06-12-2013, 12:12 PM (This post was last modified: 06-12-2013, 12:27 PM by Magda Hassan.)
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Sickening to see some of the santimonious hypocrisy on show from people that called for his continued imprisonment and continued human rights abuses against black and coloured South Africans. They'll turn him into a nice whitewashed neutered brand in the coming days.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
06-12-2013, 06:50 PM (This post was last modified: 06-12-2013, 07:26 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Besides the CIA tipping off and helping BOSS find and arrest Mandela, he was kept on the USA's terrorist watch list until 2008!!!!* [when he was 90 and long since a Nobel Peace Price winner and former President of South Africa.] This says a LOT about the Secret/Deep Government Structures in the USA.
* Don't expect to see THIS mentioned anywhere in the MSM in all the obituary and laudatory pieces.
And all kinds of American fascists haven't changed their views on him....such as this fascist pig who played a large role in 9-11-01 [and other similar things]
Dick Cheney Didn't Regret His Vote Against Freeing Nelson Mandela, Maintained He Was A 'Terrorist'
The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing Posted: 12/05/2013 6:14 pm EST | Updated: 12/06/2013 12:49 pm EST
In 1986, Nelson Mandela -- the former president of South Africa who died Thursday at the age of 95 -- was serving the 23rd year of what would ultimately be a 27-year prison sentence. The Western world was finally acknowledging the true horrors of Apartheid, a system of racial segregation that denied basic rights to blacks -- including citizenship and the right to vote -- and brutally oppressed a generation of South Africans fighting for equality. In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers were ready to show their opposition to the South African regime with the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, a bill that called for tough sanctions and travel restrictions on the nation and its leaders, and for the repeal of apartheid laws and release of political prisoners like Mandela, then leader of the African National Congress (ANC). The measure passed with bipartisan support, despite strong and largely Republican opposition. President Ronald Reagan was among those most opposed to the bill, and when he finally vetoed the measure over its support of the ANC, which he maintained was a "terrorist organization," it took another vote by Congress to override it. Among the Republicans who repeatedly voted against the measure was future Vice President Dick Cheney, then a Republican congressman from Wyoming. Cheney's staunch resistance to the Anti-Apartheid Act arose as an issue during his future campaigns on the presidential ticket, but the Wyoming Republican has never said he regretted voting the way he did. In fact, in 2000, he maintained that he'd made the right decision. "The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization," Cheney said on ABC's "This Week." "I don't have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago.'' Cheney went on to call Mandela a "great man" who had "mellowed" in the decade after his release from prison. In 2004, Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards tore into his counterpart's congressional voting record, calling out Cheney for his vote against freeing Mandela. Shortly after, Cheney historian John Nichols said that he'd spoken to Mandela about Cheney's record and worldview. Like many, Mandela was concerned:
He's very blunt about it he says one of the many reasons why he fears Dick Cheney's power in the United States, and Mandela does say, he understands that Cheney is effectively the President of the United States, he says, one of the many reasons that he fears Dick Cheney's power is that in the late 1980's when even prominent Republicans like Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich were acknowledging the crime of Apartheid, Dick Cheney maintained the lie that the ANC was a terrorist organization and a fantasy that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist leader who deserved to be in jail. Frankly it begs very powerful question. If Dick Cheney's judgment was that bad in the late 1980's, why would we believe that it's gotten any better in the early 21st century?
A handful of sitting lawmakers also voted against freeing Mandela. GOP Reps. Joe Barton (Texas), Howard Coble (N.C.) and Hal Rogers (Ky.) opposed the Anti-Apartheid Act throughout the legislative process. Texas Rep. Ralph Hall, then a Democrat, voted against the bill, but did not vote on the veto override.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Former South African president and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 95. South African President Jacob Zuma announced Mandela's death Thursday saying, "Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost their father." Mandela was held as a political prisoner for 27 years from 1962 to 1990. In 1994, four years after his release from prison, Mandela became South Africa's first black president. We air highlights of Mandela in his own words over the years, including a rare TV interview from the early 1960s. Click here to watch our special coverage of the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Today we will spend the hour remembering the life of Nelson Mandela. South African President Jacob Zuma announced the news of his death on Thursday.
PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA: Fellow South Africans, our beloved Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the founding president of our democratic nation, has departed. He passed on peacefully in the company of his family around 20:50 on the 5th of December, 2013. He is now resting. He is now at peace. Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: South Africa's first black and first democratically elected leader, Nelson Mandela, has died at the age of 95. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years from 1962 to 1990. In 1994, four years after his release from prison, he became South Africa's first black president. This marked the end of apartheid, an official policy of racial segregation and white supremacy enforced by the South African government beginning in 1948. Mandela's anti-apartheid and anti-colonial activities dated back to the 1940s. AMY GOODMAN: Trained as a lawyer, he became a founding member of the African National Congress Youth League along with Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. During the 1950s and early '60s, Mandela was repeatedly arrested and went through several major trials, the first in 1956 when he was charged with high treason, but the charges were dropped after a four-year trial. In this rare televised interview, a young Mandela, who was in hiding at the time, talked about the role of nonviolence in the anti-apartheid struggle.
NELSON MANDELA: We have made it very clear in our policy that South Africa is a country of many races. There is room for all the various races in this country. There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and nonviolence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: On March 21st, 1960, South African police opened fire on a group of black protesters, killing 69 people in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre. Ten days later, the government banned the African National Congress. Mandela, by then the ANC's national vice president, soon went underground, and the ANC launched a campaign of economic sabotage and took up arms against the South African government. In 1962, Mandela was arrested and charged with sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government. AMY GOODMAN: The CIA reportedly played a role in his capture. In 1990, The New York Times quoted an unidentified retired official who said a senior CIA officer told him shortly after his arrest, quote, "We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be." This is Nelson Mandela speaking before the court.
NELSON MANDELA: The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racism. When it triumphs, as it certainly must, it will not change that policy. This then is what the ANC is fighting. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society, in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an idea for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an idea for which I am prepared to die.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: In 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison on Robben Island. He would become the most famous political prisoner in the world, and his freedom became a central demand of the international anti-apartheid movement. Despite growing international pressure in the 1980s, the apartheid government received strong backing from the Reagan administration and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. The ANC was considered a terrorist organization by both nations. Mandela was listed on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008. AMY GOODMAN: In Washington, 180 House members voted against a nonbinding resolution in 1986 calling for Mandela's release from prison and for recognition of the ANC. Future Vice President Dick Cheney, then a congressman, voted against the resolution. In 2000, Cheney defended his vote, saying the ANC, quote, "at the time was viewed as a terrorist organization and had a number of interests that were fundamentally inimical to the U.S." Well, in February 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The president of South Africa at the time was F.W. de Klerk.
NELSON MANDELA: I stand here before you, not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you, the people. I place the remaining years of my life in your hands.
AMY GOODMAN: Four months later, Nelson Mandela traveled to the United States. He spoke at Yankee Stadium, where he was introduced by Harry Belafonte.
HARRY BELAFONTE: Never in the history of humankind has there ever been a voice that has more clearly caught the imagination and the spirit and fired the hope for freedom than the voice of the deputy president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.
NELSON MANDELA: The principle of "one person, one vote" on a common and non-racial voters' roll is therefore our central strategic objective. Throughout our lifetime, we have fought against white domination and have fought against black domination. We intend to remain true to this principle to the end of our days.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: That was Nelson Mandela speaking at Yankee Stadium in 1990, an excerpt from Danny Schechter's film, Mandela in America. Three years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1994, the people of South Africa elected him president in the country's first multiracial election. His inauguration took place in Pretoria on May 10th, 1994, televised to a billion viewers globally. Mandela was introduced by South African poet Mzwakhe Mbuli, known as "The People's Poet," before he formally took the oath of the presidency.
MZWAKHE MBULI: Ladies and gentlemen, I want to take this historic honor and introduce to you the new South African president of the Republic of South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. I talk of Madiba. Like gold and diamond, like diamond and gold, you have gone through the fires of time in order to be refined. You have gone through all forms of life. I talk of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Like an oak tree, you have survived all kinds of weather. Comrade Mandela, you are a hero. You are a veteran. You are a stalwart. You are a catalyst to unite. You are the father of the new nation.
PRESIDENT NELSON MANDELA: I, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, do hereby swear to be faithful to the Republic of South Africa, so help me God.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the film Countdown to Freedom. As President Nelson Mandela helped establish a new constitution and initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated apartheid crimes on both sides and tried to heal the wounds, he served as president until 1999. Later that year, he set up the Nelson Mandela Foundation. He was widely viewed as a global icon, but he did not shy away from criticizing the United States' invasion of Iraq. In 2003, Mandela said, quote, "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care," he said. Earlier today, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu paid tribute to his friend and fellow Nobel Peace laureate, Nelson Mandela.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: And so, we have lost our father. So many, many of us addressed him as Dada, an affectionate term for father. But of course we don't want to linger and wallow in our abundant tears, for we, yes, wonderfully are able to give great thanks to God for this one who was denigrated for so long, this "terrorist."
AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaking earlier today at mass at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa. Yes, President Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 95. And we'll spend the rest of the hour on his life and legacy. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
Filmmaker Danny Schechter: The Anti-Apartheid Movement Behind Mandela Can't Be Forgotten
We speak to documentary filmmaker Danny Schechter and Father Michael Lapsley in Cape Town. Schechter has made six nonfiction films on Mandela, including "Mandela in America." He began working in South Africa in the 1960s. He is author of the new book, "Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela," which was published in conjunction with the new film, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom." We also speak with Father Michael Lapsley, who lost his two hands in a mail bomb assassination attempt in April 1990, two months after Nelson Mandela was released. He is now the director of the Institute for Healing of Memories. Click here to watch our special coverage of the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: "Bring Back Nelson Mandela" by Hugh Masekela here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González, on this day after the death, the passing, of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 of a lingering lung infection that he was suffering from since his years in prison. Juan? JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Well, let's turn to the opening scenes of Danny Schechter's film, Mandela in America.
REPORTER: There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa.
NELSON MANDELA: Amandla!
CROWD: Awethu!
NELSON MANDELA: Amandla!
CROWD: Awethu!
NELSON MANDELA: I can only play some constructive role only if I work as a member of a team, as a member of the African National Congress.
INTERVIEWER: And what, for you personally, was the most vivid moment about returning? I mean, having your first meal at home, your first home-cooked meal? Sleeping in your own bed for the first time in 28 years?
