South Africa

From Zapiro, The Mail & Guardian 29 May, 2008:

The United States Congress is finally undertaking to remove the African National Congress from various terrorism watch lists in the United States — a status the ANC, or even Mkhonto we Sizwe, never should have suffered in the first place.

At The Mail & Guardian Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya undertakes a pretty sound (and enjoyable to behold) thrashing of Connie Mulder’s Freedom Front Plus party’s claims for special recognition for Afrikaners  from the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO). Here is a taste:

What freedom is Mulder and his chommies asking for? From whom? Freedom is the antithesis of restriction. It is always essential for freedom fighters to identify their cause and their oppressor.

Don’t hold your breath hoping that the FF+ will spell these out coherently any time soon.

The Afrikaners are not unfree or restricted in any way. Sure the SABC is no longer called the SAUK, but as recent events show, there are much more important issues we should worry about relating to the public broadcaster.

Incidentally, the same broadcaster still has more news, drama and content in Afrikaans than the Shangaan, Venda, Ndebele and Swazi put together. This, and the many cultural festivals that dot the arts calendar, don’t justify Mulder’s talk of linguistic and cultural marginalisation.

Do Mulder and those in whose name he acts not know that they and their children are still allowed to pursue their education, including higher education, in their mother tongue?

Other than English first-language speakers, no one else in this country enjoys this privilege.

One of the more ironic aspects of Mulder’s entreaties is that he seeks victim status and thus special protections when for so long Afrikaners not only derided such claims from others, but perpetrated the grossest of systems designed to abnegate the identity of the masses of South Africans. Huge swaths of the Afrikaner community reject affirmative action in almost every other form, except of course the affirmative action that was endemic in the South African system for generations.

This analysis in The Mail & Guardian seems to capture pretty well the ways in which recent events — most obviously, but not solely, the explosion of violence against foreign Africans — seem to have shaken the ruling party from its complacency. The responses from Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have been especially telling.

Even as Zuma has shown a fairly deft political touch on many of the issues facing the country, especially compared to Thabo Mbeki’s tin ear, it is still disquieting to hear talk from Mbeki’s anointed successor of the ANC being the inevitable outcome of divinely sanctioned rule destined to endure forever. This is not the sort of talk that seems likely to convince outsiders and the ANC’s internal critics that the country is moving in the right direction. Such perceptions are not vitally important. Nor are they meaningless.

Mbeki, meanwhile, continues to oscillate between shrill and defensive posturing and seeming fecklessness. One wonders who will be happier when the 2009 transition rolls around, the masses of South Africans who have soured on Mbeki and his leadership or Mbeki himself, who will likely find a golden parachute into the private sector.

As a new international rugby season gets underway, the Springboks stand tall as the defending world champions . And yet the country’s fans still have a fixation on New Zealand’s mighty All Blacks. Mark Keohane wants to shake South Africans from their rugby inferiority complex and make them realize that they support the greatest team in the world. (That said, he warns that Peter de Villiers’ men should watch out for the Aussies when the Tri-Nations fixtures start up.)

Michael Gerson has a blistering column in today’s Washington Post about the crisis in Zimbabwe and what he sees as South Africa’s enabling of Robert Mugabe’s despotism. There is little new in Gerson’s column for those who have been following the crisis for a while, but perhaps voices like his will lead to more pressure from the American government on Thabo Mbeki, whose last year in office has been characterized by myriad failures real and perceived.

The ongoing xenophobic violence in South Africa has now spread beyond Johannesburg and may well explode into a national crisis. Metrorail authorities are beefing up security in anticipation that the trains are ripe for attacks on presumed foreigners and others.

The recriminations, of course, have already begun, with many pointing fingers at Thabo Mbeki’s government. For a roundup of South African press opinion see here.

Crime is the domestic issue that evokes the most handwringing in South Africa, especially among a certain segment (read: affluent) of the white population. And crime certainly is bad, especially in the most highly populated areas. Virtually (and perhaps literally) all South Africans of every race and social class knows someone who has been victimized by crime, and while crime, and especially violent crime, looms large in the white South African mind, blacks are the most common victims of crime in the country.

 And yet it oftentimes seems that fears of crime really represent a surrogate for a whole range of fears and insecurities over the issue of change and transformation in South Africa. The narrative about crime, in other words, tends to be more unyielding than crime itself.

It is thus important to note that there appears to have been a drop in violent crime rates in the Western Cape of 32%, which is a remarkable achievement. Obviously one wonders if some of the statistics have not been cooked (for my American readers who watched The Wire, the greatest show, certainly the greatest drama, in the history of television, this question looms especially large) but if these numbers are even remotely representative of actual conditions on the ground, South Africans should rejoice. Sometimes, after all, narratives change. 

Chaos in Alexandra continued to escalate through the weekend, though people are doing the best they can to live their lives as normal and many claim not to have noticed the violence that has largely been driven by xenophobia. Calm prevailed on Tuesday morning, but one wonders if the tenuous peace will hold.  Stranded and fearful, hundreds of foreign residents of Alexandra are squatting at the police station until either alternative accomodations emerge or some guarantee of calm prevails.

Obviously the root of the violence in the cramped Johannesburg township is the grim nature of much of urban life. The economically vulnerable need to find someone to lash out at, and foreigners make for a logical scapegoat. Xenophobia, though real, thus becomes an exciuse and a catchall justification for what poverty has brought.   

With 2010 and the World Cup, and thus South Africa’s global close-up, fast approaching, the country’s tourist industry will become increasingly prominent. Moeketsi Mosola, chief executive of South African Tourism, is worried that crime is South Africa’s Achilles’ heel and that all of the work going into preparations for 2010 will be for naught if crime is not brought under control. Stories such as those coming out of Alexandra, in which foreigners have been brutally attacked, will serve only to underscore Mosola’s concerns. The fact that the foreign victims are anything but tourists probably will be lost to those living abroad who are considering a trip to South Africa but worry about crime. But more important, the events in Alex reveal the tensions within South African society, where economic insecurity and xenophobia merge with catastrophic results. It is all well and good to worry about crime because of the effect it may have on tourists, but it is even more important to address crime because of the ongoing effects it has on South Africans, and to address the underlying causes that lead to crime to begin with.