“I have cher­ished the ide­al of a demo­c­ra­t­ic and free soci­ety in which all per­sons live togeth­er in har­mo­ny and with equal opportunities.”
Nel­son Mandela’s words on the day he was released from being the 20th century’s most famous polit­i­cal pris­on­er have been shred­ded by his successors.

 

The vio­lence and loot­ing that wracked South Africa in recent weeks osten­si­bly began as spon­ta­neous protests over the jail­ing of dis­graced for­mer Pres­i­dent Jacob Zuma.
His suc­ces­sor, Cyril Ramaphosa, called it a pre­text “to pro­voke a pop­u­lar insur­rec­tion” against the state. In fact, the riots were an orches­trat­ed tech­nique the South African police rou­tine­ly used against anti-apartheid forces.

In 1986, black vig­i­lantes known as wit­doeke, Afrikaans slang for the white head cov­er­ing they wore, attacked Cross­roads squat­ter camp out­side Cape Town to dri­ve out sup­port­ers of the anti-apartheid Unit­ed Demo­c­ra­t­ic Front (UDF). Hun­dreds of shanties were burned.

Free­lance cam­era­man George D’Ath was hacked and stabbed to death. Patrick Durand, a French pho­tog­ra­ph­er, was shot in the arm. Years lat­er, the Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion report­ed that the wit­doeke act­ed “with the tac­it approval and aid of the secu­ri­ty forces.”
 It was wide­ly believed at the time that the witdoeke’s motive was eco­nom­ic; a promise from the White author­i­ties that if they drove out the UDF squat­ters, they could squat in their place.

                                POVERTY WEAPONISED

Much of the loot­ing in the pro-Zuma ‘upris­ing’ was oppor­tunis­tic — a nat­ur­al con­se­quence of grind­ing pover­ty and eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty. Unem­ploy­ment has hit 33 per­cent, the high­est rate in South African his­to­ry. Near­ly two thirds of under-35s are job­less. Elec­tric­i­ty black­outs are rou­tine. None of that should be the norm in a coun­try with vast resources, includ­ing gold, dia­monds, tita­ni­um and uranium.
South Africa was ini­tial­ly flout­ed as an excep­tion to the mis­man­age­ment and cor­rup­tion that plague much of the rest of the con­ti­nent. That was before Jacob Zuma and his cohorts turned the upper ech­e­lons of the African Nation­al Con­gress par­ty (ANC) into a klep­toc­ra­cy clique.
By the time 25,000 troops man­aged to restore a mea­sure of calm, forty thou­sand busi­ness­es, includ­ing stores, banks, fac­to­ries and post offices had been van­dal­ized or burned. Dam­age to the econ­o­my runs into bil­lions of dollars.
‘Wreck­ing the joint’ for short-term gain only makes eco­nom­ic sense when your ambi­tions are lim­it­ed by mere­ly try­ing to get through the day. In a recent sur­vey 65 per­cent of peo­ple said they strug­gle to put food on the table. When upward mobil­i­ty is a chimera, ideals count for little.

                                        WHEN YOU GOT NOTHIN’…

 On a wet, dull day out­side Dur­ban in 1985, I watched a man strug­gling to car­ry a sheet of cor­ru­gat­ed tin roof­ing. It was among the last sal­vage­able things in the ruins of what had been the Phoenix Cen­ter, estab­lished by Mahat­ma Gand­hi in 1904.
Intend­ed as a mul­tira­cial exper­i­ment in non-vio­lence, the unas­sum­ing set­tle­ment was where he coined the slo­gan: “Refuse to believe that you are weak, and you will be strong.”

It was destroyed in clash­es between war­ring anti-apartheid fac­tions. Tear­gas can­is­ters, rub­ber bul­lets and dis­card­ed books were Gandhi’s final legacy.
The World Bank report­ed in March that South Africa is among the world’s most unequal coun­tries, and inequal­i­ty has wors­ened since the for­mal end of apartheid. As Bob Dylan put it: “When you got nothin’/You got noth­in’ to lose.”

 Whether that can be fixed will depend very much on whether Ramaphosa can root out the cor­rup­tion and inef­fi­cien­cy that have gnawed into the heart of the ANC, the par­ty which has ruled South Africa with an unas­sail­able major­i­ty since it swept to pow­er in the country’s first-ever major­i­ty-rule elec­tion 27 years ago.

Ramaphosa’s best hope is that the spir­it and lessons of Madi­ba (Mandela’s trib­al name) still have a hold. Bar­bara Holt­man, a South African friend for more than 40 years stand­ing, summed it up to me in an e‑mail:
“The riots end­ed a few days before Man­dela Day, a time when South Africans are urged to do 67 min­utes of com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice in hon­our of Madiba’s 67 years of activism. This year there was an extra­or­di­nary response to the call; peo­ple came togeth­er to clean the loot­ed sites, remove the trash, pro­vide food parcels, sup­port those who had lost so much. It’s not enough to change the world, but it’s a good start. In a coun­try that suf­fers deep inter-gen­er­a­tional trau­ma, this July has added a new layer.”

Maybe a “new” ANC should adopt a thought from the great artist Vin­cent van Gogh as its new slo­gan: “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

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