NELSON MANDELA: The most pleasant memory when a man returns to his home after almost 28 years is when you close the bedroom door and to try and assure my wife that I'm back and that her problems will now be shed.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: That was a clip from Mandela in America. Joining us now is Danny Schechter, the filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker who has made six nonfiction films on Mandela, including Mandela in America and A Hero for All: Nelson Mandela's Farewell. Danny Schechter began working in South Africa in the 1960s. He's author of the new book, Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela, which was published in conjunction with the new film, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.
Danny, welcome to Democracy Now! DANNY SCHECHTER: Thank you. JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Talk to us about your reaction when you heard of the passing, and also how you first got involved in covering Mandela. DANNY SCHECHTER: Well, you know, I had the fortune of being at the London School of Economics in the '60s, at the right place at the right time, where the ANC people had come into exile. And in my class was remarkable woman, Ruth First, who became sort of my mentor about South Africa. And I was recruited by the ANC to go into South Africa. They couldn't get their people in because so many of them were in prison and well known to the security police. So, people from England, what were then called the "London recruits," were sent into South Africa on various missions. I was one of themnaive, perhaps, to do this, unaware, really, of the consequences that awaited me if I wasif I was caught. But I went anyway as an act of solidarity.
I went to the funeral of the late Chief Luthuli, who was the leader of the ANC before Mandela. And I, you know, got an insight into how vicious the apartheid system was, how pervasive it was in people's lives. It wasn't just about race. It was about controlling people as labor, as a labor force in South Africa. This was always about economics, not just pigment. And Americans make the mistake of, you know, confusing what was happening in South Africa with the civil rights movement in America where people fought to have the Constitution apply to them. In South Africa, there was no constitution, and there were no rights for a majority, not a minority, of people. And so I experienced that upfront and personally, in a way, but it also kind of got me involved deeply in South Africa.
And years later, not only did I write about South Africa and was one of the organizers of the Africa Research Group in Boston, but I became active in a project called "Sun City: Artists Against Apartheid." And, you know, just to supplement what Randall Robinson told you earlier, this was not all about lobbying Congress. This was about informing America about what was happening. And in some cases, it was cultural figures, 58 of the world's top artists who indicted the system of forced relocation in South Africa. That's what Sun City was all about. It was a part of an effort to promote a cultural boycott alongside an economic boycott. And it was very successful and worldwide in its impact. And I think that was important.
And then, you know, I helped start the TV series, South Africa Now, that ran for 156 weeks, every week, in the United States, reporting on South Africa through the eyes of South Africans. It was their story. AMY GOODMAN: On PBS. DANNY SCHECHTER: And it was on public television stations. PBS never really officially supported it, but many stations did. It was also on in 40 countries around the world throughout southern Africa. So it actually had a tremendous impact of bringing the message of the democratic movement to a world audience. And I think that was very critical. And then, of course, the documentaries.
And most recently, I was in South Africa documenting the making and the meaning of this new movie, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. And that movie will be in 2,000 cinemas in America starting Christmas Day. And, you know, it's a very dramatized but important film about Mandela, in the way that the movie Gandhi was about Gandhi. But it leaves a lot out. And that's why the producers of the movie asked me to write this book, Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela, to talk about the rest of the story. And I did so by interviewing over 150 people who worked with Mandela, who were part of this whole struggle. And what I got from them was not only admiration for him, but also a perspective that this was not just one man, but a movement, that pulled this off, this change. And it was a movement that was organized in a democratic manner from the bottom up, not the top down. So, you know, even though we revere and admire Mandela, we have to also pay respect to the people of South Africa who suffered all these yearsyou know, torture, imprisonment, deathfighting apartheid. AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Nelson Mandela being in prison for 27 years, freed in 1990, in February 1995 over 1,000 former political prisoners, led by Nelson Mandela, returned to Robben Island DANNY SCHECHTER: I was there. AMY GOODMAN: where he was incarcerated. Let's go to that clip from your film, Danny Schechter, Prisoners of Hope. DANNY SCHECHTER: With Barbara Kopple, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Here Mandela talks about his own experience being imprisoned on Robben Island.
PRESIDENT NELSON MANDELA: Well, human beings, you know, have got the ability to adjust to anything. This island was small, but we appreciated that privacy that we enjoyed in comparison to our colleagues, who were far more than ourselves, because in my section, where the numbers fluctuated between 20 and 30, at least we had privacy. You could be in your cell, day or night. You're able to sit down and think. And you could stand away from yourself and look at your performance before you go into jail. Jail walls can never prevent you identifying yourself with the struggle outside prison. And even though we were behind bars, all of us, and the leaders of the ANC outside, were actually heroes.
AMY GOODMAN: That's President Nelson Mandela being interviewed by Danny Schechter. We also are joined now by Father Michael Lapsley in Cape Town, South Africa, director of the Institute for Healing of Memories, previously worked for the Trauma Center for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town, South Africa, which assisted the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation headed up by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
In April 1990, Father Michael Lapsley received a letter bomb that blew off both his hands. He opened a magazine. It destroyed one of his eyes, burned him severely. The bomb was an assassination attempt by the then-apartheid government of South Africa. This was after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Father Lapsley's new book is called Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer, which Nelson Mandela commented on.
Father Lapsley, your response to the passing of Nelson Mandela? FATHER MICHAEL LAPSLEY: Well, thank you, Amy. I think it's not just we, South Africans, but [inaudible] it's a day of deep grief. At the same, it's a day of immense gratitude and celebration of his extraordinary contribution. So, in a way, we have to say we're thankful that he can rest, although we were never ready to let go of him. So, it is an extraordinary end of an epoch, but I have a sense that from this day, in a renewed way, we, South Africans, will take the spirit of Nelson Mandela, the spirit of self-sacrifice, of commitment, to build a new world in which a common humanity is of utmost importance. So, very, very, very mixed feelings. I think the nation is feeling a little bit overwhelmed at the moment, because, in a way, we were prepared. We were prepared. In another way, we were never going to be prepared for the end of this era of Nelson Mandela passing [inaudible] that he was a global icon. He inspired the world. And I think that inspiration will actually continue for not only decades, but for centuries to come. JUAN GONZÃLEZ: And, Danny, I'd like to ask you thewhat people here in the United States can learn, progressives and social activists, from the legacy of Mandela? DANNY SCHECHTER: Well, first of all, Mandela was a great believer, you know, in working with the collective, working together with others, not just kind of stealing all the attention. He wasn't a celebrity in the sense that we accord that to prominent people, but always spoke in terms of others. And I think that's important.
The second thing is, is that his movement was very decentralized, on some levels, in various communitieslabor unions and youth groups and religious organizations. So it brought together lots of different people from different places to find common cause. But they also did have a structure in place. And that structure enabled them to run an election, that they had never done before, and win an election. That's important.
What we in America don't really fully appreciate, I think, is not just that he was elected president and what a great victory it all was, but the tremendous pressure South Africa was under from white capital, from American business, to try to restrain the reforms that they wanted to put in place. And that led to a kind of neoliberalism, which is in effect in South Africa, which has limited their ability to fight poverty, limited their ability to deal with a lot of issues, which has led to the kind of corruption that we've seen in many other places in the world. AMY GOODMAN: Danny, we're going to end today's broadcast with your documentary, Countdown to Freedom. In it, you, Danny Schechter, ask Nelson Mandela about the type of world that he wants to leave behind.
NELSON MANDELA: Our world, the world that we are visualizing, is expressed in our Freedom Charter: a land in which the principle is entrenched that South Africa belongs to itsall its people, a land where there is a Bill of Rights that defends the rights of every individual irrespective of his color, a multiparty system, regular elections, the proportional representation, and the entrenchment of property and of religious beliefs. That is the world I believe in.
DANNY SCHECHTER: And it's happening.
NELSON MANDELA: It is happening.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. Ta-Nehisi Coates Dec 6 2013, 10:13 AM ET
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Gettysburg Times, July 17, 1995Nelson Mandela died yesterday, and all around the world, much-deserved hosannas are coming in, praising the life of one of the most important figures in modern Western history. That last bit reflects my own bias. What's become clear in all my studies of our history of World War II, of the Civil War, of Tocqueville, of Rousseau, of Zionism, of black nationalism, is that understanding Enlightenment ideals requires understanding those places where ideals and humanity meet. If you call yourself a lover of democracy, but have not studied the black diaspora, your deeds mock your claims. Understanding requires more than sloganeering, and parrotingit requires confronting our failures.
For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. We have some experience with this. Still, it's easy to forget William F. Buckleyintellectual founder of the modern righteffectively worked as a press agent for apartheid:
Buckley was actively courted by Chiang Kai-Shek's Taiwan, Franco's Spain, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal's African colonies, and went on expenses-paid trips trips to some of these countries.
When he returned from Mozambique in 1962, Buckley wrote a column describing the backwardness of the African population over which Portugal ruled, "The more serene element in Africa tends to believe that rampant African nationalism is self-discrediting, and that therefore the time is bound to come when America, and the West ... will depart from our dogmatic anti-Colonialism and realize what is the nature of the beast."
In the fall of 1962, during a visit to South Africa, arranged by the Information Ministry, Buckley wrote that South African apartheid "has evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa."
Buckley's racket as an American paid propagandist for white supremacy would be repeated over the years in conservative circles. As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America's most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake. Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a "phony" and led a "reinvestment" campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, "I know we don't like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don't have it all that bad."
Not all prominent conservatives were so dishonorable. When Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan's veto of sanctions of South Africa, Mitch McConnell, for instance, was forthright"I think he is wrong ... We have waited long enough for him to come on board." When Falwell embarrassed himself by condemning Tutu, some Republican senators denounced him.
But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa's white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage. When you see a Tea Party protestor waving the flag of slavery in front of the home of the first black president, understand that this instinct has been cultivated. It is still, at this very hour, being cultivated:
He won the country's first free presidential elections in 1994 and worked to unite a scarred and anxious nation. He opened up the economy to the world, and a black middle class came to life. After a single term, he voluntarily left power at the height of his popularity. Most African rulers didn't do that, but Mandela said, "I don't want a country like ours to be led by an octogenarian. I must step down while there are one or two people who admire me."
That is the Wall Street Journal, offering a shameful, condescending "tribute" to one of the great figures of our time. Understand the racism here. It is certainly true that "most African rulers" do not willingly hand over power. That is because most human leaders do not hand over power. What racism does is take a basic human tendency and make it it the property of ancestry. As though Franco never happened. As though Hitler and Stalin never happened. As though Pinochet never happened. As though we did not prop up Mobutu. As though South Carolina was not, for most of its history, ruled by Big Men as nefarious and vicious as any "African ruler."
