Africa

Helen Suzman, longtime stalwart of the Progressive Party and its various iterations (the Progressive Reform Party, the Progressive Federal Party), passed away on Thursday at the age of 91. Suzman was a long-time thorn in the side of the National Party, and if the Progressives’ anti-Apartheid bona fides have sometimes been overstated, her commitment to changing what she recognized as a noxious regime made her a legitimate and important voice for change during an era when the opposition was steadily circumscribed and battered. Go well, Ms. Suzman. South Africa has lost one of its beacons of light from the country’s darkest era.

[Helen Suzman, via Truthout]

The sun will rise. The sun will set. South African rugby will be fraught with controversy. Some assertions are truisms.

The latest kerfuffle over the transformation of South African rugby is a revival of the question of whether to remove the Springbok as the national program’s emblem. For its critics, the Springbok is a symbol of white, and especially Afrikaner, supremacy and thus of Apartheid. For others, keeping the Springbok represents transformation at its best, an appropriation of a once racist symbol to represent the New South Africa.

The latest salvo comes from the legendary political activist and rugby star Cheeky Watson, whose son Luke’s placement on the Springbok team was controversial and appears to be over. Watson has asserted publicly that the Springbok has to go. Of course Watson also represents a father scorned, and he is also considering legal action on behalf of his son, who also is alleged to have spoken harshly about the Springbok symbol, so the personal and political intersect in this case.

Symbols are vitally important in South Africa. And transformation is still in its early stages. SA rugby reveals the nature of resistance to change even as it slowly lurches toward change on the pitch. Nelson Mandela was able to embrace the Springbok mascot. So too could millions of South Africans (indeed, the ANC has thrown its weight behind maintaining the mascot) if only those who want to maintain the mascot would yield in those areas that truly matter.  

Even as talk of forming a breakaway party from the remnants of the ANC that have fallen out of favor accelerates, Allan Boesak has begun talk of also forming a new United Democratic Front (UDF). The timing of Boesak’s proposal is perhaps telling.

While the UDF, which Boesak helped form, is often seen as having embodied the public manifestation of the banned ANC during the 1980s, the organization, which emerged in response to the attempt of the National Party to engage in pseudo-reform by establishing a Tri-Cameral parliament in 1983-1984, was in fact much more than simply the old ANC wine in new skins. Deeply devoted to local community politics, the UDF in many ways brought the struggle to the people in a way that even the ANC had not been able to do for much of its existence. Boesak’s call, then represents in a very real way an attempt to revive people power and a recognition of the failures, or at least shortcomings, of electoral politics.

The UDF once hoped to “make South Africa ungovernable.” One wonders if a viable new slogan might be to “make South Africa governable again.”

Tomorrow will mark Desmond Tutu’s 77th birthday and he continues to crusade for justice both in South Africa and globally. Tutu is no stranger to controversy, but when all is said and done he has been a vital figure in his time, the central moral voice within South Africa during the last years of Apartheid and the public face of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He would have been lauded had he settled for peaceful retirement years ago, but instead he goes on strong. Let us hope he continues as a voice of conscience and goodwill for many years to come.  

The FW de Klerk Foundation has released correspondence between the former president and current president Thabo Mbeki in which the former expresses her concerns about the encroachment on the independence of the country’s judiciary. Mbeki provided assurances to de Klerk that the government is committed to judicial independence and to upholding the constitution.

I have agreed with de Klerk over very little over the years. Although he deserves credit for his role in bringing apartheid to an end, even as he engaged in the negotiation process his government fomented violence and engaged in dirty tricks. His reticence to confront his part in the instability of the early 1990s and his unwillingness to participate in the TRC process except in the most perfunctory fashion served to undermine South Africa at a time when the TRC needed the support of prominent members of the National Party. It still galls me that de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela.

That said, his concerns about the judiciary are apt. And in coming months things will only get dicier as Jacob Zuma maintains his collision course with the country’s criminal courts. South Africa cannot afford for its judicial branch to become embroiled in, or at least compromised by, politics.

South African History Online has a feature on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the United Democratic Front (UDF). With the African National Congress, Pan-Africanist Congress, and other organizations banned the UDF filled an essential void and fueled the anti-Apartheid opposition in the tumultuous 1980s. Largely locally focused, the UDF confronted apartheid as much by confronting local problems as through national campaigns. SAHO thus brings to light a vitally important but often misunderstood aspect of the struggle.

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.

I have been silent on the fiasco going on at the University of the Free State largely because some stories almost write their own commentary. Mix Afrikaner racism with white and black college students and the possibility of a combustible mix will be present. The Mail & Guardian’s “Thought leader” has had a couple of worthwhile pieces if you are in search of commentary, including pieces by Christi Van der Westhuizen and Michael Trapido.

The outrage is warranted and necessary and anyone who downplays what happened at the Universiteit van die Vrystaat is either hopelessly blind as to South Africa’s lingering racist history or is simply a fool. And we ought not to suffer either gladly. Nonetheless, we should not be surprised precisely because of the country’s racist legacy. And Afrikaners, not all of whom are racist by any measure, nonetheless have a great deal to account for when it comes to the country’s racist past. If events such as those at UFS manages to remind South Africans of the reality of race, then it will have served a purpose, which is not to say that it was necessary or good, but rather than from the terrible comes the hope for redemption.

The Mail & Guardian has a feature on Kader Asmal, who is leaving politics to take on a post at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville. Asmal’s peripatetic career in opposition to the Apartheid state and in support of democracy took him to Bellville in 1994, where he lectured at UWC after he returned from exile. Asmal’s career has blended academic and activism and politics in vital ways and one wishes for him a long career at UWC.

Thirty years ago this week the South African political philosopher Richard Turner was assassinated in his Durban home.

 South African History Online (SAHO) has put together a special feature on the anniversary of Turner’s shooting. His daughter, the journalist Jann Turner, has included her own personal reflections of her father’s life and death and what it meant not only for her, but for South Africa’s liberation struggle.