Top Quotes: “After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa” — Alec Russell

Introduction

“The new states were betrayed by the colonising powers, which had equipped them with only a handful of graduates to run their governments. They were betrayed by Moscow and Washington, who used them as proxy battlefields of the Cold War. Most of all they were betrayed by their own leaders, many of whom did little but bask in personality cults and fll foreign bank accounts while beggaring their people.”

“The ANC made a steady start in tackling the legacy of white rule. It swiftly introduced a liberal constitution supported by independent courts that guaranteed rights long denied under apartheid. It revived the economy. It established South Africa as a presence on the world stage. But after fifteen years in power, the ANC is losing its way. It has catastrophically failed its two greatest challenges, AIDS and the collapse of Zimbabwe on its border. Now it is fighting to escape the shadow of so many other liberation movements that came to office with great dreams only to see them founder under the weight of unfulfillable expectations and against the backdrop of corruption, infighting and misrule. South Africa’s second struggle is under way.”

“Under apartheid the domestic maps of South Africa had resembled giant blotting pads, reflecting the borders that the Nationalists drew up for the tribal ‘homelands’ to ensure that whites rather than blacks had most of the prime agricultural land. Now right-wingers were once again plotting another unjust carve-up, this time of a white rather than a black homeland that would keep them safe from the horrors of majority rule. Their proposals bore no relation to demographics of political reality.”

“The ANC has proved a reliable steward of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest economy, embracing orthodox fiscal and monetary policies and handling the nation’s finances far more steadily than the Afrikaner Nationalists in the last years of apartheid. A decade after the end of white rule, South Africa enjoyed its most concerted period of economic growth since the Second World War. Between 2004 and 2007 the economy grew at an average of 5% per cent a year.”

“Zuma had just been elected leader of the ANC. Some of the more illustrious names in twentieth-century political history preceded him, including Chief Albert Luthuli, the first of the anti-apartheid movement’s three Nobel peace laureates; Oliver Tambo; and of course, Mandela. He offered the electorate the invigorating crowd-pleasing politics that had been sorely lacking under his aloof predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. His election was a seismic event. For a liberation movement to unseat a leader after just ten years in his position was unprecedented in southern Africa. It heralded a potential renewal for the ANC as it emerged from under the shadow of the increasingly autocratic Mbeki.

Zuma had cracked the monolith of a hegemonic ruling party, setting a welcome post-apartheid precedent that leaders who erred could expect to be dismissed. The former freedom fighter had a heroic past and formidable political skills. He promised to tackle crime, AIDS, poverty and Zimbabwe, and to bring back the reconciliatory ethos of Mandela’s era. But that was not the whole story. The man who saw himself as the country’s saviour had no formal education, at least eighteen children, a penchant for populism and a history of scandal. He was embroiled in a corruption probe relating to his ties with his former financial adviser, who was in prison for procuring a bribe for him from an arms dealer. He had been tried for the rape of the HIV-positive daughter of a family friend. While he was acquitted, his testimony further clouded his reputation. He did not dispute that he had had unprotected sex with the complainant while knowing she was HIV-positive. He testified that, according to Zulu custom, his accuser had solicited his attentions by wearing a short skirt and it would have been an insult to her to refuse her?”

“In the frenetic days before and after the April 1994 election that ended white rule, Mandela was an itinerant prophet of reconcilation, tourng the country delivering homily after homily to bind his divided nation together. In August 1993 in Kalehong, an urban wasteland of tin-roofed bungalows and shacks, after five days of fighting in which scores had died, ten thousand ANC supporters were packed into a ramshackle stadium chanting for weapons to fight their enemies from the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu nationalist movement then vying for control of the township. Half a mile away the Natalsprit Hospital was treating the wounded from the latest street battles. The crowd was howling for revenge, yet Mandela gave no ground.

‘If you have no discipline, you are not freedom fighters, and we do not want you in our organisation,’ he said in his distinctive reedy tones. ‘If you are going to kill innocent people and old men, you do not belong in the ANC. I am your leader. If you don’t want me, tell me to go and rest. As long as I am your leader, I will tell you where you are wrong. Your task is reconciliation.’ He stared his angry supporters down. They shuffled out abashed.

He delivered hundreds of such speeches, often impromptu, and frequenty displaying a moral clarity that few dared to question.”

“This was after all a man who was to say on meeting the Spice Girls, a sassy British pop band, that they were his ‘heroes’”

Mandela’s Presidency

“[Mandela’s] presidency was not a golden age, as his friends are the first to concede. He had an autocratic streak. He neglected key areas of policy, most critically the fight against AIDS.”

“Mandela’s unflinching support for the independence of the courts, the media and state institutions set a vital precedent. The ANC inherited a stronger judiciary and a more vibrant civil society than anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. Mandela respected the courts, even when rulings by white judges from the apartheid era went in favour of old Afrikaner Nationalist leaders. When General Magnus Malan, a former defence minister, was acquitted of murdering thirteen civilians in a 1987 massacre, ANC supporters were outraged. Mandela, however, called on them to respect the judgement. He himself appeared in court when subpoenaed in a dispute over the national rugby squad. He regularly submitted himself to questioning by the press.

His respect for the judiciary was in contrast to the approach of Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, who were both to stand accused of undermining the independence of democratic institutions. Mandela, however, believed in leading by example. He was prepared to break ranks with his fellow African leaders and condemn oppression. He did not indulge the ruinous culture of relativism and solidarity that had led to so many abuses in Africa passing unrebuked. He led. He also knew when to go. Mandela was the last of a long line of African liberation leaders to take charge. He was acutely aware of the need to buck their trend by serving just one term.”

“Without Mandela the story of South Africa’s transition from white rule might have had a far bleaker ending. Years after he stepped down from office, one of his advisers said that even after taking power Mandela had still been worried that the security forces might try to sabotage the new democracy. Mandela also knew South Africa could not afford a mass exodus of whites with their skills and their capital. He cited many times as a cautionary tale the histories of the former Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique, which lost most of their skilled workers and professionals at independence when the Portuguese colonists fled.”

“He masked his anger over the decades of brutality and injustice — he always said he had forgiven but not forgotten the past — and strove to make the Afrikaners feel they belonged in the new nation.”

“It was left to the post aparthera Parliament to spell out the terms. After an intense debate the legislators came to the critical condusion: perpetrators of human rights abuses would be eligible for amnesty if they confessed their misdeed and if their crimes were deemed political.”