To not see this requires a special disposition, a special blindness, a special shamelessness, a special idiocy. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...ts/282114/
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001[SUP]1[/SUP]
Before transferring power, the Nationalist Party wants to emasculate it. It is trying to negotiate a kind of swap where it will give up the right to run the country its way in exchange for the right to stop blacks from running it their own way.
Allister Sparks, South African journalist[SUP]2[/SUP]
In January 1990, Nelson Mandela, age seventy-one, sat down in his prison compound to write a note to his supporters outside. It was meant to settle a debate over whether twenty-seven years behind bars, most of it spent on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, had weakened the leader's commitment to the economic transformation of South Africa's apartheid state. The note was only two sentences long, and it decisively put the matter to rest: "The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable."[SUP]3[/SUP]
History, it turned out, was not over just yet, as Fukuyama had claimed. In South Africa, the largest economy on the African continent, it seemed that some people still believed that freedom included the right to reclaim and redistribute their oppressors' ill-gotten gains.
That belief had formed the basis of the policy of the African National Congress for thirty-five years, ever since it was spelled out in its statement of core principles, the Freedom Charter. The story of the charter's drafting is the stuff of folklore in South Africa, and for good reason. The process began in 1955, when the party dispatched fifty thousand volunteers into the townships and countryside. The task of the volunteers was to collect "freedom demands" from the peopletheir vision of a post-apartheid world in which all South Africans had equal rights. The demands were handwritten on scraps of paper: "Land to be given to all landless people," "Living wages and shorter hours of work," "Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality," "The right to reside and move about freely" and many more.[SUP]4[/SUP] When the demands came back, leaders of the African National Congress synthesized them into a final document, which was officially adopted on June 26, 1955, at the Congress of the People, held in Kliptown, a "buffer zone" township built to protect the white residents of Johannesburg from the teeming masses of Soweto. Roughly three thousand delegates black, Indian, "coloured" and a few whitesat together in an empty field to vote on the contents of the document. According to Nelson Mandela's account of the historic Kliptown gathering, "the charter was read aloud, section by section, to the people in English, Sesotho and Xhosa. After each section, the crowd shouted its approval with cries of Afrika!' and Mayibuye!'"[SUP]5[/SUP] The first defiant demand of the Freedom Charter reads, "The People Shall Govern!"
In the mid-fifties, that dream was decades away from fulfillment. On the Congress's second day, the gathering was violently broken up by police, who claimed the delegates were plotting treason.
For three decades, South Africa's government, dominated by white Afrikaners and British, banned the ANC and the other political parties that were intent on ending apartheid. Throughout this period of intense repression, the Freedom Charter continued to circulate, passed from hand to hand in the revolutionary underground, its power to inspire hope and resistance undiminished. In the 1980s, it was picked up by a new generation of young militants who emerged in the townships. Fed up with patience and good behaviour and braced to do whatever it took to topple white domination, the young radicals stunned their parents with their fearlessness. They took to the streets without illusion, chanting, "Neither bullets nor tear gas will stop us." They faced massacre after massacre, buried friends, kept singing and kept coming. When the militants were asked what they were fighting against, they answered, "Apartheid" or "Racism"; asked what they were fighting for, many replied "Freedom" and, often, "The Freedom Charter."
The charter enshrines the right to work, to decent housing, to freedom of thought, and, most radically, to a share in the wealth of the richest country in Africa, containing, among other treasures, the largest goldfield in the world. "The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people," the charter states.[SUP]6[/SUP]
At the time of its drafting, the charter was viewed by some in the liberation movement as positively centrist, by others as unforgivably weak. The Pan-Africanists castigated the ANC for conceding too much to white colonizers (why did South Africa belong to "everyone, black and white?" they asked; the manifesto should have demanded, as the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had, "Africa for the Africans.") The staunch Marxists dismissed the demands as "petty bourgeois:" it wasn't revolutionary to divide the ownership of the land among all people; Lenin said that private property itself must be abolished.
What was taken as a given by all factions of the liberation struggle was that apartheid was not only a political system regulating who was allowed to vote and move freely. It was also an economic system that used racism to enforce a highly lucrative arrangement: a small white elite had been able to amass enormous profits from South Africa's mines, farms and factories because a large black majority was prevented from owning land and forced to provide its labour for far less than it was worthand was beaten and imprisoned when it dared to rebel. In the mines, whites were paid up to ten times more than blacks, and, as in Latin America, the large industrialists worked closely with the military to have unruly workers disappeared.[SUP]7[/SUP]
What the Freedom Charter asserted was the baseline consensus in the liberation movement that freedom would not come merely when blacks took control of the state but when the wealth of the land that had been illegitimately confiscated was reclaimed and redistributed to the society as a whole. South Africa could no longer be a country with Californian living standards for whites and Congolese living standards for blacks, as the country was described during the apartheid years; freedom meant that it would have to find something in the middle.
That was what Mandela was confirming with his two-sentence note from prison: he still believed in the bottom line that there would be no freedom without redistribution. With so many other countries now also "in transition," it was a statement with enormous implications. If Mandela led the ANC to power and nationalized the banks and the mines, the precedent would make it far more difficult for Chicago School economists to dismiss such proposals in other countries as relics of the past and insist that only unfettered free markets and free trade had the ability to redress deep inequalities.
On February 11, 1990, two weeks after writing that note, Mandela walked out of prison a free man, as close to a living saint as existed anywhere in the world. South Africa's townships exploded in celebration and renewed conviction that nothing could stop the struggle for liberation. Unlike the movement in Eastern Europe, South Africa's was not beaten down but a movement on a roll. Mandela, for his part, was suffering from such an epic case of culture shock that he mistook a camera microphone for "some newfangled weapon developed while I was in prison."[SUP]8[/SUP]
It was definitely a different world from the one he had left twenty-seven years earlier. When Mandela was arrested in 1962, a wave of Third World nationalism was sweeping the African continent; now it was torn apart by war. While he was in prison, socialist revolutions had been ignited and extinguished: Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia in 1967; Salvador Allende had died in the coup of 1973; Mozambique's liberation hero and president, Samora Machel, had perished in a mysterious plane crash in 1986. The late eighties and early nineties saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, the repression in Tiananmen Square and the collapse of Communism. Amid all this change there was little time for catching up: immediately on his release, Mandela had a people to lead to freedom while preventing a civil war and an economic collapseboth of which looked like distinct possibilities.
If there was a third path between Communism and capitalism a way of democratizing the country and redistributing wealth at the same timeSouth Africa under the ANC looked uniquely positioned to turn that persistent dream into reality. It wasn't only the global outpouring of admiration and support for Mandela, but also the particular way in which the anti-apartheid struggle had taken shape in the preceding years. In the eighties, it had become a truly global mass movement, and outside South Africa, the weapon that activists wielded most effectively was the corporate boycottboth of South Africanmade products and of international firms that did business with the apartheid state. The goal of the boycott strategy was to put enough of a squeeze on the corporate sector that it would lobby the intransigent South African government to end apartheid. But there was also a moral component to the campaign: many consumers firmly believed that companies that were profiting from white supremacist laws deserved to take a financial hit.
It was this attitude that gave the ANC a unique opportunity to reject the free-market orthodoxy of the day. Since there was already widespread agreement that corporations shared responsibility for the crimes of apartheid, the stage was set for Mandela to explain why key sectors of South Africa's economy needed to be nationalized just as the Freedom Charter demanded. He could have used the same argument to explain why the debt accumulated under apartheid was an illegitimate burden to place on any new, popularly elected government. There would have been plenty of outrage from the IMF, the U.S. Treasury and the European Union in the face of such undisciplined behaviour, but Mandela was also a living saintthere would have been enormous popular support for it as well.
We will never know which of these forces would have proved more powerful. In the years that passed between Mandela's writing his note from prison and the ANC's 1994 election sweep in which he was elected president, something happened to convince the party hierarchy that it could not use its grassroots prestige to reclaim and redistribute the country's stolen wealth. So, rather than meeting in the middle between California and the Congo, the ANC adopted policies that exploded both inequality and crime to such a degree that South Africa's divide is now closer to Beverly Hills and Baghdad. Today, the country stands as a living testament to what happens when economic reform is severed from political transformation. Politically, its people have the right to vote, civil liberties and majority rule. Yet economically, South Africa has surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world.
I went to South Africa in 2005 to try to understand what had happened in the transition, in those key years between 1990 and 1994, to make Mandela take a route that he had described so unequivocally as "inconceivable."
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The ANC went into negotiations with the ruling National Party determined to avoid the kind of nightmare that neighbouring Mozambique had experienced when the independence movement forced an end to Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. On their way out the door, the Portuguese threw a vindictive temper tantrum, pouring cement down elevator shafts, smashing tractors and stripping the country of all they could carry. To its enormous credit, the ANC did negotiate a relatively peaceful handover. However, it did not manage to prevent South Africa's apartheid-era rulers from wreaking havoc on their way out the door. Unlike their counterparts in Mozambique, the National Party didn't pour concretetheir sabotage, equally crippling, was far subtler, and was all in the fine print of those historic negotiations.
The talks that hashed out the terms of apartheid's end took place on two parallel tracks that often intersected: one was political, the other economic. Most of the attention, naturally, focused on the high-profile political summits between Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, leader of the National Party.
De Klerk's strategy in these negotiations was to preserve as much power as possible. He tried everythingbreaking the country into a federation, guaranteeing veto power for minority parties, reserving a certain percentage of the seats in government structures for each ethnic groupanything to prevent simple majority rule, which he was sure would lead to mass land expropriations and the nationalizing of corporations. As Mandela later put it, "What the National Party was trying to do was to maintain white supremacy with our consent." De Klerk had guns and money behind him, but his opponent had a movement of millions. Mandela and his chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, won on almost every count.[SUP]9[/SUP]
Running alongside these often explosive summits were the much lower profile economic negotiations, primarily managed on the ANC side by Thabo Mbeki, then a rising star in the party, now South Africa's president. As the political talks progressed, and it became clear to the National Party that Parliament would soon be firmly in the hands of the ANC, the party of South Africa's elites began pouring its energy and creativity into the economic negotiations. South Africa's whites had failed to keep blacks from taking over the government, but when it came to safeguarding the wealth they had amassed under apartheid, they would not give up so easily.
