Africa

Bill Keller recently reviewed John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation in The New York Times. Keller’s review is glowing. I worry a bit that the book will be somewhat deterministic. The 1995 World Cup marked a nice moment for South Africa, and a profoundly powerful symbolic one at that, but South Africa’s democratic transition probably did not rise and fall based on Mandela’s willingness to embrace the Springboks. I am working on an article on rugby, race, and nationalism in South Africa since 1994 and so have more than a passing interest in receiving my copy of Carlin’s book.

This past weekend’s New York Times travel section had a cover feature on Namibia that provides pretty sound evidence for why that country is one of my very favorites.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is not only largely irrelevant in South African political life, it is an anachronism. Borne of the apartheid era, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s movement (which always was, as much as anything, a tribute to the glories of Mangosuthu Buthelezi) represented an ethnically driven party committed to Zulu nationalism that did not come close to garnering the support of a majority of the country’s Zulus. It has always been a regionally-based party with national pretensions. The IFP ultimately represented a ploy, equal parts savvy and cynical, to triangulate between the National party and the African National Congress in order to maximize self interest that Buthlezi was able to convince a small group of nationalists that they shared. Perhaps in another part of Africa at another time Buthelezi’s machinations would have worked. But not in South Africa in the mid-1990s, and certainly not in South Africa today.

Although he would hardly agree with my perhaps intemperate (which is not to say inaccurate) assessment, it is clear that even Buthelezi is beginning to wonder about the project he conceived and nurtured. On Friday night in a speech before the IFP’s 33rd Congress Buthelezi wondered why South Africans would bother to vote for his party. This frank admission hardly means that Buthelezi has resigned himself to ANC rule, but rather that he realizes that his party’s own performance in recent years has given South Africans little reason to support it.

One of the answers is likely that South Africa needs fewer political parties, which would allow those opposition parties that continue to exist to have a better chance of mobilizing enough voters to be more than a mere nuisance to the ANC. The most logical step still seems to me to be a COSATU-SACP breakaway faction from the ANC followed by the dissolution of a number of the smaller parties, which might either join with that new left-leaning party with the Democratic Alliance embracing some of the parties that embrace a more center-right approach. There would still (alas?) be room for one more right wing party. But the more fractured the opposition parties are, right or left, the less likelihood they will have of ever challenging the ANC. Such a political transformation might also be good for the ruling party inasmuch as it would not longer have to hold together an increasingly fractured alliance.

The newest issue of the incomparable journal Foreign Affairs has several short reviews of books on Africa. The topics of the books under review include Botswana’s economic successes, another book on that country’s military, the failure to establish democratic institutions in the Republic of Congo, Africa’s political economy, and the role of Africa in the world.

In The Star Ufrieda Ho shows how many argue that Eskom’s proposed rationing recommendations will hit the poor disproportionately:

A 10 percent power cut for a Sandton man means his air-conditioner gathers dust; for the Soweto man it means he spends his nights in darkness.

This is skewed equity Eskom-style, says environmental activist Bobby Peek.

The affluent have to cut back on luxuries. The poor have already cut to the bone. There are few luxuries. Asking them to further do without simply exacerbates the gap between those who have and those who don’t.

In a recent article in The Mail & Guardian Michael Georgy makes the case that the deadlock in Zimbabwe represents yet another failure for Thabo Mbeki, another sign of his waning credibility and fading influence at home and abroad.

The case seems pretty strong. Yet something about this argument does not strike me as being quite right or quite fair. Certainly Mbeki deserves plenty of blame for letting the Zimbabwe sore fester for as long as it has without taking stronger action, without pushing for a resolution sooner, without taking more seriously his mandate to broker peace on the behalf of SADC, without ever, to this day, truly condemning Robert Mugabe or at minimum what mugabe allowed to happen to his country. And as a consequence things have gotten to where they are, for which Thabo Mbeki is one of many actors who deserves his share of the blame.

But at the same time, Mbeki is in no position to force an agreement right now. Cliches about horses and water and forcing them to drink come to mind. I  suppose that were a deal to come that the world could celebrate Mbeki would bask in the credit, and as a consequence he has to deal with the backlash. But there are situations where credit might be due success even if equal blame is not due failure. Many of us knew that these negotiations would only go as far as Robert Mugabe would allow them to go. And so they have. For this, at least, it is hard for me to blame Thabo Mbeki.

The incomparable South African political observer and journalist Allister Sparks has an important column in the Cape Times. Here is the introduction:

While everyone is anxious to see the Zimbabwe negotiations succeed in bringing relief to the long-suffering people of that country, it is nonetheless galling that the process should be taking place at all. For it is sending a terrible message to tyrants everywhere.

It is telling them that when you face defeat in an election, the thing to do is to launch mayhem in your country, beating and butchering and bludgeoning your own people until horrified peacekeepers come hurrying to the scene to stop the carnage and you can then negotiate an ongoing role for yourself in the power structure.

Sparks is right. But all along those of us observing the sad situation in Zimbabwe have known that we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  These negotiations were never the ideal path. We all wish that in a free and fair election Morgan Tsvangirai had been recognized as the clear winner and he would be in the process of governing and bringing Zimbabwe back from the abyss. But we do not inhabit that ideal world, we live in our very real, very messy one. Sparks recognizes as much, but still points out numerous failings within that real world context over the last few months.

Somalia might be the most chaotic state in the world, to the point that it barely qualifies as a state any more. It’s location on the Gulf of Aden means that Somalia also represents a sort of wild west for piracy. In the last two weeks two ships have been hijacked  off the coast of Somalia. The latest of these took place yesterday and involved the seizure of a ship, The Bunga Melati Dua, carrying palm oil from Indonesia to the Netherlands.

Instability on Africa’s horn has a tremendous ripple effect on global politics. Somalia is ripe for not only regional destabilization and for this sort of piracy but also for radicals of all stripes, including radical Islamists.

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, whose health has been in question for some time now (Thabo Mbeki caused a bit of a stir when he mistakenly announced a few weeks ago that Mwanawasa had died) has passed away. Observers fear that Mwanawasa’s death could have two repurcussions, the first being causing political instability in Zambia, the second being that his death might have a ripple effect on the Zimbabwean peace negotiations.

Mwanawasa had become one of the most vocal critics of Robert Mugabe in recent years, and one of the few African leaders willing to speak out about the madness unfurling south of the Zambesi. As head of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) had pushed for negotiations in the wake of the election madness that Mugabe had wrought.  

In the wake of the xenophobic violence that engulfed Gauteng earlier this year the government set up camps for those foreigners displaced by the chaos. Those camps were set to close on 15 August, but a group of foreign nationals has brought an application for relief to the Constitutional Court to keep the camps open. The court will meet tomorrow to hear that application. What they decide will be crucial to the well being of a vulnerable population in South Africa.