The Mbeki Years

“Economists agreed that the creation of a black middle class, one of Mbeki’s priorities, was the best way to bridge the gap. According to one survey the average income in black households in the central Gauteng province, the engine room of the economy, rose by 47 per cent to over 90,000 rand a year between 2000 and 2006. But still, the country’s extremes broadly split down racial lines. A trade union report in 2008 found that fourteen years into democracy whites enjoyed on average incomes 450 per cent higher than blacks, and 400 per cent higher than people of mixed race.” The survey’s results were not surprising, given the legacy of apartheid education. But they highlighted a trend: despite the growth of the black middle class and the government’s anti-povery measures, including an annual social welfare budget of over 70 billion rand, the inequality gap between rich and poor was increasing. The Gini coefficien, the international measure of economic inequalities, rose between 1995 and 2005, identifying South Africa as having one of the world’s sharpest divides between rich and poor.”

“Despite the push by reformists to open up the economy, the MPLA was one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. In 2004 a report by the New York-based agency Human Rights Watch said $4 billion of oil revenue was unaccounted for between 1987 and 2002. It was a staggering figure in a country where, according to the UN, most people lived on less than $2 a day. Many in Luanda lived in slums as bad as any in Africa.”

“The party dated back to 8 January 1912, when the white residents of Bloemfontein, one of South Africa’s most conservative cities, had had the unaccustomed and presumably disconcerting experience of seeing large numbers of blacks gathering in the streets, accompanied by the haunting strain of Nosi Sikel’ i-Africa, the liberation hymn ‘God Bless Africa.’ It was just two years after the Afrikaners and the British had formally ended decades of enmity and forged the Union of South Africa. Far from extending the relatively liberal provisions in the British-ruled Cape to the rest of the country, the constitution of the new state had made no provision for the rights of blacks. Congregating in Bloemfontein, the ANC’s middle-class founders, lawyers, journalists and academics were determined to oppose this. They were, in Mandela’s words, ‘pioneers who braved uncharted waters driven by a noble ideal’, but they faced a longer battle to gain their rights than they could ever have predicted.

The first major turning point for the ANC came in 1948, with the landslide election of the National Party on a platform of uplifting Afrikaners and intensifying segregationist laws. The result was a devastating blow to Mandela and other young leaders in the ANC who appreciated that their fight for a non-democracy had just become far harder. The following year he and others in the ANC Youth League ousted the party’s then leader, Dr. Alfred Xuma, a middle-class lawyer who was unwilling to confront the authorities with mass demonstrations. ‘I think after so many years I must now confess what we actually did,’ Mandela told ANC colleagues nearly half a century later to loud chuckles. In Xuma’s place they put a feistier figure, Dr. James Moroka, who was not at the time even a member of the party. They wrote out and gave him a party membership card on the spot, Mandela recalled.

For a glorious decade the party dared to dream of one man, one vote. It organised protests. It wrote petitions. It enlisted the support of white liberals. In June 1955 it unveiled the Freedom Charter, a sweeping policy document laying out the principles of a non-racial democratic country and also detailing a series of social reforms, including free education for everyone regardless of race, land for the landless and shorter working hours. But as soon as the ANC and its rival liberation movement, the Pan-Africanist Congress, which had broken away from the ANC in opposition to its non-racialism, posed more than the most token threat, the state reacted ruthlessly. In 1960 police shot dead sixty-nine unarmed protesters, including ten children, many in the back, in the township of Sharpeville, after they marched to protest against the law requiring them to carry a passbook. Later that year the two parties were banned. The clampdown ushered in three grim decades with the party’s leaders in prison, in exile, or underground

The exile years posed huge challenges to the ANC. The party benefited from widespread international support for its opposition to such a noxious racist system. Yet its leadership was scattered across the globe, and many of its most impressive and authoritative figures were in prison on Robben Island. While it eventually learned how to harness public sympathy for its cause in the West, it was hardly the brilliant revolutionary mastermind that its propagandists suggested. It could not even claim credit for the two principal uprisings against the white regime. The exiled leadership was taken by surprise by the Soweto Uprising in 1976, when a protest led by schoolchildren and students and organised by the black consciousness movement spiralled into a rebellion. The ANC also had a relatively minor role in organising the township revolts in the mid-eighties. These were internal rebellions. In exile the ANC was, according to Mac Maharaj, a senior party member, divided and hopelessly indecisive.

Then, after the ANC was unbanned in 1990, just when it wanted to start making detailed plans for running the government, most of its leading figures were caught up in the increasingly bloody drama of the transition from apartheid. Not only did the ANC have to negotiate with the National Party over its departure from office, it also faced secessionist threats from the white right wing and from a nationalist Zulu movement, the Inkatha Freedom Party. Over ten thousand people were killed in political violence in the four years between Mandela’s release from prison and his assumption of office. On a sunny March day in 1994, the fighting washed up against the door of the ANC headquarters itself, as thousands of Zulus aligned to Inkatha marched through the centre of Johannesburg brandishing spears, machetes and clubs. At least eight of them were killed when ANC security guards fired on them as they massed outside the party headquarters, apparently planning to attack. An hour later dark pools of blood glistened on the tarmac just beyond the entrance.”

“By one reckoning, 40 per cent of ANC MPs in early 2007 were directors of companies, with many ‘owning them outright.’ Most officials in the party headquarters professed not to see a conflict of interest between their positions in the governing party and their involvement in state contracts — which were awarded by the ANC in government. For instance, Ronnie Mamoepa, the spokesman of the ministry of foreign affairs, led a consortium that aspired to buy the country’s most influential media house. In possibly the most infamous example, Smuts Ngonyama, the senior spokesman for the ANC, and Andile Ngcaba, the former director general of the telecommunications department, led a consortium that bought a 15 per cent stake, worth billion rand, in Telkom, the national telephone provider.”

“In 2004 the ANC was exposed as having established a front company known as Chancellor House, to which the government awarded stakes in private corporations through contracts aimed at uplifting blacks, in order to raise money for the party.”

“The most obvious encroachment was on the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Under apartheid the SABC had shamelessly punted the government line. After a few years of independent journalism post-1994, the SABC reverted to its old sycophantic ways. The head of news blacklisted a number of analysts and commentators who had been critical of the government. In a sign of his contempt for due process, Mbeki drew up a list for members of the new SABC board and forwarded it to the party’s MPs for their signature.

Parliament itself became little more than a rubber stamp for the executive, Andrew Feinstein found at the start of Mbeki’s presidency, when he sought to expose wrongdoing by senior party members and arms companies in a controversial multibillion-dollar arms deal. The same de Lange who, at the start of the ANC’s first term in government, had extolled the brilliance of the ANC in holding the executive to account was one of the many senior ANC MPs who failed to support Feinstein’s investigation into the arms deal and backed the leadership’s drive to bar South Africa’s most prominent anti-corruption judge from presiding over an inquiry. Feinstein was subjected to vicious denunciations by Mbek’s senior aides. In despair he resigned from Parliament.”