In these talks, the de Klerk government had a twofold strategy. First, drawing on the ascendant Washington Consensus that there was now only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision makingsuch as trade policy and the central bankas "technical" or "administrative." Then it used a wide range of new policy toolsinternational trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programsto hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the National Partyanyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC. It was a strategy of balkanization, not of the country's geography (as de Klerk had originally attempted) but of its economy.
This plan was successfully executed under the noses of ANC leaders, who were naturally preoccupied with winning the battle to control Parliament. In the process, the ANC failed to protect itself against a far more insidious strategyin essence, an elaborate insurance plan against the economic clauses in the Freedom Charter ever becoming law in South Africa. "The people shall govern!" would soon become a reality, but the sphere over which they would govern was shrinking fast.
While these tense negotiations between adversaries were unfolding, the ANC was also busily preparing within its own ranks for the day when it would take office. Teams of ANC economists and lawyers formed working groups charged with figuring out exactly how to turn the general promises of the Freedom Charterfor housing amentites and health careinto practical policies. The most ambitious of these plans was Make Democracy Work, an economic blueprint for South Africa's post-apartheid future, written while the high-level negotiations were taking place. What the party loyalists didn't know at the time was that while they were hatching their ambitious plans, the negotiating team was accepting concessions at the bargaining table that would make their implementation a practical impossibility. "It was dead before it was even launched," the economist Vishnu Padayachee told me of Make Democracy Work. By the time the draft was complete, "there was a new ball game."
As one of the few classically trained economists active in the ANC, Padayachee was enlisted to play a leading role in Make Democracy Work ("doing the number-crunching," as he puts it). Most of the people he worked alongside in those long policy meetings went on to top posts in the ANC government, but Padayachee did not. He has turned down all the offers of government jobs, preferring academic life in Durban, where he teaches, writes and owns the much-loved Ike's Bookshop, named after Ike Mayet, the first non-white South African bookseller. It was there, surrounded by carefully preserved out-of-print volumes on African history, that we met to discuss the transition.
Padayachee entered the liberation struggle in the seventies, as an adviser to South Africa's trade union movement. "We all had the Freedom Charter stuck on the back of our doors in those days," he recalled. I asked him when he knew its economic promises were not going to be realized. He first suspected it, he said, in late 1993, when he and a colleague from the Make Democracy Work group got a call from the negotiating team who were in the final stages of haggling with the National Party. The call was a request for them to write a position paper on the pros and cons of making South Africa's central bank an independent entity, run with total autonomy from the elected governmentoh, and the negotiators needed it by morning.
"We were caught completely off guard," recalled Padayachee, now in his early fifties. He had done his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He knew that at the time, even among free-market economists in the U.S., central bank independence was considered a fringe idea, a pet policy of a handful of Chicago School ideologues who believed that central banks should be run as sovereign republics within states, out of reach of the meddling hands of elected lawmakers.[SUP]*[/SUP],10 For Padayachee and his colleagues, who strongly believed that monetary policy needed to serve the new government's "big goals of growth, employment and redistribution," the ANC's position was a no-brainer: "There was not going to be an independent central bank in South Africa."
Padayachee and a colleague stayed up all night writing a paper that gave the negotiating team the arguments it needed to resist this curveball from the National Party. If the central bank (in South Africa called the Reserve Bank) was run separately from the rest of the government, it could restrict the ANC's ability to keep the promises in the Freedom Charter. Besides, if the central bank was not accountable to the ANC government, to whom, exactly, would it be accountable? The IMF? The Johannesburg Stock Exchange? Obviously, the National Party was trying to find a backdoor way to hold on to power even after it lost the electionsa strategy that needed to be resisted at all costs. "They were locking in as much as possible," Padayachee recalled. "That was a clear part of the agenda."
Padayachee faxed the paper in the morning and didn't hear back for weeks. "Then, when we asked what happened, we were told, Well, we gave that one up.'" Not only would the central bank be run as an autonomous entity within the South African state, with its independence enshrined in the new constitution, but it would be headed by the same man who ran it under apartheid, Chris Stals. It wasn't just the central bank that the ANC had given up: in another major concession, Derek Keyes, the white finance minister under apartheid, would also remain in his postmuch as the finance ministers and central bank heads from Argentina's dictatorship somehow managed to get their jobs back under democracy. The New York Times praised Keyes as "the country's ranking apostle of low-spending business-friendly government."[SUP]11[/SUP]
Until that point, Padayachee said, "we were still buoyant, because, my God, this was a revolutionary struggle; at least there'd be something to come out of it." When he learned that the central bank and the treasury would be run by their old apartheid bosses, it meant "everything would be lost in terms of economic transformation." When I asked him whether he thought the negotiators realized how much they had lost, after some hesitation, he replied, "Frankly, no." It was simple horse-trading: "In the negotiations, something had to be given, and our side gave those thingsI'll give you this, you give me that."
From Padayachee's point of view, none of this happened because of some grand betrayal on the part of ANC leaders but simply because they were outmanoeuvred on a series of issues that seemed less than crucial at the timebut turned out to hold South Africa's lasting liberation in the balance.
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What happened in those negotiations is that the ANC found itself caught in a new kind of web, one made of arcane rules and regulations, all designed to confine and constrain the power of elected leaders. As the web descended on the country, only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government came to power and tried to move freely, to give its voters the tangible benefits of liberation they expected and thought they had voted for, the strands of the web tightened and the administration discovered that its powers were tightly bound. Patrick Bond, who worked as an economic adviser in Mandela's office during the first years of ANC rule, recalls that the in-house quip was "Hey, we've got the state, where's the power?" As the new government attempted to make tangible the dreams of the Freedom Charter, it discovered that the power was elsewhere.
Want to redistribute land? Impossibleat the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can'thundreds of factories were actually about to close because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which made it illegal to subsidize the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. Need money to build more and larger houses for the poor and to bring free electricity to the townships? Sorrythe budget is being eaten up servicing the massive debt, passed on quietly by the apartheid government. Print more money? Tell that to the apartheid-era head of the central bank. Free water for all? Not likely. The World Bank, with its large in-country contingent of economists, researchers and trainers (a self-proclaimed "Knowledge Bank"), is making private-sector partnerships the service norm. Want to impose currency controls to guard against wild speculation? That would violate the $850 million IMF deal, signed, conveniently enough, right before the elections. Raise the minimum wage to close the apartheid income gap? Nope. The IMF deal promises "wage restraint."[SUP]12[/SUP] And don't even think about ignoring these commitments any change will be regarded as evidence of dangerous national untrustworthiness, a lack of commitment to "reform," an absence of a "rules-based system." All of which will lead to currency crashes, aid cuts and capital flight. The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured; each one of these arcane acronyms represented a different thread in the web that pinned down the limbs of the new government.
A long-time anti-apartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. "They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles." Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition "was business saying, We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name. . . . You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.'" [SUP]†, 13[/SUP] It was a process of infantilization that is common to so-called transitional countriesnew governments are, in effect, given the keys to the house but not the combination to the safe.
Part of what I wanted to understand was how, after such an epic struggle for freedom, any of this could have been allowed to happen. Not just how the leaders of the liberation movement gave up the economic front, but how the ANC's basepeople who had already sacrificed so muchlet their leaders give it up. Why didn't the grassroots movement demand that the ANC keep the promises of the Freedom Charter and rebel against the concessions as they were being made?
I put the question to William Gumede, a third-generation ANC activist who, as a leader of the student movement during the transition, was on the streets in those tumultuous years. "Everyone was watching the political negotiations," he recalled, referring to the de KlerkMandela summits. "And if people felt it wasn't going well there would be mass protests. But when the economic negotiators would report back, people thought it was technical; no one was interested." This perception, he said, was encouraged by Mbeki, who portrayed the talks as "administrative" and of no popular concern (much like the Chileans with their "technified democracy"). As a result, he told me, with great exasperation, "We missed it! We missed the real story."
Gumede, who today is one of South Africa's most respected investigative journalists, says he came to understand that it was in those "technical" meetings that the true future of his country was being decidedthough few understood it at the time. Like many people I spoke with, Gumede reminded me that South Africa was very much on the brink of civil war throughout the transition periodtownships were being terrorized by gangs who had been armed by the National Party, police massacres were still taking place, leaders were still being assassinated and there was constant talk of the country descending into a bloodbath. "I was focusing on the politicsmass action, going to Bisho [site of a definitive showdown between demonstrators and police], shouting, Those guys must go!'" Gumede recalled. "But that was not the real struggle the real struggle was over economics. And I am disappointed in myself for being so naive. I thought I was politically mature enough to understand the issues. How did I miss this?"
It's hard to see how the outcome could have been different. If Padayachee is right and the ANC's own negotiators failed to grasp the enormity of what they were bargaining away, what chance was there for the movement's street fighters?
During those key years when the deals were being signed, South Africans were in a constant state of crisis, ricocheting between the intense exuberance of watching Mandela walk free and the rage of learning that Chris Hani, the younger militant many hoped would succeed Mandela as leader, had been shot dead by a racist assassin. Other than a handful of economists, nobody wanted to talk about the independence of the central bank, a topic that works as a powerful soporific even under normal circumstances. Gumede points out that most people simply assumed that no matter what compromises had to be made to get into power, they could be unmade once the ANC was firmly in charge. "We were going to be the government we could fix it later," he said.
What ANC activists didn't understand at the time was that it was the nature of democracy itself that was being altered in those negotiations, changed so thatonce the web of constraints had descended on their countrythere would effectively be no later.
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In the first two years of ANC rule, the party still tried to use the limited resources it had to make good on the promise of redistribution. There was a flurry of public investmentmore than a hundred thousand homes were built for the poor, and millions were hooked up to water, electricity and phone lines.[SUP]14[/SUP] But, in a familiar story, weighed down by debt and under international pressure to privatize these services, the government soon began raising prices. After a decade of ANC rule, millions of people had been cut off from newly connected water and electricity because they couldn't pay the bills. [SUP]‡[/SUP] At least 40 percent of the new phones lines were no longer in service by 2003.[SUP]15[/SUP] As for the "banks, mines and monopoly industry" that Mandela had pledged to nationalize, they remained firmly in the hands of the same four white-owned mega-conglomerates that also control 80 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.[SUP]16[/SUP] In 2005, only 4 percent of the companies listed on the exchange were owned or controlled by blacks.[SUP]17[/SUP] Seventy percent of South Africa's land, in 2006, was still monopolized by whites, who are just 10 percent of the population.[SUP]18[/SUP] Most distressingly, the ANC government has spent far more time denying the severity of the AIDS crisis than getting lifesaving drugs to the approximately 5 million people infected with HIV, though there were, by early 2007, some positive signs of progress.[SUP]19[/SUP] Perhaps the most striking statistic is this one: since 1990, the year Mandela left prison, the average life expectancy for South Africans has dropped by thirteen years.[SUP]20[/SUP]
Underlying all these facts and figures is a fateful choice made by the ANC after the leadership realized it had been outmanoeuvred in the economic negotiations. At that point, the party could have attempted to launch a second liberation movement and break free of the asphyxiating web that had been spun during the transition. Or it could simply accept its restricted power and embrace the new economic order. The ANC's leadership chose the second option. Rather than making the centrepiece of its policy the redistribution of wealth that was already in the country the core of the Freedom Charter on which it had been electedthe ANC, once it because the government, accepted the dominant logic that its only hope was to pursue new foreign investors who would create new wealth, the benefits of which would trickle down to the poor. But for the trickle-down model to have a hope of working, the ANC government had to radically alter its behaviour to make itself appealing to investors.
