the infringement of rights. The strategies and tactics of the grassroots – trade unions, civic and community organisations, women’s and youth groups – signpost the way ahead with their non-violent and dignified but militant action.
The space and freedom to express one’s views, won through decades of struggle, are available and need to be developed. We look to the Born Frees as the future torchbearers.
Ronnie Kasrils was a member of the national executive committee of the African National Congress from 1987 to 2007, and a member of the central committee of the South African Communist party from December 1986 to 2007. He was the country’s minister for intelligence services from 2004 to 2008. This is an extract from the new introduction to his autobiography, Armed and Dangerous.