“With his time in the presidency limited by the constitution to two terms, Mbeki moved to entrench his domination into the future by floating the idea of a third term as ANC president. He could then emulate Vladimir Putin of Russia and be the éminence grise behind a handpicked successor, safeguarding his legacy, policies and allies long into the future. For a while it seemed the ANC might accept this passively. He had not counted on the party proving for the first time in many years why it deserved its reputation as superior to other liberation movements.”

“In informal settlement just outside Johannesburg’s city centre, a mob chased a young Mozambican down a back alley. They cornered him in a patch of urban wasteland against a wall. Then, when he could resist no more, they wrapped him in his duvet cover, piled wood on top of him, and set him alight A few stood watching his smoking and crackling body. Some shouted and danced. One woman laughed.”

“The young Mozambican was one of dozens of immigrants from elsewhere in Africa killed in a week of ethnic cleansing that led to thirty thousand people having to fee their homes. The outpouring of anger was a cry of anguish from the dispossessed over the competition for scant services and jobs. It was a reminder of the passions that lay just below the surface of society. It also marked the moment that the ANC could no longer convincingly argue that it had done enough to alleviate poverty. The necklace reflected not just the failure of South Arica to escape the brutality of the past but also more broadly its failure to overcome the inequalities of the apartheid era.

The media and the authorities blamed the violence on ‘xenophobia.’ The implication seemed to be that this was somehow an alien syndrome that had poisoned South Africa. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was the first politician to challenge this self-righteous theory. For her to seize on a necklacing to reprise her anti-apartheid role as the conscience of the nation was rich with irony. In the seventies she had been the indomitable heroine of the struggle. Her refusal to be cowed or even silenced when banished to a remote township had inspired the anti-apartheid movement. In thirty-three years of marriage she spent barely five weeks in broken stretches with her husband, Nelson Mandela. But in 1985 her halo slipped when she appeared to exhort the township comrades to more necklacing. ‘With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country,’ she told a rally.

Since then her reputation had fallen precipitously. Her thuggish entourage in the late eighties, known as the Mandela United Football Club, terrorised her section of Soweto, kidnapping and assaulting youths suspected of being informers. One, a fourteen-year-old called Stompie Moeketsi, was murdered by the ‘coach’ of the club. In 1991 Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of kidnapping him and being an accessory to assault, but her six-year prison sentence was commuted to a fine and a two-year suspended sentence on appeal. Mandela, whose relationship with her didn’t survive his long incarceration, fired her as a deputy minister early in his term in office over a corruption scandal. In the subsequent decade she incurred convictions for fraud and theft. But the Winnie legend retained some of its lustre. She swept back to prominence in December 2007, when she won first place in the ANC’s national executive committee.”

“The violence came as no surprise to Gigi Mafifi and his family. They lived in Diepsloot, an expanse of low-cost housing and shacks that sprang up on the northwest of Johannesburg at the end of white rule. There they had an existence that mirrored the lives of many millions across Africa and the developing world. Maffi had left school with good grades and had half completed a mathematics programme at a technical college. His girlfriend worked for an advertising agency. And yet still they were struggling to make ends meet to support an extended family. He was unemployed. They lived in a Diepslot shack from which his girlfriend emerged every day to compete in a high-powered office. For more than a year the pressure on amenities had been intolerable as more immigrants arrived. The lines at the clinic were filled with foreigners, resentment was mounting, and still more Zimbabweans were coming from their troubled homeland looking for shelter, willing to undercut South Africans in their desperation for work. The global rise in food and fuel prices in the first half of 2008 and a steep rise in South Africa’s inflation had been, it appeared, the final straw.”

“The ANC came to power trumpeting an ambitious Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). It promised to build a million new homes, redistribute ‘a substantial amount of land’, and provide clean water and sanitation for everyone in five years. But how the party was going to fund this munificent list was from the outset unclear. Trevor Manuel, the then head of the party’s economic policy unit, talked of streamlining government spending and cutting the defence budget, which had ballooned during the last years of white rule. But there was no clear rubric for macroeconomic policy. Many in the ANC still believed that South Africa’s treasury was in rude health and that a flow of funds just needed to be redirected to the underdeveloped townships. As it was, they had a shock on entering office and finding that after years of sanctions and overspending on defence, and in the wake of a series of last-minute splurges by the Nationalists in particular on the civil service, the economy was in a desperate state. It was hobbled by debt. In the decade before 1994 it had grown at an average of just half a per cent a year. It needed to grow at 6 per cent if the government was to make inroads into unemployment, estimated at the handover at over 30 percent of economically active adults.”

“For Manuel, the most diligent minister in Mbeki’s government, such barbs were familiar. They were also inaccurate. Far from implementing a textbook neoliberal doctrine, the government retained a high degree of confidence in the role of the state in steering the economy. The idea of privatising non-core state assets was off the agenda. The post-1994 labour laws enshrined sweeping rights for workers that were far better suited to a developed economy than to South Africa and led to a rise in unemployment. As for the charge that the plight of the poor had been forgotten, that too was unfair. Between 1994 and 2007 the ANC built 2.6 million houses. The number of homes with electricity doubled to 8.8 million. By 2007, over 87 per cent of people had access to clean running water. As of March 2008, 14.1 million people in South Africa were benefiting from the largest social welfare program in sub-Saharan Africa.”

“As the joy of liberation dissipated the country had had to come to terms with the realisation that it was just another middle income country with a host of pressing problems and that it could expect no special favours from the outside world. Under apartheid about 8o per cent of the budget was directed to about 15 per cent of the population. That ensured that many in that minority had a lifestyle to compare with the most affluent countries in the world. But as Manuel appreciated, wealthy as South Africa was in comparison with other sub-Saharan African countries, whatever the government did, the inequalities could not be evened out. Rather, South Africans had to tailor their expectations of the state to the realities of a developing country.

Compounding his difficulties – and frustration – there had been no post-apartheid dividend. Foreign investment had not poured in to South Africa after the unveiling of GEAR. Rather, it had come in a trickle. There were other, more attractive destinations in Asia and Eastern Europe, where societies were not still embroiled in debates over how to deal with the past. A decade into the post-apartheid era, like many other developing countries, South Africa found itself battling against the unforeseen phenomenon of jobless growth. But the greatest frustration for the millions of impoverished people like Comrade Sam was not the policy, nor the failure of foreign investors to show confidence in the new country, but rather the ANC’s mixed record in delivering basic services.”

“The only trouble was that the ones being built by the ANC were smaller and of poorer quality than the houses built by the apartheid government. Under apartheid they had fought against the building of five-hundred-square-foot houses. “They were an insult. Now the government is building us even smaller ones.”’

Overlooking the project was a row of government-prefabricated blocks housing the local civil servants. Surprisingly, Ernest Rambau, a government housing officer, did not make the slightest attempt to defend official policy. Once he started speaking, his frustrations bubbled forth in a torrent. The government was incompetent, uncommunicative and overwhelmed, he said. They would not meet their target of building five thousand houses in Orange Farm in 2007. That figure anyway was not nearly enough for demand. Third, the houses they were building were substandard. He dismissed out of hand the government’s goal of building a house for everyone in South Africa by 2014. ‘We’ll never make it.’