This was not an easy task, as Mandela had learned when he walked out of prison. As soon as he was released, the South African stock market collapsed in panic; South Africa's currency, the rand, dropped by 10 percent.[SUP]21[/SUP] A few weeks later, De Beers, the diamond corporation, moved its headquarters from South Africa to Switzerland.[SUP]22[/SUP] This kind of instant punishment from the markets would have been unimaginable three decades earlier, when Mandela was first imprisoned. In the sixties, it was unheard of for multinationals to switch nationalities on a whim and, back then, the world money system was still firmly linked to the gold standard. Now South Africa's currency had been stripped of controls, trade barriers were down, and most trading was short-term speculation.
Not only did the volatile market not like the idea of a liberated Mandela, but just a few misplaced words from him or his fellow ANC leaders could lead to an earth-shaking stampede by what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has aptly termed "the electronic herd."[SUP]23[/SUP] The stampede that greeted Mandela's release was just the start of what became a call-and-response between the ANC leadership and the financial marketsa shock dialogue that trained the party in the new rules of the game. Every time a top party official said something that hinted that the ominous Freedom Charter might still become policy, the market responded with a shock, sending the rand into free fall. The rules were simple and crude, the electronic equivalent of monosyllabic grunts: justiceexpensive, sell; status quogood, buy. When, shortly after his release, Mandela once again spoke out in favour of nationalization at a private lunch with leading businessmen, "the All-Gold Index plunged by 5 per cent."[SUP]24[/SUP]
Even moves that seemed to have nothing to do with the financial world but betrayed some latent radicalism seemed to provoke a market jolt. When Trevor Manuel, an ANC minister, called rugby in South Africa a "white minority game" because its team was an all-white one, the rand took another hit.[SUP]25[/SUP]
Of all the constraints on the new government, it was the market that proved most confiningand this, in a way, is the genius of unfettered capitalism: it's self-enforcing. Once countries have opened themselves up to the global market's temperamental moods, any departure from Chicago School orthodoxy is instantly punished by traders in New York and London who bet against the offending country's currency, causing a deeper crisis and the need for more loans, with more conditions attached. Mandela acknowledged the trap in 1997, telling the ANC's national conference, "The very mobility of capital and the globalisation of the capital and other markets, make it impossible for countries, for instance, to decide national economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets."[SUP]26[/SUP]
The person inside the ANC who seemed to understand how to make the shocks stop was Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's right hand during his presidency and soon to be his successor. Mbeki had spent many of his years of exile in England, studying at the University of Sussex, then moving to London. In the eighties, while the townships of his country were flooded with tear gas, he was breathing in the fumes of Thatcherism. Of all the ANC leaders, Mbeki was the one who mingled most easily with business leaders, and before Mandela's release, he organized several secret meetings with corporate executives who were afraid of the prospect of black majority rule. In 1985, after a night of drinking Scotch with Mbeki and a group of South African businesspeople at a Zambian game lodge, Hugh Murray, the editor of a prestigious business magazine, commented, "The ANC supremo has a remarkable ability to instill confidence, even in the most fraught circumstances."[SUP]27[/SUP]
Mbeki was convinced that the key to getting the market to calm down was for the ANC to instill that kind of clubby confidence on a much larger scale. According to Gumede, Mbeki took on the role of free-market tutor within the party. The beast of the market had been unleashed, Mbeki would explain; there was no taming it, just feeding it what it craved: growth and more growth.
So, rather than calling for the nationalization of the mines, Mandela and Mbeki began meeting regularly with Harry Oppenheimer, former chairman of the mining giants Anglo- American and De Beers, the economic symbols of apartheid rule. Shortly after the 1994 election, they even submitted the ANC's economic program to Oppenheimer for approval and made several key revisions to address his concerns, as well as those of other top industrialists. [SUP]28[/SUP] Hoping to avoid getting another shock from the market, Mandela, in his first post-election interview as president, carefully distanced himself from his previous statements favouring nationalization. "In our economic policies . . . there is not a single reference to things like nationalization, and this is not accidental," he said. "There is not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology." [SUP]§, 29[/SUP] The financial press offered steady encouragement for this conversion: "Though the ANC still has a powerful leftist wing," the Wall Street Journal observed, "Mr. Mandela has in recent days sounded more like Margaret Thatcher than the socialist revolutionary he was once thought to be."[SUP]30[/SUP]
The memory of its radical past still clung to the ANC, and despite the new government's best efforts to appear unthreatening, the market kept inflicting its painful shocks: in a single month in 1996, the rand dropped 20 percent, and the country continued to hemorrhage capital as South Africa's jittery rich moved their money offshore.[SUP]31[/SUP]
Mbeki convinced Mandela that what was needed was a definitive break with the past. The ANC needed a completely new economic plansomething bold, something shocking, something that would communicate, in the broad, dramatic strokes the market understood, that the ANC was ready to embrace the Washington Consensus.
As in Bolivia, where the shock therapy program was prepared with all the secrecy of a covert military operation, in South Africa only a handful of Mbeki's closest colleagues even knew that a new economic program was in the works, one very different from the promises they had all made during the 1994 elections. Of the people on the team, Gumede writes, "all were sworn to secrecy and the entire process was shrouded in deepest confidentiality lest the left wing get wind of Mbeki's plan."[SUP]32[/SUP] The economist Stephen Gelb, who took part in drafting the new program, admitted that "this was reform from above' with a vengeance, taking to an extreme the arguments in favour of insulation and autonomy of policymakers from popular pressures." [SUP]33[/SUP] (This emphasis on secrecy and insulation was particularly ironic given that, under the tyranny of apartheid, the ANC had pulled off a remarkably open and participatory process to come up with the Freedom Charter. Now, under a new order of democracy, the party was opting to hide its economic plans from its own caucus.)
In June 1996, Mbeki unveiled the results: it was a neo-liberal shock therapy program for South Africa, calling for more privatization, cutbacks to government spending, labour "flexibility," freer trade and even looser controls on money flows. According to Gelb, its overriding aim "was to signal to potential investors the government's (and specifically the ANC's) commitment to the prevailing orthodoxy."[SUP]34[/SUP] To make sure the message was loud and clear to traders in New York and London, at the public launch of the plan, Mbeki quipped, "Just call me a Thatcherite."[SUP]35[/SUP]
Shock therapy is always a market performancethat is part of its underlying theory. The stock market loves overhyped, highly managed moments that send stock prices soaring, usually provided by an initial public stock offering, the announcement of a huge merger or the hiring of a celebrity CEO. When economists urge countries to announce a sweeping shock therapy package, the advice is partially based on an attempt to imitate this kind of high-drama market event and trigger a stampedebut rather than selling an individual stock, they are selling a country. The hoped-for response is "Buy Argentine stocks!" "Buy Bolivian bonds!" A slower, more careful approach, on the other hand, may be less brutal, but it deprives the market of these hype-bubbles, during which the real money gets made. Shock therapy is always a significant gamble, and in South Africa it didn't work: Mbeki's grand gesture failed to attract long-term investment; it resulted only in speculative betting that ended up devaluing the currency even further.
The Shock of the Base
"The new convert is always more zealous at these things. They want to please even more," remarked the Durban-based writer Ashwin Desai when we met to discuss his memories of the transition. Desai spent time in jail during the liberation struggle, and he sees parallels between the psychology in prisons and the ANC's behaviour in government. In prison, he said, "if you please the warden more, you get a better status. And that logic obviously transposed itself into some of the things that South African society did. They did want to somehow prove that they were much better prisoners. Much more disciplined prisoners than other countries, even."
The ANC base, however, proved distinctly more unrulywhich created a need for yet more discipline. According to Yasmin Sooka, one of the jurors on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the discipline mentality reached into every aspect of the transitionincluding the quest for justice. After hearing years of testimony about torture, killings and disappearances, the truth commission turned to the question of what kind of gestures could begin to heal the injustices. Truth and forgiveness were important, but so was compensation for the victims and their families. It made little sense to ask the new government to make compensation payouts, as these were not its crimes, and anything spent on reparations for apartheid abuses was money not spent building homes and schools for the poor in the newly liberated nation.
Some commissioners felt that multinational corporations that had benefited from apartheid should be forced to pay reparations. In the end the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made the modest recommendation of a one-time 1 percent corporate tax to raise money for the victims, what it called "a solidarity tax." Sooka expected support for this mild recommendation from the ANC; instead, the government, then headed by Mbeki, rejected any suggestion of corporate reparations or a solidarity tax, fearing that it would send an anti-business message to the market. "The president decided not to hold business accountable," Sooka told me. "It was that simple." In the end, the government put forward a fraction of what had been requested, taking the money out of its own budget, as the commissioners had feared.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently held up as a model of successful "peace building," exported to other conflict zones from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan. But many of those who were directly involved in the process are deeply ambivalent. When he unveiled the final report in March 2003, the commission's chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, confronted journalists with freedom's unfinished business. "Can you explain how a black person wakes up in a squalid ghetto today, almost 10 years after freedom? Then he goes to work in town, which is still largely white, in palatial homes. And at the end of the day, he goes back home to squalor? I don't know why those people don't just say, To hell with peace. To hell with Tutu and the truth commission.'"[SUP]36[/SUP]
Sooka, who now heads South Africa's Foundation for Human Rights, says that she feels that although the hearings dealt with what she described as "outward manifestations of apartheid such as torture, severe ill treatment and disappearances," it left the economic system served by those abuses "completely untouched"an echo of the concerns about the blindness of "human rights" expressed by Orlando Letelier three decades earlier. If she had the process to do over again, Sooka said, "I would do it completely differently. I would look at the systems of apartheidI would look at the question of land, I would certainly look at the role of multinationals, I would look at the role of the mining industry very, very closely because I think that's the real sickness of South Africa. . . . I would look at the systematic effects of the policies of apartheid, and I would devote only one hearing to torture because I think when you focus on torture and you don't look at what it was serving, that's when you start to do a revision of the real history."
