Africa

Yesterday’s Washington Post explores how Africa’s growing (but still largely overlooked) middle class is playing a greater role on the continent.

Today marks Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s 90th birthday. The great man is slowed but still robust, with his characteristic grace and wit still intact. As South Africa muddles through, the country’s leaders would do well to dwell on Mandela and his meaning, not merely his undeniable symbolic power, and not even the mythology that surrounds him — in some cases rightfully — but rather on his approach to leadership and governing.

Mandela’s greatness stems not from his perfection – he was not perfect and would be the first to recognize as much — but rather from the humility of his approach, on his willingness to compromise, on his loyalty, and on his unparallelled integrity. As just one example of a shortcoming leading to positive action, Mandela recognized even before he had left office that he had fallen short on what would prove to be one of the country’s, the region’s, biggest challenges, the threat of HIV-AIDS. And so his foundation has tackled that issue head-on and in so doing has done much good on that scourge that so haunts the country.

Mandela emerged from 27 years on imprisonment by a regime that deserved no quarter. But Mandela knew that in order to accomplish his goals of a non-racial, or multi-racial South Africa with one-person, one-vote democracy, he would have to negotiate with his enemies. And so he went about establishing the conditions for negotiation, cajoling some of his more skeptical comrades while at the same time making clear to the National Party the parameters within which negotiations would happen. Mandela was not the sole, perhaps was not even the most important, negotiator for the African National Congress, but he was the most important figure in the negotiation process, and knowing this, Mandela leveraged his identity and his leadership to bring about the end result that he desired.

Nelson Mandela will not live forever, yet he will live on. the question is how he will live on: As the father of a new South Africa forged in the consensus of the Freedom Charter or as the lamented apogee of an ANC gone awry. It is too facile to speak of historical crossroads, and yet South Africa certainly seems to be dealing roughly with the post-Mandela era. Thabo Mbeki will likely leave office scorned, his absence not long lamented despite his own well-earned status as an ANC exile leader. Jacob Zuma is hardly off to a promising start as the president of the ANC, and though it appears that he and his supporters may well find a way to cause the corruption charges against him to evaporate, as the country’s president Zuma seems detined to be a divider rather than a uniter. South Africa does not need another Mandela — there can be no such thing and we’ve been lucky to have the one — but what it needs is leaders who look beyond Mandela’s symbolism, beyond the birthday praise, however insufficient in relation to what the man accomplished and has meant to so many, and who can capture the essence of what Mandela wanted for his country and his world.

Grown men are not supposed to have heroes, or in any case are not supposed to worship them publicly. But Mandela is my hero. And he is the hero of millions. Long may he live in the minds and hearts and actions of South Africans and people the world over. More important, long may he live.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog and at dcat.] 

Greetings from Stellenbosch, the historical intellectual center of Afrikanerdom. I am here for a conference on sport history at the University of Stellenbosch, and as I did with Melville, I have seen changes in this picturesque little university town.

Clearly the city parents here are no fools. No longer  can Stellenbosch be merely the epicenter of Afrikaans intellectual life in South Africa. Seeing its potential as a tourist town, as the crossroads to the country’s booming and burgeoning wine routes, as a close bucolic escape from Cape Town, the city has marshalled ite resources. The Afrikaans accent might loom heavily over so many conversations here, but above all the universal language of trade and commerce looms largest of all. Where even a decade ago most shopkeepers and bartenders greeted patrons in Afrikaans as the default, now it is as likely that you’ll receive an English greeting. Whether this qualifies as progress or cultural abandonment is in the eye of the beholder.

Greetings from Stellenbosch, the historical intellectual center of Afrikanerdom. I am here for a conference on sport history at the University of Stellenbosch, and as I did with Melville, I have seen changes in this picturesque little university town.

Clearly the city parents here are no fools. No longer can Stellenbosch be merely the epicenter of Afrikaans intellectual life in South Africa. Seeing its potential as a tourist town, as the crossroads to the country’s booming and burgeoning wine routes, as a close bucolic escape from Cape Town, the city has marshalled its resources. The Afrikaans accent might loom heavily over so many conversations here, but above all the universal language of trade and commerce and tourism looms largest of all. Where even a decade ago most shopkeepers and bartenders greeted patrons in Afrikaans as the default, now it is as likely that you’ll receive an English greeting. Whether this qualifies as progress or cultural abandonment is in the eye of the beholder.