So what was the underlying problem? He had a number of gripes, including the top-down style of the national government. But the biggest problem was the low quality of officials at the provincial and local government. ‘There is poor management of everything,’ he said. ‘I cannot run away from the truth.’

His complaint could be heard across the country. When asked about the quality of the local government and its employees, South Africans always gave the same response: dire. The issue exasperated Trevor Manuel and his Treasury officials. One of the reasons behind the budget surplus of 2007 was that many provincial government departments were so incompetent, overwhelmed and, in some cases, corrupt, that they were unable to draw up viable plans to spend their budgets. So money provisionally allocated to provincial governments was often not disbursed or was returned unspent to the Treasury. It might be controversial to have a surplus, Manuel argued. But he was not going to endorse ill-considered plans just so the budget was spent. Between 2003 and 2008 municipal governments massively underspent on infrastructure, according to a government report, potentially undermining prospects for growth and the reduction of poverty.

There were several factors behind the failings of local government.”

“There was the difficulty of retaining people with good qualifications at a time when there were far more lucrative contractions in the provinces at a time when there were far more lucrative contract in the cities. In a town such as Lichenburg, an old white right wing stronghold three hours dusty drive from Johannesburg, the problem was particularly acute. The Reverend Moses Moshelane, the municipal manager, said it was impossible for the town to keep engineers. A government programme had deployed trainee engineers to small towns such as Lichtenburg. But as soon as they were qualified, he said, they left for better jobs in the cities.

Third, as Manuel had told me, there was the delicate matter of expectations. In the last year of white rule many whites feverishly predicted that on the day of liberation blacks would start moving into the suburbs and measuring up whites’ homes for themselves. It was clear, however, to anyone who spent any time in the townships that that was nonsense. The apparent willingness of so many blacks to be patient for the fruits of liberation was as remarkable as was the modesty of their aspirations. Time and again, ahead of the April 1994 elections and then in the years afterwards, people across the country said that all they were looking for was the opportunity to live a life in dignity, have access to running water and electricity, and to have a roof over their heads. Yet after a decade or more of patience, residents in some townships started to become more restive. The huge fortunes that small numbers of black business people were making in Johannesburg fuelled frustrations, encouraging the sense that there was money to be made somehow, somewhere in the new order, if only they were not held in check and the government gave them their due.”

“Previously, the civil service had been dominated by English-speaking whites. Within a decade it was a preserve of Afrikaners. Half a century later history repeated itself. Under Mbeki the civil service underwent a rapid transformation.

The need for a comprehensive and rapid affirmative action programme vas undeniable. While many of the Afrikaner civil servants had done their johnvery eficiently, these were the people who had implemented the apartheid policies. So it was not just for appearances that the ANC needed to promote blacks to senior positions. Many in the old guard were never going to be enthusiastic about crafting new policies to tackle apartheid’s legacies.”

“The fourth factor behind the dismal record of provincial and local government was the most politically delicate: affirmative action. Reports into South Africa’s ‘skills crisis’ tended to shy away from addressing this because of the sensitivities of race. But the unvarnished reality of government was that in the understandable post-liberation drive to promote blacks rapidly to positions of authority, many experienced white civil servants, surveyors, engineers and other professionals were encouraged to take early retirement, and their replacements were not always as well qualified for their jobs.

Under apartheid the civil service was dominated by Afrikaners. Mandela moved cautiously to change this. The post-apartheid settlement had included a sunset clause for civil servants. Mandela was wary of alienating the Afrikaner establishment at a time when he was still trying to cement the foundations of the new country. But on taking office Mbeki stepped up the pace.”

“The dire results in mathematics and science were of particular concern. In 2007 just 1 per cent of black schoolchildren in South Africa gained a decent pass in mathematics in their school-leaving exams. For businesses this was a major disincentive to invest in South Africa. A survey of chief executives and managers in 2007 concluded that companies were ‘creaking under the strain’ of the ‘skills shortage’

In a savage irony, a decade into ANC rule, thousands of middle-class Zimbabweans fleeing the implosion of their own economy landed well-paid jobs in Johannesburg by virtue of their qualifications and their excellent English.

Funding was not the issue. The ANC spent 18.5 per cent of the budget on education, a higher per centage than many other developing countries. Teachers were, in Trevor Manuel’s words, ‘not poorly remunerated’. Rather, the problem was management. To the frustration of Treasury officials, more than 800 million rand of the education budget in the Eastern Cape was unspent in 2007, a reflection of the notorious incompetence of its provincial government. It was better that the money was saved rather than frittered away on ill-considered and poorly managed projects. But what was required was a total overhaul of education. There were too many poorly run schools with appalling levels of absenteeism among staff that were not being held to account.”

“The schools in the former tribal homelands, the regions that had been set aside by apartheid governments nominally as semi-independent states but in reality as impoverished dumping grounds for blacks, had long been underfunded and were in an atrocious state. The power of the teachers’ unions needed to be shattered. Such was their grip on the profession that government officials said it was all but impossible to fire negligent, incompetent or corrupt teachers. But the ANC did not have the stomach to take on the unions. Year in, year out, new government initiatives for education were unveiled and yet went unenforced, and the pass rate dropped lower and lower.”

“In 2008 the state electricity provider ran out of power. For several weeks the country suffered sustained power cuts, often imposed without any advance warning. The mines had to close for a week. Hospitals had to rely on generators. When the situation eased, it was made clear that there would be more power cuts for at least another six years. Eskom’s financial director went so far as to advise investors not to plan big new projects until 2013, when new power stations were due to come online.

For South Africa this was a stunning reversal of fortune. At the end of white rule, Eskom had boasted an excess of cheap power, which it hoped to export to neighbouring countries. But in early 2008 the reserve margin was down to 4 per cent, barely a quarter of the international norm. Solidarity, a trade union for mainly white blue-collar workers, blamed affirmative action policies at Eskom.

While the early retirement of many experienced technicians was clearly a factor, there was a more fundamental problem: the government’s failure to plan. Nine years earlier Eskom had warned officials the country would run out of power within a decade if it did not plan a new generation of power stations. For several years after that warning the government dithered over how to proceed. By the time it finally made up its mind and started to plan for new power stations, it was too late. As predicted, in 2008, the power ran out.

The crisis reflected a particular weakness in the ANC’s style of government: it was rather better at discussing policy than implementing it. AIDS activists became wearily accustomed to reading well-worded policy papers on health whose policies were never implemented.”