Reparations in Reverse
The fact that the ANC dismissed the Commission's call for corporate reparations is particularly unfair, Sooka pointed out, because the government continues to pay the apartheid debt. In the first years after the handover, it cost the new government 30 billion rand annually (about $4.5 billion) in servicinga sum that provides a stark contrast with the paltry total of $85 million that the government ultimately paid out to more than nineteen thousand victims of apartheid killings and torture and their families. Nelson Mandela has cited the debt burden as the single greatest obstacle to keeping the promises of the Freedom Charter. "That is 30 billion [rand] we did not have to build houses as we planned, before we came into government, to make sure that our children go to the best schools, that unemployment is properly addressed and that everybody has the dignity of having a job, a decent income, of being able to provide shelter to his beloved, to feed them. . . . We are limited by the debt that we inherited."[SUP]37[/SUP]
Despite Mandela's acknowledgement that paying the apartheid bills has become a disfiguring burden, the party has opposed all suggestions that it default. The fear is that even though there is a strong legal case that the debts are "odious," any move to default would make South Africa look dangerously radical in the eyes of investors, thus provoking another market shock. Dennis Brutus, a long-time ANC member and a former prisoner on Robben Island, ran directly into that wall of fear. In 1998, seeing the financial stress the new government was under, he and a group of South African activists decided that the best way they could support the ongoing struggle was to start a "debt jubilee" movement. "I must say, I was so naive," Brutus, now in his seventies, told me. "I expected that the government would express appreciation to us, that the grassroots are taking up the issue of debt, you know, that it would reinforce the government taking up debt." To his astonishment, "the government repudiated us and said, No, we don't accept your support.'"
What makes the ANC's decision to keep paying the debt so infuriating to activists like Brutus is the tangible sacrifice made to meet each payment. For instance, between 1997 and 2004, the South African government sold eighteen state-owned firms, raising $4 billion, but almost half the money went to servicing the debt.[SUP]38[/SUP] In other words, not only did the ANC renege on Mandela's original pledge of "the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry" but because of the debt, it was doing the oppositeselling off national assets to make good on the debts of its oppressors.
Then there is the matter of where, precisely, the money is going. During the transition negotiations, F.W. de Klerk's team demanded that all civil servants be guaranteed their jobs even after the handover; those who wanted to leave, they argued, should receive hefty lifelong pensions. This was an extraordinary demand in a country with no social safety net to speak of, yet it was one of several "technical" issues on which the ANC ceded ground.[SUP]39[/SUP] The concession meant that the new ANC government carried the cost of two governments its own, and a shadow white government that was out of power. Forty percent of the government's annual debt payments go to the country's massive pension fund. The vast majority of the beneficiaries are former apartheid employees.[SUP]**, 40[/SUP]
In the end, South Africa has wound up with a twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labour during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paycheques to their former victimizers. And how do they raise the money for this generosity? By stripping the state of its assets through privatizationa modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when it agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue to this day.
-------------------------------------------------------
When I arrived in South Africa, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter was approaching, and the ANC had decided to mark the event with a media spectacle. The plan was for Parliament to relocate for the day from its usual commanding home in Cape Town to the far more humble surroundings of Kliptown, where the charter was first ratified. The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, was going to take the occasion to rename Kliptown's main intersection the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, after one of the ANC's most revered leaders. Mbeki would also inaugurate a new Freedom Charter Monument, a brick tower in which the words of the Charter had been engraved on stone tablets, and light an eternal "flame of freedom." Adjacent to this building, work was progressing on another monument, this one called the Freedom Towers, a pavilion of black and white concrete pillars designed to symbolize the charter's famous clause that says, "South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, black and white."[SUP]41[/SUP]
The overall message of the event was hard to miss: fifty years ago, the party had promised to bring freedom to South Africa and now it had deliveredit was the ANC's own "mission accomplished" moment.
Yet there was something strange about the event. Kliptownan impoverished township with dilapidated shacks, raw sewage in the streets and an unemployment rate of 72 percent, far higher than under apartheidseems more like a symbol of the Freedom Charter's broken promises than an appropriate backdrop for such a slickly produced celebration.[SUP]42[/SUP] As it turned out, the anniversary events were staged and art-directed not by the ANC but by an odd entity called Blue IQ. Though officially an arm of the provincial government, Blue IQ "operates in a carefully constructed environment which makes it look and feel more like a private sector company than a government department," according to its very glossy, and very blue, brochure. Its goal is to drum up new foreign investment in South Africapart of the ANC program of "re-distribution through growth."
Blue IQ had identified tourism as a major growth area for investment, and its market research showed that for tourists visiting South Africa, a large part of the attraction is the ANC's global reputation for having triumphed over oppression. Hoping to build on this powerful draw, Blue IQ determined that there was no better symbol of the South African triumph-over-adversity narrative than the Freedom Charter. With that in mind, it launched a project to transform Kliptown into a Freedom Charter theme park, "a world-class tourist destination and heritage site offering local and international visitors a unique experience"complete with museum, a freedom-themed shopping mall and a glass-and-steel Freedom Hotel. What is now a slum is set to be remade "into a desirous and prosperous" Johannesburg suburb, while many of its current residents will be relocated to slums in less historic locales.[SUP]43[/SUP]
With its plans to rebrand Kliptown, Blue IQ is following the free-market playbookproviding incentives for business to invest, in the hope that it will create jobs down the road. What sets this particular project apart is that, in Kliptown, the foundation on which the entire trickle-down apparatus rests is a fifty-year-old piece of paper that called for a distinctly more direct road to poverty elimination. Redistribute the land so millions can sustain themselves from it, demanded the framers of the Freedom Charter, and take back the mines so the bounty can be used to build houses and infrastructure and create jobs in the process. In other words, cut out the middleman. Those ideas may sound like utopian populism to many ears, but after so many failed experiments in Chicago School orthodoxy, the real dreamers may be those who still believe that a scheme like the Freedom Charter theme park, which provided handouts to corporations while further disposessing the neediest people, will solve the pressing health and economic problems for the 22 million South Africans still living in poverty.[SUP]44[/SUP]
After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results of its experiment in trickledown justice are scandalous:
Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.[SUP]45[/SUP]
Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.[SUP]46[/SUP]
Of South Africa's 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.[SUP]47[/SUP]
The ANC government has built 1.8 million homes, but in the meantime 2 million people have lost their homes.[SUP]48[/SUP]
Close to 1 million people have been evicted from farms in the first decade of democracy.[SUP]49[/SUP]
Such evictions have meant that the number of shack dwellers has grown by 50 percent. In 2006, more than one in four South Africans lived in shacks located in informal shantytowns, many without running water or electricity.[SUP]50[/SUP]
Perhaps the best measure of the betrayed promises of freedom is the way the Freedom Charter is now regarded in different parts of South African society. Not so long ago, the document represented the ultimate threat to white privilege in the country; today it is embraced in business lounges and gated communities as a statement of good intentions, at once flattering and totally unthreatening, on a par with a flowery corporate code of conduct. But in the townships where the document adopted in a field in Kliptown was once electric with possibility, its promises are almost too painful to contemplate. Many South Africans boycotted the government-sponsored anniversary celebrations completely. "What is in the Freedom Charter is very good," S'bu Zikode, a leader of Durban's burgeoning shack dwellers' movement, told me. "But all I see is the betrayal."
-------------------------------------------------------
In the end, the most persuasive argument for abandoning the redistribution promises of the Freedom Charter was the least imaginative one: everyone is doing it. Vishnu Padayachee summed up for me the message that the ANC leadership was getting from the start from "Western governments, the IMF and the World Bank. They would say, The world has changed; none of that left stuff means anything any more; this is the only game in town.'" As Gumede writes, "It was an onslaught for which the ANC was wholly unprepared. Key economic leaders were regularly ferried to the head offices of international organizations such as the World Bank and IMF, and during 1992 and 1993 several ANC staffers, some of whom had no economic qualifications at all, took part in abbreviated executive training programs at foreign business schools, investment banks, economic policy think tanks and the World Bank, where they were fed a steady diet of neo-liberal ideas.' It was a dizzying experience. Never before had a government-in-waiting been so seduced by the international community."[SUP]51[/SUP]
Mandela received a particularly intense dose of this elite form of schoolyard peer pressure when he met with European leaders at the 1992 World Economic Forum in Davos. When he pointed out that South Africa wanted to do nothing more radical than what Western Europe had done under the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, the Dutch minister of finance dismissed the parallel. "That was what we understood then. But the economies of the world are interdependent. The process of globalization is taking root. No economy can develop separately from the economies of other countries."[SUP]52[/SUP]
As leaders like Mandela travelled the globalization circuit, it was pounded into them that even the most left-wing governments were embracing the Washington Consensus: the Communists in Vietnam and China were doing it, and so were the trade unionists in Poland and the social democrats in Chile, finally free from Pinochet. Even Russians had seen the neo-liberal lightat the time the ANC was in its heaviest negotiations, Moscow was in the midst of a corporatist feeding frenzy, selling off its state assets to apparatchiks-turned-entrepreneurs as fast as it could. If Moscow had given in, how could a raggedy band of freedom fighters in South Africa resist such a forceful global tide?
That, at least, was the message being peddled by the lawyers, economists and social workers who made up the rapidly expanding "transition" industrythe teams of experts who hop from war-torn country to crisis-racked city, regaling overwhelmed new politicians with the latest best practice from Buenos Aires, the most inspiring success story from Warsaw, the most fearsome roar from the Asian Tigers. "Transitionologists" (as the NYU political scientist Stephen Cohen has called them) have a built-in advantage over the politicians they advise: they are a hypermobile class, while the leaders of liberation movements are inherently inward-looking.[SUP]53[/SUP] By their
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. Ta-Nehisi Coates Dec 6 2013, 10:13 AM ET
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Gettysburg Times, July 17, 1995Nelson Mandela died yesterday, and all around the world, much-deserved hosannas are coming in, praising the life of one of the most important figures in modern Western history. That last bit reflects my own bias. What's become clear in all my studies of our history of World War II, of the Civil War, of Tocqueville, of Rousseau, of Zionism, of black nationalism, is that understanding Enlightenment ideals requires understanding those places where ideals and humanity meet. If you call yourself a lover of democracy, but have not studied the black diaspora, your deeds mock your claims. Understanding requires more than sloganeering, and parrotingit requires confronting our failures.
