South Africa

Morgenie Pillay, the Andrew Mellon lecturer in the department of politics and international studies at one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University, and a visiting doctoral research scholar at the London School of Economics asks (and tries to answer) an important question in The Mail & Guardian: “Why are there so few up-and-coming new career black academics at South African institutions?”

Her answers (and the question is legitimate — according to South African statistics (2004/05) 69.8% of the master’s/doctoral degrees in the country are held by whites) ? Funding, opportunity, and of course racism, either latent or covert. There may be additional factors at work as well. For example, for high-talent strivers, academia might not seem as lucrative as the private sector or as significant as government. Another answer might be that South Africa is still dealing with the lag time of the PhD process. It takes a long time to earn a PhD. Perhaps those students still in the pipeline will help close the gap. A final possibility is that the gap may well be closing. I’d be curious to know the percantages among adcademics who were black in 1987 and 1997 to get a sense of change over time. Nonetheless, Pillay has identified a significant gap that South Africa’s universities in particular must address.

Liberia’s former President, Charles Taylor, one of Africa’s most ruthless thugs (a bold claim, to be sure) will go on trial at a UN-backed Special Court at the Haguie next week. He will face war crimes charges stemming back to his years as Liberia’s Big Man. A couple of colorful quotations reveal the loathing that taylor inspires among Africans:

“This man called Charles Taylor is a monster.” — Sierra Leonean Adama Turay, whose son and daughter both had hands amputated by RUF rebels.

“I am very happy to see this man is at that court. He needs to be killed rather than fed each day.
Whatever a man soweth, so shall he reap …. Men acting on his order killed many people … That should tell you how wicked that man was.“  — Monrovia resident Rosetta Smith, whose husband was beaten to death by members of an Anti-Terrorist Unit operating under Taylor.

Not all are thrilled with the trial — some fear that it will become a circus, others believe that the trial represents a misallocation of resources, some fear that taylor will be acquitted. But on the whole I would argue that bringing taylor to justice sends the best possible message in light of the atrocities for which Taylor bears responsibility, whether direct or indirect.

The United States has announced that it will increase sanctions on Khartoum as part of President Bush’s much ballyhooed “Plan B” to deal with the human rights catastrophe that is Darfur. Smith College’s Eric Reeves, one of the most perspicacious Sudan observers, argues that sanctions will prove useless and that they represent “nothing more than a bookkeeping inconvenience” for the Sudanese government. Sudan’s leadership will sputter and fulminate, of course, but it likely will not change in any meaningful way.

There is a grim reality at work. It is evident from recent history that Sudan won’t change unless forced to do so, and that force may have to come in the form of, well, force. We live in a world in which America’s misadventures in Iraq have given military intervention a bad name and have made placing boots on the ground anathema as a first or second resort. But mismanaging Iraq should not make the United States squeamish about intervention elsewhere if there is a moral and strategic imperative and if there is the will, not only at home, but also globally.

A long-term plan will require more than troops, and will involve international cooperation, a willingness to desanctify the idea of “international sovereignty,” and something beyond an ad hoc approach to address the crisis of the day. Lee Feinstein, a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and International Law at the Council on Foreign Relations has addressed some of these ideas in a CFR special report, “Darfur and Beyond: What is Needed to Prevent Mass Atrocities.”

Things have gone so far without a response from the global community that there are no easy answers and there certainly will be no clean resolutions. But the lack of a clean and easy solution does not mean that there are no solutions. This distinction makes an enormous difference.

A Zimbabwe’s inflation rate, which long ago reached the status of being the worst in the world, doubles and trebles, the country’s humanitarian crisis worsens. Thabo Mbeki continues to try to facilitate dialogue between Robert Mugabe’s thugocracy and the opposition, most notably the Movement for Democratic Change, as per his mandate from SADC, but the process is slow when it progresses at all. South Africa has rejected taking a hardline stance against Zimbabwe, arguing that doing so would likely prove counterproductive. In a speech before Parliament on Tuesday South Africa’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, argued, “You must not push the country over the brink, you must pull it back from the brink. That is our approach.”

It must be incredibly frustrating to be a part of South Africa’s foreign affairs apparatus and to be dealing with the Zimbabwe fiasco. Opposing a hardline stance might simply qualify as making a virtue out of necessity, as even Mbeki’s harshest critics have been better at asserting his Zimbabwe policy’s failings without providing a concrete prescription for how to remedy the country’s approach to Mugabe’s regime.