My three nights here follow one night in Cape Town, where I’ll be returning on Wednesday. Cape Town sits in one of the world’s most fortuitously beautiful settings. Nestled between the water and the mountains, with Table Mountain as the main though not sole backdrop,  Cape Town stands as the symbolic representation of South Africa to the world even if the vast majority of visitors to the country arrive via sprawling Oliver Tambo airport in the decidedly less picturesque megalopolis that is Gauteng. No longer is there a truly recognizable Midrand, that space between Johannesburg and Pretoria, as expansion and growth mean that the suburbs of the one city are close to blending with those of the other.

The conference is going well, though for a host of reasons I’ve missed most of it and will make up time tomorrow, when I’ll give my paper on rugby, race, and nationalism in the New South Africa. I’ve met some old friends — one a PhD student at UT, a five hour drive from my home, who I nonetheless seem only to see in South Africa — and made some new ones, and that, in the end, is the real purpose of conferences. 

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]    

I hope every one of you had a wonderful Easter.  I especially wished for a safe holiday for my South African readers on this, the most dangerous and deadly weekend every year on the country’s roads.   

If you are looking for something to browse during your weekend and were hoping that I might have posted something worthwhile, I’m sorry to disappoint. However, I might recommend that you check out the International Affairs Forum’s extensive and useful coverage of Africa. That should keep you busy.

Two interesting developments in the Zimbabwe election campaign. The first is that it appears that many of Simba Makoni’s supporters are hedging their bets, quietly supporting the upstart candidate while avowing their loyalty to Zanu-PF and thus implicitly, it would seem, to Robert Mugabe. One can sympathize with the inclination — crossing Mugabe almost always comes at a cost — and yet during a time when Makoni and his supporters are taking a great deal of risk and revealing tremendous courage, it would be nice if some of Zimbabwe’s most prominent members of the political class could do the same. It is this sort of fecklessness that will help Mugabe secure the presidency again by hook or by crook, violence or theft.

The second story is equally telling. Zimbabwe’s economy has gone to hell over the last few years with nary a helping hand from Mugabe and Zanu-PF for any but the smallest, most well-connected cadre of loyalists. But suddenly Mugabe is demanding faster food imports, particularly of maize, in light of the country’s food emergency, which the president seems a bit late in discovering. It was not all that long ago that Zimbabwe was the region’s breadbasket. Nonetheless, Mugabe’s nakedly self-interested reaction does bring about one question: If the old man wins re-election, which only a fool or an optimist would bet against, could Makoni’s challenge have awakened in him a realization that he is not bulletproof? Or are these merely the temporal machinations of a despot interested only in consolidating power? I would bet on the latter, but assuming that Mugabe is going to find a way to win, we all had better hope against hope for the former.

A United Nations Official has concluded that Africans will only pay attention to climate change when it can be couched in human consequences:

“Most people are unable to relate to the projections of increase in temperature or the impact of climate change on the economy, but if the climate change forecasts are linked to possible deaths, then countries will be forced to contemplate prevention plans,” said Yvette Stevens, the former UN Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator.

“We need a ‘Stern review’ of the human costs; people are not motivated by the impact of climate change on a country’s gross domestic product (GDP),” added Stevens, who retired from the UN recently.

Actually, I cannot help but wonder if Africans are especially unique in this respect. For all of the attention this issue receives in the United States, for example, it seems pretty clear that huge numbers of Americans are pretty blithely untouched by climate change in terms of how they live their lives.

My name is Derek Catsam and I am thrilled to serve as a blogger and writer for the Foreign Policy Association’s “Great Decisions” series. I will be handling issues related to South Africa. I am a history professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin and I work on issues of race and politics in the United states and South Africa, though as a militant generalist I also write about sports, terrorism, and other issues.

I have experience writing in this format at my own blog, dcat, where I write about just about everything under the sun, from pop culture to sports. But I am thrilled to be able to focus on South Africa here at the Foreign Policy Association. I have extensive experience travelling, living, and working in Southern Africa and am thrilled to share my ideas and whatever insights I might have with you on this vitally important country on that most overlooked of continents.