For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. We have some experience with this. Still, it's easy to forget William F. Buckleyintellectual founder of the modern righteffectively worked as a press agent for apartheid:
Buckley was actively courted by Chiang Kai-Shek's Taiwan, Franco's Spain, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal's African colonies, and went on expenses-paid trips trips to some of these countries.
When he returned from Mozambique in 1962, Buckley wrote a column describing the backwardness of the African population over which Portugal ruled, "The more serene element in Africa tends to believe that rampant African nationalism is self-discrediting, and that therefore the time is bound to come when America, and the West ... will depart from our dogmatic anti-Colonialism and realize what is the nature of the beast."
In the fall of 1962, during a visit to South Africa, arranged by the Information Ministry, Buckley wrote that South African apartheid "has evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa."
Buckley's racket as an American paid propagandist for white supremacy would be repeated over the years in conservative circles. As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America's most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake. Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a "phony" and led a "reinvestment" campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, "I know we don't like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don't have it all that bad."
Not all prominent conservatives were so dishonorable. When Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan's veto of sanctions of South Africa, Mitch McConnell, for instance, was forthright"I think he is wrong ... We have waited long enough for him to come on board." When Falwell embarrassed himself by condemning Tutu, some Republican senators denounced him.
But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa's white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage. When you see a Tea Party protestor waving the flag of slavery in front of the home of the first black president, understand that this instinct has been cultivated. It is still, at this very hour, being cultivated:
He won the country's first free presidential elections in 1994 and worked to unite a scarred and anxious nation. He opened up the economy to the world, and a black middle class came to life. After a single term, he voluntarily left power at the height of his popularity. Most African rulers didn't do that, but Mandela said, "I don't want a country like ours to be led by an octogenarian. I must step down while there are one or two people who admire me."
That is the Wall Street Journal, offering a shameful, condescending "tribute" to one of the great figures of our time. Understand the racism here. It is certainly true that "most African rulers" do not willingly hand over power. That is because most human leaders do not hand over power. What racism does is take a basic human tendency and make it it the property of ancestry. As though Franco never happened. As though Hitler and Stalin never happened. As though Pinochet never happened. As though we did not prop up Mobutu. As though South Carolina was not, for most of its history, ruled by Big Men as nefarious and vicious as any "African ruler."
To not see this requires a special disposition, a special blindness, a special shamelessness, a special idiocy. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...ts/282114/
William F. Buckley was CIA from his days at Yale to the day he died!
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead." Nelson Mandela
Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the Madiba clan in Mvezo, Transkei, on July 18, 1918, to Nonqaphi Nosekeni and Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela, principal counsellor to the Acting King of the Thembu people, Jongintaba Dalindyebo. His father died when he was a child and the young Rolihlahla became a ward of Jongintaba at the Great Place in Mqhekezweni. Hearing the elder's stories of his ancestor's valour during the wars of resistance, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom struggle of his people. He attended primary school in Qunu where his teacher Miss Mdingane gave him the name Nelson, in accordance with the custom to give all school children "Christian" names. He completed his Junior Certificate at Clarkebury Boarding Institute and went on to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute, where he matriculated. Nelson Mandela began his studies for a Bachelor of Arts Degree at the University College of Fort Hare but did not complete the degree there as he was expelled for joining in a student protest. He completed his BA through the University of South Africa and went back to Fort Hare for his graduation in 1943. On his return to the Great Place at Mkhekezweni the King was furious and said if he didn't return to Fort Hare he would arrange wives for him and his cousin Justice. They ran away to Johannesburg instead arriving there in 1941. There he worked as a mine security officer and after meeting Walter Sisulu, an estate agent, who introduced him to Lazar Sidelsky. He then did his articles through the firm of attorneys Witkin Eidelman and Sidelsky. Meanwhile he began studying for an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand. By his own admission he was a poor student and left the university in 1948 without graduating. He only started studying again through the University of London and also did not complete that degree. In 1989, while in the last months of his imprisonment, he obtained an LLB through the University of South Africa. He graduated in absentia at a ceremony in Cape Town. Nelson Mandela, while increasingly politically involved from 1942, only joined the African National Congress in 1944 when he helped formed the ANC Youth League. In 1944 he married Walter Sisulu's cousin Evelyn Mase, a nurse. They had two sons Madiba Thembekile Thembi' and Makgatho and two daughters both called Makaziwe, the first of whom died in infancy. They effectively separated in 1955 and divorced in 1958. Nelson Mandela rose through the ranks of the ANCYL and through its work the ANC adopted in 1949 a more radical mass-based policy, the Programme of Action. In 1952 he was chosen at the National Volunteer-in-Chief of the Defiance Campaign with Maulvi Cachalia as his Deputy. This campaign of civil disobedience against six unjust laws was a joint programme between the ANC and the South African Indian Congress. He and 19 others were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act for their part in the campaign and sentenced to nine months hard labour suspended for two years. A two-year diploma in law on top of his BA allowed Nelson Mandela to practice law and in August 1952 he and Oliver Tambo established South Africa's first black law firm, Mandela and Tambo. At the end of 1952 he was banned for the first time. As a restricted person he was only able to secretly watch as the Freedom Charter was adopted at Kliptown on 26 June 1955. Nelson Mandela was arrested in a countrywide police swoop of 156 activists on 5 December 1955, which led to the 1956 Treason Trial. Men and women of all races found themselves in the dock in the marathon trial that only ended when the last 28 accused, including Mr. Mandela were acquitted on 29 March 1961. On 21 March 1960 police killed 69 unarmed people in a protest at Sharpeville against the pass laws. This led to the country's first state of emergency on 31 March and the banning of the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress on 8 April. Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the Treason Trial were among the thousands detained during the state of emergency. During the trial on 14 June 1958 Nelson Mandela married a social worker Winnie Madikizela. They had two daughters Zenani and Zindziswa. The couple divorced in 1996. Days before the end of the Treason Trial Nelson Mandela travelled to Pietermaritzburg to speak at the All-in Africa Conference, which resolved he should write to Prime Minister Verwoerd requesting a non-racial national convention, and to warn that should he not agree there would be a national strike against South Africa becoming a republic. As soon as he and his colleagues were acquitted in the Treason Trial Nelson Mandela went underground and began planning a national strike for 29, 30 and 31 March. In the face of a massive mobilization of state security the strike was called off early. In June 1961 he was asked to lead the armed struggle and helped to establish Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation). On 11 January 1962 using the adopted name David Motsamayi, Nelson Mandela left South Africa secretly. He travelled around Africa and visited England to gain support for the armed struggle. He received military training in Morocco and Ethiopia and returned to South Africa in July 1962. He was arrested in a police roadblock outside Howick on 5 August while returning from KwaZulu-Natal where he briefed ANC President Chief Albert Luthuli about his trip. He was charged with leaving the country illegally and inciting workers to strike. He was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment which he began serving in Pretoria Local Prison. On 27 May 1963 he was transferred to Robben Island and returned to Pretoria on 12 June. Within a month police raided a secret hide-out in Rivonia used by ANC and Communist Party activists and several of his comrades were arrested. In October 1963 Nelson Mandela joined nine others on trial for sabotage in what became known as the Rivonia Trial. Facing the death penalty his words to the court at the end of his famous Speech from the Dock' on 20 April 1964 became immortalized: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." On 11 June 1964 Nelson Mandela and seven other accused Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni were convicted and the next day were sentenced to life imprisonment. Denis Goldberg was sent to Pretoria Prison because he was white while the others went to Robben Island. Nelson Mandela's mother died in 1968 and his eldest son Thembi in 1969. He was not allowed to attend their funerals. On 31 March 1982 Nelson Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town with Sisulu, Mhlaba and Mlangeni. Kathrada joined them in October. When he returned to the prison in November 1985 after prostate surgery Nelson Mandela was held alone. Justice Minister Kobie Coetsee had visited him in hospital. Later Nelson Mandela initiated talks about an ultimate meeting between the apartheid government and the ANC. In 1988 he was treated for Tuberculosis and was transferred on 7 December 1988 to a house at Victor Verster Prison near Paarl. He was released from its gates on Sunday 11 February 1990, nine days after the unbanning of the ANC and the PAC and nearly four months after the release of the remaining Rivonia comrades. Throughout his imprisonment he had rejected at least three conditional offers of release. Nelson Mandela immersed himself into official talks to end white minority rule and in 1991 was elected ANC President to replace his ailing friend Oliver Tambo. In 1993 he and President FW de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize and on 27 April 1994 he voted for the first time in his life. On 10 May 1994 he was inaugurated South Africa's first democratically elected President. On his 80th birthday in 1998 he married Graça Machel, his third wife. True to his promise Nelson Mandela stepped down in 1999 after one term as President. He continued to work with the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund he set up in 1995 and established the Nelson Mandela Foundation and The Mandela-Rhodes Foundation. In April 2007 his grandson Mandla Mandela became head of the Mvezo Traditional Council at a ceremony at the Mvezo Great Place. Nelson Mandela never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he never answered racism with racism.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Everyone from President Obama to the mainstream news is lionizing Nelson Mandela.
But the New York Times reported in 1990:
The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.
The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela's activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.
***
Newsweek reported in February that the agency was believed to have been involved.
***
At the time of Mr. Mandela's arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa's then-fledgling security service.
***
A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela's capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.
Newsweek confirmed this story yesterday.
The Daily Beast notes:
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela's African National Congress on America's official list of "terrorist" groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his "vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists." As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America's terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.
…In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa's monstrous regime "essential to the free world."
Indeed, Nelson Mandela was only removed from the U.S. "terrorist" list in 2008.
Mandela was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy. And anyone even U.S. citizens critical of U.S. policy may be labelled a terrorist. [My note: Just as they did, secretly, MLK]
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
When I reported from South Africa in the 1960s, the Nazi admirer Johannes Vorster occupied the prime minister's residence in Cape Town. Thirty years later, as I waited at the gates, it was as if the guards had not changed. White Afrikaners checked my ID with the confidence of men in secure work. One carried a copy of 'Long Walk to Freedom', Nelson Mandela's autobiography. "It's very eenspirational," he said.