A while back the Sunday New York Times had a front-page article (now archived, so you may need to pay to read it) on some remarkable successes that farmers in the Niger Delta have enjoyed. Chido Makunine of the African News Network provided a perceptive summary and assessment of the piece soon after it appeared. I particularly agree with Makunine’s emphasis on positive news coming from Africa. The Niger case provides a nice counter to the stream of bad news from the region that usually garners front-page treatment.

In our zeal to embrace alternative sources of energy, including biofuels, let’s keep in mind that there may be very real human costs. And not surprisingly those human costs will be felt by the most vulnerable. The most vulnerable often live in Africa. IRIN points out a recent report arguing:

The rush to produce biofuels, driven by the threat of global warming and higher oil prices, is exerting price pressure on staple foods in South Africa, according to a report by the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP), a nongovernmental organisation that highlights food security concerns. 

My colleague Bill Hewitt at the FPA Climate Change Blog has a post with lots of great links in which he explores these same complexities. None of this is intended to disavow the importance of alternative fuel sources, but rather simply to explicate the realities that environmental change will not be easy and that the trickle down effect will deleteriously effect the most vulnerable in Africa and elsewhere. 
 

At The New York Times Naruddin Farah, a Somalian writer who lives in Cape Town, provides some insight into the situation in Somalia from the vantage point as an insider-outsider who was tapped as a short term emissary between his native country’s two main warring factions. He is not optimistic that peace will take hold:

. . . [I]n the end, the only way out of the current impasse is to resume dialogue between the two principal parties to the conflict. I now know from personal experience how difficult this is. President Yusuf has said that the Islamists’ claim to represent a religious constituency does not sit well with his administration.

At the same time, the exiled Islamists are endorsing or openly engaging in violence. Assassinations of political figures, exploding roadside bombs in which peacekeepers or innocent bystanders lose their lives: these must stop.

Both sides must give. Most Somalis believe that the Islamists deserve a place at the table; they have been disempowered through invasion by an occupying force, which must withdraw, the sooner the better.

Genuine negotiations will not be easy. I found this out the hard way. But Somalis must consider the alternative: the violence will continue and the rest of the world will continue to use land as a playground for intervention.

While the world’s attention is so often focused on the conflicts in the Middle East, one of the next great testing grounds of radical Islam versus both its moderate counterpart and the non-Muslim world will play out in the Horn of Africa with Somalia at the epicenter. It would behoove the West to pay far more attention to this crisis. 

Under ordinary circumstances a discussion of the possible successors to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would be an affirmative thing. Mugabe’s murderous regime has to go. And similarly, a discussion of a possible successor who has shown the temerity to challenge Mugabe frontally would ordinarily represent serious progress.

Alas, the most likely successor to Mugabe will not come from the various factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) but rather from within Mugabe’s own inner sanctum. Mugabe hand picked Joyce Mujuru to be Deputy President in 2005 after the death of her predecessor, Simon Muzenda. This decision raise many eyebrows in the country and across the region. To be sure, Mujuru has proven to be difficult for even Mugabe to control and she has shown an independent streak that has made him lament his decision. But worryingly, she has shown the same despotic tendencies  as Mugabe, and perhaps even more problematic is that fact that her husband, former commander in the Zimbabwean Army and business magnate, Solomon Mujuru, seems to relish his wife ascending to the highest office in the land because her doing so would allow him to operate as a svengali behind the scenes.

According to a story in the Cape Argus:

It is Mujuru’s tough talking and her controversial business dealings with her husband that sends cold shivers down the spines of many.

On occasion Mujuru has far outdone Mugabe’s confrontational and divisive rhetoric. In the liberation struggle, she gave herself the nom de guerre, Teurai Ropa, which means “spill blood”.

She has boasted how as a young woman during the war she grabbed an AK-47 rifle from a dying guerrilla fighter and single-handedly shot down and destroyed a Rhodesian Air Force helicopter, killing all aboard. Her claim has never been independently verified by anyone who fought alongside her in the liberation war.

When violent land seizures began in 2000, Mujuru kept to the spirit of her nom de guerre by urging Zimbabweans not to hesitate to “spill the blood of white farmers” to recapture their land heritage.

She is said to have personally led several land invasions and threatened families with death unless they vacated their properties. At a time when Zimbabwe needs a conciliator, she seems to represent the opposite.