“Such was the climate that it seemed perfectly natural for many householders from affluent suburbs to rehearse with their children what they would do in the event of a man approaching them with a gun in his hand. It did not seem remotely surprising to the parents of children at our boys’ school that the role of Snow White in the school play had been adapted so she carried a panic button, a standard accessory for householders in wealthier suburbs.”

“In the 19605, 197o and 1980s, waves of white immigrants moved south from the independent Congo and then from the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and finally from Zimbabwe, bringing with them lurid tales of life under majority rule.”

“The vast disparity between haves and have-nots in Johannesburg, where swanky suburbs and shopping malls were within half a mile of the township of Alexandra, made the city an obvious and easy target for criminals. Mandela recalled the daily hardship of life in Alexandra when he lived there in the 194os. Sixty years later, most of its houses had electricity and running water, but it was still an overpopulated slum, with tens of thousands of shacks where people scrabbled for survival. In the early nineties it witnessed running street battles between the ANC and inhabitants of migrant worker hostels, strongholds of its rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party. It experienced the first of the anti-foreigner pogroms of May 2008, when mobs went on the rampage, driving immigrants from their homes. Isaac Moyo, a young Zimbabwean decorator, was camped out in the shadow of Alexandra’s police station. Six years after he fled to South Africa from his troubled homeland, his dreams of a new life had come to an abrupt end when a mob of machete-wielding South Africans yelling xenophobic slogans smashed down the door of his shack and forced him and his three brothers to run for their lives. Clutching a small mirror and a bucket of old clothes, all he could grab, he had fled for sanctuary to the very building that under apartheid had been a symbol of oppression.”

“Investigations of carjackings in South Africa revealed these were largely coordinated by syndicates, which relied on desperate young men to steal cars to order and drive them to safe houses. There they were paid the rand equivalent of about $300 and the cars were then stripped overnight before being smuggled across the border, often with the connivance of corrupt policemen. South Africa’s misfortune was to come of age at a time when the international crime networks were expanding their reach. For drug-smuggling syndicates South Africa was an ideal haven in the nineties: a wealthy country with good air and sea connections to the rest of the world and a dysfunctional police force.”

“It is hard to avoid concluding that centuries of race-based repression, applied for the last half of the twentieth century with scientific and brutal rigour, embedded a culture of violence. Apartheid was predicated on force — the evictions and relocations of whole communities, the separating of families, the bulldozing of homes, the dawn raids by policemen searching for infringers of the pass laws, the shooting at crowds of unarmed protesters and the torture of prisoners. Too many families have been dispossessed, uprooted and torn apart over the years. Too many relations have been killed or imprisoned. There are too many grieving and aggrieved.

Then there was also the legacy of the resistance to apartheid. The struggle was fought in townships across the country. It was a brutal fight that led to the collapse of many of the traditional codes of behaviour. In the eighties in the townships that encircled Johannesburg, young men abandoned their classes and joined ‘self-defence units’ to defend their streets against the security forces. Later, in the early nineties, when the fighting between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party spread from the eastern province of Natal, Johannesburg’s townships experienced a small-scale guerrilla war between supporters of the two parties.

Mandela repeatedly lectured the youths in the self-defence units and urged them to put down their weapons and to resist the temptation to become embroiled in crime. But it was always going to be hard to put the genie back into the bottle. Dr Gomolemo Mokae, a scholarly medical doctor who had been a leading member of the black consciousness movement, the inspiration behind the 1976 Soweto Uprising, concluded after the end of white rule that South Africa was reaping the whirlwind not just of apartheid but also of the ANC’s decision to make the townships ungovernable. In the eighties, supporters of the black consciousness movement had been brutally targeted by the ANC. Mokae was not going to spare the ANC from blame. In the eighties the leaders of the liberation struggle had sanctioned youths to kill their opponents, he said. ‘Correctly we didn’t have confidence in white courts and settled for an even more monstrous force, kangaroo courts.’ A few years earlier, township youths had caught a notorious criminal called Korumbi, whom the police were ignoring. Schoolchildren beheaded him, put his head on a stick and paraded it around the township. ‘It is a Lord of the Flies syndrome,’ he said.”

“Residents in several of Johannesburg’s more exclusive suburbs banded together to fund their own private militias. One such firm provided armed units that patrolled in four-by-fours, escorted cars home and monitored suspect vehicles and pedestrians. After an initial collective investment of several million rand to buy the vehicles, householders were expected to pay 2,000 rand a month for the patrols, on top of the monthly fees they were paying for the services of armed-response security firms.

Crime plunged in the suburbs with these new private militias — and promptly rose in adjacent, less well-protected areas. Johannesburg’s suburbs were, after dark, a no-man’s-land patrolled by rival units of armed men, each in their own distinctive uniforms and vehicles. Meanwhile, residents lived behind ever higher perimeter walls. One of the most striking physical changes in Johannesburg over the first fourteen years of majority rule was the growth of the suburban fortress: the average height of walls rose by several feet; gated suburbs and office parks sprouted on the fringes of the city like medieval walled towns; more and more roads were fenced off with booms and sentries. Yet analyses of crime statistics suggested that higher walls had no impact on the number of break-ins. Rather, there was a spurt of cases of people being hijacked as they entered or left their homes. Gates and drives had been identified as the weak point in defences, just as drawbridges had once been for forts. Armed robberies increased by nearly two-thirds from 77,000 per annum to 126,000 in the decade from 1996. In the same period the ratio of robberies at gunpoint to burglaries of empty premises had risen from 1:4.1 to 1:2.4.”

“In June 1990 thousands of miners rampaged through Bucharest, the Romanian capital, attacking supporters of opposition parties, students and ‘intellectuals’ with clubs, hammers and pit props. One young woman in a red shirt was beaten in front of several journalists until her back was a bloody pulp.”

“A tourist was murdered in a bed and breakfast, and a neighbourhood watch scheme was launched, linking all three racial communities. It was to become a model for the country.

“Hout Bay got together and said, “Thank you, that is enough,”’ said Captain Gerhard van den Bergh, the deputy police chief in the two-storey pillbox of a police station that faces the main entrance to Imizamo Yethu. I thought there was no way a neighbourhood watch scheme would work. But when people stood up and said, “We’re tired of crime,” they meant it. If we all change attitudes, stop blaming each other and get involved, we can beat crime.

It was a hugely successful initiative. Residents of Imizamo Yethu patrolled the shantytown every night. In the village Rod Panagos, a businessman, and other coordinators of the neighbourhood watch scheme ran a mobile response service and took turns to be on duty to respond to calls. One night he had been on duty barely five minutes when the radio in the control room crackled into life. A woman called Josephine was on the line in a panic. A man was in her garden trying to break into her home.