Mandela had just had his afternoon nap and looked sleepy; his shoelaces were untied. Wearing a bright gold shirt, he meandered into the room. "Welcome back," said the first president of a democratic South Africa, beaming. "You must understand that to have been banned from my country is a great honour." The sheer grace and charm of the man made you feel good. He chuckled about his elevation to sainthood. "That's not the job I applied for," he said drily.
Still, he was well used to deferential interviews and I was ticked off several times - "you completely forgot what I said" and "I have already explained that matter to you". In brooking no criticism of the African National Congress (ANC), he revealed something of why millions of South Africans will mourn his passing but not his "legacy".
I had asked him why the pledges he and the ANC had given on his release from prison in 1990 had not been kept. The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks - and "a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable". Once in power, the party's official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC's politics were Thatcherite.
"You can put any label on it if you like," he replied. "...but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy."
"That's the opposite of what you said in 1994."
"You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change."
Few ordinary South Africans were aware that this "process" had begun in high secrecy more than two years before Mandela's release when the ANC in exile had, in effect, done a deal with prominent members of the Afrikaaner elite at meetings in a stately home, Mells Park House, near Bath. The prime movers were the corporations that had underpinned apartheid.
Around the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations. In 1982, he had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, where he could receive and entertain people. The apartheid regime's aim was to split the ANC between the "moderates" they could "do business with" (Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo) and those in the frontline townships who led the United Democratic Front (UDF). On 5 July, 1989, Mandela was spirited out of prison to meet P.W. Botha, the white minority president known as the 'Groot Krokodil' ('Big Crocodile'). Mandela was delighted that Botha poured the tea.
With democratic elections in 1994, racial apartheid was ended, and economic apartheid had a new face. During the 1980s, the Botha regime had offered black businessmen generous loans, allowing them set up companies outside the Bantustans. A new black bourgeoisie emerged quickly, along with a rampant cronyism. ANC chieftains moved into mansions in "golf and country estates". As disparities between white and black narrowed, they widened between black and black.
The familiar refrain that the new wealth would "trickle down" and "create jobs" was lost in dodgy merger deals and "restructuring" that cost jobs. For foreign companies, a black face on the board often ensured that nothing had changed. In 2001, George Soros told the Davos Economic Forum, "South Africa is in the hands of international capital."
In the townships, people felt little change and were subjected to apartheid-era evictions; some expressed nostalgia for the "order" of the old regime. The post-apartheid achievements in de-segregating daily life in South Africa, including schools, were undercut by the extremes and corruption of a "neoliberalism" to which the ANC devoted itself. This led directly to state crimes such as the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in 2012, which evoked the infamous Sharpeville massacre more than half a century earlier. Both had been protests about injustice.
Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of "reconciliation". Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long they were willing to accept and collude with the forces that had been the people's enemy. There were those who genuinely wanted radical change, including a few in the South African Communist Party, but it was the powerful influence of mission Christianity that may have left the most indelible mark. White liberals at home and abroad warmed to this, often ignoring or welcoming Mandela's reluctance to spell out a coherent vision, as Amilcar Cabral and Pandit Nehru had done.
Ironically, Mandela seemed to change in retirement, alerting the world to the post 9/11 dangers of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. His description of Blair as "Bush's foreign minister" was mischievously timed; Thabo Mbeki, his successor, was about to arrive in London to meet Blair. I wonder what he would make of the recent "pilgrimage" to his cell on Robben Island by Barack Obama, the unrelenting jailer of Guantanamo.
Mandela seemed unfailingly gracious. When my interview with him was over, he patted me on the arm as if to say I was forgiven for contradicting him. We walked to his silver Mercedes, which consumed his small grey head among a bevy of white men with huge arms and wires in their ears. One of them gave an order in Afrikaans and he was gone.
Mandela is named as MI6 agent Mandela is named as MI6 agent
By Neil Mackay Home Affairs Editor
EXCLUSIVE, SUNDAY HERALD SCOTLAND
Publication date: March 19, 2000
NELSON Mandela is to be named as an MI6 agent who aided British intelligence officers with operations against Colonel Gadaffi's Libyan weapons programmes, supplied his handlers with details of arms shipments to Ulster terrorists and allowed UK spying operations to be based in South Africa.
Allegations of Mandela's recruitment by the British intelligence service will be revealed in a controversial new book, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, by the acclaimed intelligence expert Stephen Dorril. The book is due to be published at the end of this month.
MI6 launched an unsuccessful legal challenge to get the book's publisher, Fourth Estate, to release its contents. Special Branch officers also raided the London publishing house and seized computer equipment, but did not unearth details of Mandela's recruitment by MI6.
British intelligence chiefs are outraged that they failed to access the contents of Dorril's book after an Old Bailey judge ordered on Friday that the Guardian and Observer newspapers hand over documents relating to the former MI5 officer David Shayler. The ruling was made on the grounds that the papers could help police prosecute the rogue spy under the Official Secrets Act. Shayler had made claims that MI6 was involved in a plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.
Stephen Dorril's book will stun the world with its allegations about Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It is thought that Mandela's recruitment would have been motivated partly by his virulent anti-communism. In return MI6 offered information about potential assassination attempts on his life.
Dorril claims highly-placed MI6 officers told him about Mandela's recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service - the arm of British intelligence which undertakes espionage activities overseas, recruits foreign spies and engages in counter- espionage against foreign agents working in the UK.
Sources within the Foreign Office and the intelligence service have said that Dorril's claim "is entirely credible". Last night, the Foreign Office did nothing to deny the allegation that Mandela worked for MI6. There were also no denials, or threats of legal action against the book, from either Nelson Mandela's office in Johannesburg, South Africa or his London-based lawyers.
Part of Dorril's book, on the activities of MI6 in Africa, reads: "Another MI6 catch was ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Whether Mandela was recruited in London before he was imprisoned in South Africa is not clear, but it is understood that on a recent trip to London he made a secret visit to MI6's training section to thank the service for its help in foiling two assassination attempts directed against him soon after he became president."
Dorril says the assassination attempts referred to probably included one from within a faction of the African National Congress (ANC) which was bitterly opposed to Mandela's successful maneuvering to oust Communist Party leaders from under the umbrella of the African National Congress. Another is believed to have been planned by a covert operations wing of the apartheid government's military.
Dorril, a writer on intelligence issues and a lecturer at Huddersfield University, claims Mandela was of use to MI6 as his friendliness with Colonel Gadaffi's Libyan government paved the way for the hand-over of the two Libyan agents accused of the Lockerbie bombing.
Both the British and American governments are keen to rebuild relations with Libya to exploit the country's rich oil fields. "Mandela was the key to turning Libya from a terrorist state to one open to the West," Dorril told the Sunday Herald. "The result of his actions will be a huge economic boost to western economies. It can be said that he charmed Gaddafi for western economic interests." He claimed MI6's psychological warfare, or IOps, department - responsible for propaganda - helped massage international opinion allowing Mandela to visit Gadaffi without courting virulent western opprobrium.
Dorril added: "Mandela helped MI6 with information over Libya's funding and arming of the IRA, and the sending of arms to loyalist terrorists in Ulster from apartheid South Africa." Dorril claimed Mandela told his MI6 handlers about Libya's attempts to develop chemical and biological warfare capabilities, and informed them about South Africa's own secret nuclear arsenal.
Dorril claims in his book that Britain did not push for full disclosure of South Africa's biological weapons programme as part of its plan to support Mandela when he was president, and Mandela helped stem the tide of South African scientists being recruited by Libya to build Gadaffi's bio-weapons programme.
One of MI6's biggest overseas stations is in South Africa. It was a key spy center during the Cold War as Russia and America fought to take countries like neighboring Mozambique and Angola into their sphere of influence. South Africa is also key to Britain's economic interests because of its natural uranium, gold and platinum deposits.
It is unclear exactly when Mandela was recruited. Nor is it clear whether MI6 courted Mandela with warnings about assassination attempts in order to lure him into the service's clutches, or if he was recruited and provided MI6 with information and then received the warnings in return.
The publisher of the book, Fourth Estate, has been under intense pressure to reveal the contents of Dorril's 900 page work to MI6 prior to its publication on March 30. MI6 made a request through its lawyers for a full disclosure of the contents but Fourth Estate successfully fended off the challenge. However, the publishing house was raided under a search warrant by Special Branch officers who seized the computer of Fourth Estate editor-in-chief Clive Priddle which contained notes on the book. According to Nicky Eaton, Fourth Estate's publicist, the intelligence service is unaware of the Mandela claim. The book has been meticulously poured over for accuracy by Fourth Estate's own lawyers.
Both Neil Harold, from Mandela's personal office, and Mandela's London lawyer, Iqbal Meer, of Meer Care Desai, were stunned by the allegations coming to light. They were both unable to contact Mandela last night to brief him on the claims. It is thought he is holidaying in the South African countryside, and is not contactable. Dorril claims his revelations are not damaging to Mandela's reputation. "There is nothing defamatory about being a recruit for MI6," he said.
Officially the Foreign Office said it could not comment on the allegation as it was a security matter. However, unofficially senior Foreign Office sources hinted that the recruitment claim was credible. One said: "If we focus on the allegations referring to assassination claims, it is not surprising that the ANC would have sought security advice from the UK, or its intelligence services, to protect key individuals."
Foreign analysts and African experts also claim that Mandela's recruitment into MI6 is not only credible but will also have a seismic effect internationally.
One expert on Southern Africa said: "His life history shows how he would have been attractive to MI6 and MI6 would have been attractive to him. Mandela is deeply anti- communist. As a young man he would break up Communist Party meetings with his fists. Later in life, he came to realize that to end apartheid he needed every ally he could get and he pragmatically decided to get into bed with the Communists.
"Mandela admires Britain, its parliamentary democracy and its judicial system. Once he went into jail, Mandela moved further and further away from the Communists, privately pouring scorn on their policies. When he was freed, a struggle began for the soul of the ANC between the Communists and the 'democrats', like Mandela."
There has been intense speculation, including allegations by Winni Mandela, that the South African Communist leader, Chris Hani, who was assassinated in 1992, apparently by white extremists, may in fact have been a victim of this internal feud. "Many of the democrats in the ANC certainly hated the Communists enough to have them killed.
"British diplomats were also central to smoothing the end of apartheid during negotiations between Mandela and President De Klerk. It can not be underestimated how many MI6 and CIA officers were working in this area. Their numbers were colossal."
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Gettysburg Times, July 17, 1995Nelson Mandela