Zimbabwe does not need old wine in new skins. A successor who has spoken out against Mugabe represents a necessary but not sufficient condition for inheriting the reins of Zimbabwe. What the country needs is the emergence of a democrat interested less in power and more in her or his country’s well being.  

In today’s test match South Africa pummeled a depleted England team missing up to 30 of its top players due to injury, illness, and the absence of players from last week’s Heineken Cup champonship game. The final score was 58-10. Notwithstanding England’s weakened status, this triumph seems to validate South African optimism on the state of this year’s Bok squad’s chances to emerge triumphant at the World Cup in France. The stars for the Boks were veteran fullback Percy Montgomery, who has been a stalwart for South Africa for more than a decade and who converted seven conversions and three penalties, and Bryan Habana, who scored two tries. Next week’s rematch at Loftus versfeld might be more telling, as the defending World Champions should be at closer to full strength.

There has been a perplexing story unwinding in South Africa over the course of the last few weeks. The Springboks are gearing up for their World Cup run later this year. The start has been promising — two South African teams, the Bulls and the Sharks, made the finals of the Super 14 with the Bulls pulling off the win. The annual Tri-Nations clashes, pitting the national teams of traditional powerhouses New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, will provide the usual measuring stick for where the teams are. Then will come the World Cup, which South Africa has only hosted once, in the epochal 1995 victory in which Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and for a brief moment the supreme icon of Afrikaner nationalism, the Springbok, became a symbol of reconciliation.

 But in the midst of the preparations for the World Cup a peculiar story has bubbled that reveals all of the fissures in South African society, but in a bizarro world sort of way. The controversy involves team selection. South Africa’s national sports teams bear the burden of trying to compete at the highest level while at the same time helping to make a transition from apartheid sport in which black athletes were inelegible to compete on the national teams. The processes of trying to promote inclusion have led to some tense moments and have brought affirmative action into the public dialogue in a way that tends to reveal deep-seeded politics rather bluntly.

The most recent controversy involves the inclusion of Western Province Stormers flank Luke Watson on the Springbok squad. The solons of South African rugby want him on the team. The coach, Jake White, does not. Watson is a good player — he was Vodacom Cup player of the year last year. But White argues that Watson is not big enough for the style of play — brute force upfront, a traditional Springbok hallmark — that White hopes to implement.

But the twist is that Watson is white. Though he also unabashedly claims to be African. And to make matters even more inscrutable, some, including Western Province ANC Premier Ebrahim Rasool, have taken to calling Watson a “black” player.

The further twist is that Watson is the son of “Cheeky” Watson. Watson and his brother, Valence, were sterling rugby players in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. But they chose to turn their back on the white rugby establishment, and thus the Springboks, in order to play with black players in the townships under the old South African Rugby Union (SARU).  The Watson brothers’ stance — Cheeky turned down Springbok selection in 1976 because of the country’s racial policies – made them virtual pariahs in white South Africa. Many observers believe that their stand so many years ago provide the foundation for the opposition to Luke Watson by many in the current rugby structure. In other words, the Watsons’ anti-apartheid activism might be harming Luke Watson so that even though Luke Watson is white, racism plays a part in this imbroglio. SARU deputy Mike Stofile, for example, accused White of being prejudiced against Watson because of his father’s fight against rugby racism during the apartheid era. Furthermore, some of the black members of the rugby hierarchy, particularly Springbok manager Zola Yeye, are old friends with the Watsons, and thus the politicization of the sport takes another bizarre turn. 

Coach White insists that Luke Watson’s inclusion is not a problem on the squad. Watson will not be on the roster for the test match against England, the defending world champions, this weekend nor will he don the Springbok jersey for the second England match, but he will appear against Samoa on June 9 in the last test match prior to the start of the Tri Nations series. 

The Watson case has drawn a tremendous amount of attention across South Africa. The odds are that it will not abate soon. The controversy over Watson has overshadowed a host of other stories regarding the maekup of the squad. Perhaps the biggest irony is that lost in the shuffle has been that the national governing body imposed another player, the Sharks’ Odwa Ndungane, onto the squad over White’s preferences. Ndugane’s inclusion (he will join his twin brother Akona on the squad) may well have represented an attempt at racial balancing.

If nothing else is clear amidst this muddle, there is no doubt that rugby, race and politics create a peculiar, vexing, and fascinating mix in South Africa.  It is likely that by the time of the World Cup this controversy will be long past, though the Watson backstory will probably prove too alluring for it to recede too deep into the background and race will continue to be an issue in the sport for so long most closely associated with white supremacy in South Africa.