‘Josephine, can you see him?’ said the radio operator. ‘Lock the door. Don’t put the phone down. I am still here. Moments later a message was being sent to hundreds of people tuned into the neighbourhood watch frequency: We have an intruder at 35 Penzance. Panagos was on his way, with his night-vision goggles, two-way radio and pepper gun at his side. As he waited just down from 35 Penzance Road, his radio crackled into life: ‘Suspect wearing red cap, with dark top and stripes on sleeves.”

“In its heyday the National Party was all powertl. It took office in 1948 on a programme of uplifting Afrikaners, the white tribe whose forefathers had come to the Cape from Holland and France in the seventeenth and eightenth centuries to escape discrimination. They were determined to guarantee white supremacy by a sweeping extension of segregationist laws. They were also determined to ensure that Afrikaners no longer felt like second-class citizens.

Their old foes, the English-speaking whites, many of whose forefathers had fought theirs in the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century, had dominated government, the civil service and business since the formation of the Union of South Africa out of the British colonies of Natal and the Cape and the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1910. They achieved both goals in swift order, the former by a blizzard of draconian new laws codifying apartheid and the latter by affirmative action.”

“While many English-speaking white South Africans liked to bemoan the Afrikaner Nationalists as crude and uneducated, in fact apartheid suited most whites well. From 1961 to 1974 the Nationalists faced just one opponent of apartheid in the whites-only Parliament, the feisty Helen Suzman, who infuriated the Nationalists with her probing questions. Her party steadily gained supporters and parliamentary seats in the eighties, when the townships were in flames and it was hard to see a peaceful solution to apartheid, but still the National Party easily retained the support of the majority of whites.

Then came the astonishing moment on 2 February 1990, when F. W. de Klerk, the country’s last white president, stood up in Parliament and announced the unbanning of the liberation movements and the release of Mandela.”

“Such evolutionary stories in the early years after white rule ran against the trend of history for whites in sub-Saharan Africa, where independence had usually prompted a mass exodus of the former colonial masters. Most Afrikaners, however, whose very name means ‘Africans’, had nowhere to go, having long since cut ties to Europe. Their forefathers had come to Africa before the US Declaration of Independence, and they had liked to cast their nineteenth-century trek north from the Cape to escape from British rule in the same light as westward expansion in the United States. They had long seen themselves as part of the continent, even if their romanticised view of Africa had tended to exclude a role for black Africans except as their servants. With the stigma of apartheid removed, many of their cultural and intellectual leaders liked to argue that Afrikaners would find it easier to adapt to black rule than the English speakers, many of whom still thought of themselves as Europeans.

Professor J. C. van der Walt, the head of Johannesburg’s Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), a traditional bastion of Afrikaner Nationalism, told me proudly that, a few years after the end of white rule, he had travelled to Soweto and forged a link with the township’s main football club. He was then able to trumpet that connection to persuade a delegation from Howard University, the traditionally black university in Washington DC, to sign a twinning agreement. You see the image of the granite Verwoerdian is not correct, he said. “We Afrikaners are very adaptable. The coming of the new dispensation has been for many of us a relief.’”

“Nearly half of the 1,396 schools that taught solely in Afrikaans in 1993, the last full year of white rule, had by 2007 ceased to be Afrikaans-speaking. The University of Stellenbosch, the intellectual cradle of Afrikaner Nationalism, was one of several traditionally Afrikaans universities embroiled in a bitter fight over what should be the language of instruction. In 2002, in a bid to encourage more black students to apply for places, university authorities agreed English could be used for teaching in the first year of undergraduate courses.”

“The de la Rey song provided a catalyst for this debate for Afrikaners, who comprise two-thirds of South Africa’s whites. It was a debate that had been played out acrimoniously across Africa since the end of colonial rule. Its couse was vital for the future of South Africa.

There are no accurate figures for white emigration, still less for the Afrikaners. But the population of white South Africans has a striking characteristic: there are fewer in their twenties, thirties and forties than in their teens or in their fifties or older, the opposite trend to most First World population groups, which tend to be at their most numerous in those three middle decades. Demographers concluded that the twist reflected a steep rise in emigration among people in their twenties, thirties and forties. At the end of white rule there were an estimated 5.2 million whites in South Africa, including 3 million Afrikaners. A report extrapolated from official household surveys estimated that over three-quarters of a million whites emigrated in the decade after 1995.

The report concluded that the white population had sunk from 5.1 million to 4.3 million between 1995 and 2005.”’”

“Twenty years after independence, dismayed at the growing corruption and misgovernance, many joined, funded and campaigned for a new black-led opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Heidi Holland, an acclaimed biographer of Mugabe, believes the old autocrat felt betrayed and thought that they had spurned the offer of reconciliation he had made on taking office. His response was brutal. The majority of the country’s 4,500 white farmers were driven off their land. The compact had been broken.”

“The DP was the successor to Helen Suzman’s original party and the inheritor of her outspoken liberal tradition. In her thirty-six years in Parliament, from 1953 to 1989, she infuriated the Nationalists with her probing questions. On average she asked two hundred questions a year. When accused by a minister of asking questions in Parliament that embarrassed South Africa, she famously replied, ‘It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.’”

“In the wake of race riots in 1969 the government had implemented a programme known as bumiputra or ‘sons of the soil’, which was aimed at narrowing the wealth gap between the 37 per cent Chinese minority, who dominated local business, and the remainder of the population, including the 52 per cent Malay majority and indigenous people. Businesses were to have a bumiputra partner with a 30 per cent equity stake. Affirmative action programmes were to give them preferential access to university places and state jobs.

The policy became increasingly controversial over the years. Economists suggested it was hampering the country’s growth prospects and needed to be brought to an end. Chinese complained they were suffering from a form of apartheid and emigrated by the thousands. Even many of the intended beneficiaries started to weary of the policy, as it emerged in time that the main beneficiaries were not the poor but an oligarchy and their hangers-on, who won the bulk of government contracts and share allocations in the private sector. But the Malaysian policy did succeed in its primary objective of reducing poverty among Malays and creating a class of ethnic Malaysian business people. In 1994 it was still seen as a success and regarded by the ANC as a viable model for what South Africa needed to do.”

“In Malaysia in 2004, after years of increasing controversy over its empowerment programme, the prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, signalled the beginning of the end of affirmative action. Further dependence on it would, he argued, affect economic prospects and ‘enfeeble’ Malays.”

“The Russian oligarchs made fortunes from the buying of state assets at rock-bottom prices on the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“Charlestown was in Apartheid speak a ‘black spot’ dating back to the infamous Land Act of 1913, which banned blacks from buying land outside designated reserves: In a stroke of the pen, about 75 per cent of South Africa’s population was relegated to about 3 per cent of its territory. The emergence of an increasing number of black farmers successfully competing with white farmers was one of the causes of the act. In a bid to pre-empt the law, leaders of the South African Native Congress, the forerunner of the ANC, frantically tried to buy up plots of land between the tabling of the bill and its passing into law. Such plots, as well as other areas on which black farmers had been flourishing, became known as ‘black spots’, isolated areas of black freehold land that the National Party sought to expunge from the map when they came to power in 1948.

The most famous was Sophiatown, the vibrant central Johannesburg slum that was a haven for black writers and musicians, including Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela in the 1940s and early 1950s. Mandela recalls it fondly as having a ‘special character’ and being ‘bohemian, conventional, lively and sedate.’ White developers had originally not wanted to build there because of its proximity to a municipal refuse dump, but its presence was deemed an affront to the whites living in surrounding areas. Technically, it also infringed the Group Areas Act, which had barred different races from living in the same places. In 1954, Sophiatown was flattened by the authorities; its sixty thousand black residents were transported thirteen miles out of town to what was to be known as Soweto; Sophiatown was rebuilt in rows of Identikit houses intended for Afrikaners, and renamed Triomf.”

HIV

“According to the UN, in 2003, the year after Eric Morake started taking ARVs, every day in South Africa two hundred babies were born HIV-positive, and six hundred people died of AIDS. Five years later, in 2008, the estimated death rate had increased to about a thousand a day. The statistics are not definitive, but the UN’s figures are deemed the most reliable on AIDS. South Africa, with a population of about 50 million, has more people living with HIV and AIDS than any other country in the world. The UN estimated that, of an estimated 33 million people living with HIV worldwide in 2008, 5.7 million were in South Africa. Nearly 1 in 3 pregnant women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were HIV-positive.”

“In 1986 the Chamber of Mines publicie the findings of a study of the blood samples of 300,000 male mine worker. These showed that about eight hundred, mainly from Central Africa, were HIV-positive? At the end of the following year their contracts were not renewed, and they were sent home to meet almost certain death in countries where health facilities were minimal. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, AngloGold was one of several mining houses that made a momentous decision. It had assessed the spiralling costs of having a sick and dying workforce and calculated that in the long run it was cheaper to implement their own ARV programme, both to keep their workers alive and their mines productive. And so in a bitter twist, the mining houses whose reliance on migrant workers had been an integral part of the policy of apartheid and had contributed to the spread of AIDS had upstaged the very government that had come to power vowing to improve the lot of Africans after centuries of subjugation.

Mbeki’s quibbling with the accepted science – in particular the denial of ARVs to patients – and his reluctance to provide drugs to prevent pregnant women passing on the virus to their babies caused the premature deaths of 365,000 people, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health. AIDS activists argued that Mbeki was responsible for more unnecessary deaths than resulted from apartheid.”

“Zackie — like Winnie Mandela, he is known across South Africa by his first name only — is irrepressible, irreverent, idealistic and impassioned, not to say obstinate. A puckish gay former anti-apartheid activist who became engaged in politics in 1976, when he set fire to his school in sympathy with the Soweto Uprising, and went on to be detained several times, he has (after Mandela) played the most important political role in South Africa since the end of white rule. He tested positive for HIV in 1990, the year Mandela was released from prison. Eight years later he founded a pressure group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), to fight the Western drug companies in the courts for the right to cheap non-generic AIDS drugs and to challenge the government for the right to access to ARVs. He was far more than a litigator, however. He mobilised a community campaign across South Africa to goad the government into action, encouraging tens of thousands of HIV-positive people to defy the stigma attached to the virus and to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘HIV POSITIVE’. He brought HIV and AIDS out of the shadows of South African society. It was easily the largest and most successful grassroots movement in the country since the apartheid era.

Zackie’s voice rose when he recalled the spirit of the TAC campaign. The songs had been based on old struggle songs. The use of posters and mass mobilisation had been learned in the anti-apartheid days.”

“The UN AIDS head, Dr. Piot, regarded Thailand as an analogy for South Africa. Like South Africa, it had entered the nineties with a relatively low rate of infection. Then after a period when the authorities, fearful of the risk to the lucrative tourist industry, dithered and denied there was a crisis, the government made AIDS a priority. ‘In a period of one year the trend was reversed,’ Piot said. The AIDS programme was put in the office of the prime minister, and every minister was forced to have a budget line on AIDS. Under Mbeki, however, the South African government moved in the opposite direction.”

“Mandela has repeatedly and publicly berated himself for failing to do enough about AIDS when he was president. In March 1999, just before stepping down from office, he addressed a meeting on AIDS and formally apologised for not talking about it. He made the fight against AIDS the priority of his post retirement life, successfully badgering former President Clinton to raise funds for AIDS treatment. In 2000s he took his boldest step yet to confront the taboo when he announced that his son, Makgatho, had died of AIDS. But while Mandela’s government neglected the fight against HIV/AIDS, Mbeki’s guilt would be of a different order. First he questioned the very nature of the pandemic, and then he impeded the most effective way of treating it.

When the epidemic swept through Uganda in the eighties, President Yoweri Museveni ordered his cabinet ministers to mention AIDS in every speech they delivered, whatever the subject. In South Africa the president, far from addressing it at every opportunity, projected a muddled and misleading message. Not once did he urge people to have an HIV test, the standard first step towards prevention. He once said he would not take a test for HIV because it would confirm a ‘particular paradigm.’ Not once did he urge people to use condoms. So inadequate was his approach that if he so much as mentioned AIDS in his annual state-of-the-nation address to Parliament, in a throwaway line, his aides cited it as proof that he was taking the matter very seriously. In the wake of an international storm over his interventions, he withdrew from the debate, and some health officials pushed to implement an internationally approved AIDS policy. But its progress was desperately slow, not least because his notorious health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and several of the provincial health ministers appeared to share Mbeki’s denial. They delayed implementation of the new policies through obfuscation and petty interventions in official reports. All the while, thousands more South Africans were being infected with HIV and progressing to AIDS.”

“The clinic’s staff told me later that even if Morake had known the prostitutes were HIV-positive, such was the macho culture of the mines that they suspected he would not have dreamed of using a condom, the first line of defence against the spread of the virus. They were still battling to persuade miners not to consult traditional healers about AIDS. Two were squatting just outside the main gate that very evening, draped in animal skins and with beads and strings of bones around their necks, hawking their own ‘natural’ cures for the virus.”

“Doctors had long acknowledged that ARVs did not help a minority of people with AIDS, that poverty and a poor diet exacerbated its ravages, and that ARVS could have debilitating side effects, especially if started long after the onset of the disease. But equally the overwhelming scientific consensus was that ARVs were the best way of keeping HIV at bay. So while Mbeki publicly touted the idea that they were toxic, that was not the main impulse behind his deranged policy. Far more important was his hankering to outdo the West and to stand up for Africa. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who was to serve as Mbeki’s deputy health minister before falling out with him over AIDS, believes he was fired up by the desire to find an African remedy and by a fury at the West’s negative perceptions of Africa. It was not just about going on to the Internet and stumbling on the denialists’ websites, she said. Rather, he was determined to prove the West wrong about AIDS in Africa. The denialists offered what he hoped would be his long-sought alternative answer.”

“In 2001 average life expectancy was fifty-four; by 2008 it was down to forty-seven.”

Zuma

“Jacob Zuma’s ignominious role in the scandal that is South Africa’s official response to AIDS reflects how the spread of the disease is linked to the patriarchal and macho view of sexual relations that still holds sway in many parts of Africa. When he was deputy president from 1999 to 2005, he had special responsibilities for overseeing AIDS policies. Yet the following year, when he was on trial for raping an HIV-positive family friend, he told the court that after having sexual intercourse he took a shower to wash away the virus. He was acquitted, but it was never in dispute that the man who had been in charge of the country’s AIDS policy had knowingly had unprotected sex with a woman who was HIV-positive. He later apologised for the ‘shower’ remark. But it was an appalling statement to have made, as had been his testimony to the court that his accuser had signalled she wanted to have sex with him by wearing a kanga (a knee-length skirt) and that in Zulu culture it was the equivalent of rape not to have sex with a woman who was aroused.”

“The rally was the latest installment of a cynical campaign by Zuma’s supporters to undermine the credibility of the judiciary by demonizing it as compromised and tainted with Apartheid. The judges from the Constitutional Court had, a few days earlier, found against Zuma and ruled that tens of thousands of potentially incriminating documents seized from his home and his lawyer’s office in raids in 2005 were admissible in court. They were, Zuma’s allies, said ‘counter-revolutionaries’. The fact that seven of the ten judges on the Constitutional Court were black and two of the other three were traditionally sympathetic to the ANC was brushed aside.

The second change was the assertive and proud display of Zuluness. In the apartheid era the ANC had insisted it was a non-tribal party. To talk of tribal differences was to play the game of the Afrikaner Nationalists, it argued, and to harp back to a feudal past. Rather, it was its rival in the Zulu heartland, the Inkatha Freedom Party, that stressed its links to Zulu tradition and culture. The murderous battles between Inkatha and ANC supporters were often as much a matter of differences between town and country, modernity and tradition, detribalised Zulus and traditional Zulus, as between rival political parties. The ANC liked to argue that, unlike many other African states, South Africa had moved beyond the ties of ethnicity and clan and that Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Inkatha leader who attended rallies dressed in traditional garb, was a throwback to the past. Such protestations were, however, simplistic. Many Zulus, particularly in rural areas, retained a strong sense of tribal identity. When Zuma’s fortunes plummeted in 200s, and he was fired as the country’s deputy president following the conviction of his financial adviser for procuring a bribe for him from an arms company, he fell back on his Zulu roots to resurrect his political career.

To be a Zulu has a particular emotional and political heft. Zulus are the most populous tribe in South Africa, and elders have long prided themselves their imperial past under Shaka, their Napoleonic king who carved out a vast empire in the early nineteenth century. Urbanised South Africans from other tribes have long mocked rural Zulus as hicks, but many Zulus maintained a residual pride in their warrior tradition. In 1879, a Zulu army equipped with just spears and shields annihilated a 1,100-strong British expeditionary force in one of the most humiliating defeats ever suffered by the British imperial forces before the Zulu kingdom was finally conquered and dismembered.

While the Zulus had garnered military triumphs largely at the expense of other African tribes, the Xhosas, South Africa’s second largest tribe, had traditionally dominated anti-colonial politics. The Xhosas waged a series of brutal frontier wars in the mid-nineteenth century against the settlers encroaching on their homeland, the Eastern Cape. In the first half of the twentieth century the Xhosa elite tended to be better educated than other tribes’, as they had benefited from earlier and more frequent contact with missionaries, who founded schools and colleges. For much of the twentieth century the ANC and other liberation movements were dominated by Xhosas. Oliver Tambo, who led the ANC from 1967, and his two successors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, were Xhosas, as was Steve Biko, the leader of the black consciousness movement. So the idea that it was a Zulu’s turn to lead the ANC had appeal even among ANC-supporting Zulus who in the apartheid era had regarded talk of ethnicity as retrogressive.

When in 2006 Zuma went on trial for the rape of the thirty-one-year-old HIV-positive daughter of a family friend, he used the courtroom as a political stage, stressing his Zulu roots. He spoke isiZulu in court. He cited Zulu custom as a main plank of his defence. On his acquittal he enthused the mainly Zulu crowd that had gathered outside the courtroom with an impassioned rendition of the old anti-apartheid song ‘Lethu Mshini Wami’ (Bring Me My Machine Gun). Relying on the ethnic politics that had worked so well for leaders elsewhere in the world — not just Africa — Zuma established KwaZulu-Natal as his electoral stronghold. When he was voted in as ANC president in December 2007, the Zulu delegates voted for him en masse. In a sign of how the old non-tribal ethos had broken down under the stress of the disputed succession, the majority of the Xhosas voted as a bloc for Mbeki.”

“As the economy shrivelled, Mugabe turned to populist measures. In 1997 he bowed to the pressure of thousands of veterans demanding compensation for the war of independence and ordered unbudgeted payments of 5o,000 Zimbabwean dollars (then about 5,500 pounds) to every registered veteran and also recurring monthly stipends. The payments set the Reserve Bank on a ruinous course of printing money. Two years later, facing the first serious political challenge to his authority since taking power, following the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change, Mugabe launched a brutal crackdown to nullify the threat. The campaign for the 2000 parliamentary elections was marked by vicious state-sponsored violence. Mugabe also turned on the white farmers, some of whom had been backing the MDC, and sanctioned the invasion of their farms by state-backed gangs ostensibly to redistribute land, but in reality to reward his allies and punish his foes.

Mugabe portrayed the invasions as the righting of an old wrong. Landownership in Zimbabwe was rooted in the injustice of the colonial era. Many of the white settlers in the early years of the twentieth century would ride out for a day from a point designated by colonial officials. They would then mark out the boundary of their future farm, while the Africans were crowded into native reserves, much as in South Africa. Unfortunately, since taking office, Mugabe had made no serious attempt to reform landownership. At independence, Britain, the former colonial power, pledged to help land reform by offering compensation to farmers on the basis of ‘willing buyer, willing seller’. But Whitehall halted the payments in 1990, after it emerged that far from helping the poor, land reform was primarily benefiting the elite. Most of the farms handed over in the eighties went to government bigwigs rather than the poor.

The same cynical pattern emerged in the second, enforced round of land reform after 2000. Many of the so-called war veterans who led the invasions were ZANU-PF lackeys and thugs who were far too young to have fought in the liberation war. Many of the confiscated farms ended up in the control of government and ZANU-PF officials.”