The fractured legacy of Nelson Mandela

Scan page 12

On Dec. 10, dignitaries from around the world made a pilgrimage to Johannesburg to pay respects to Nelson Mandela, who died five days earlier at the age of 95. U.S. President Obama was one of the visiting heads of state who took full advantage of the photo opportunity that the occasion afforded. At a time when the imperialist nations are engaged in a headlong competition to further humble and exploit the African continent, Obama saw fit to hail Mandela as a “liberator” and advised the young people of Africa to “make his life’s work your own.” Obama chose to neglect the fact that for years the government that he represents in Washington had col­ laborated with South Africa’s apartheid regime in acts of repression against Mandela, his African National Con­ gress (ANC), and other Black liberation organizations. The CIA gave information to South African authorities in 1962 that helped them to capture Mandela and send him to prison for over 27 years. And Mandela remained on the U.S. “terrorist” watch list until 2008. People around the world revere Nelson Mandela for his courage and quiet wisdom. And they revere him, as they do Martin Luther King, for his dream of “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in har­ mony and with equal opportunities.” But the element of Mandela’s character that Obama and other imperialist leaders—and the compliant big-business media—have chosen to highlight is his so-called ability to forgive the oppressors of South Africa’s Black population. That quality is the one that they call on the youth of Africa to emulate.

History shows, unfortunately, that Mandela and the ANC went beyond mere moral “forgiveness” toward the oppressors, and instead fell into the trap of offering them deep political and social concessions—an escalat­ ing process that ultimately betrayed apartheid’s victims. The shell of apartheid was dismantled, but the core of the exploitive social system was allowed to remain. South Africa today displays one of the steepest divi­ sions between wealth and poverty in the world. Since the ANC first formed the government, almost 20 years ago, the number of people living in poverty has risen. While the number of millionaires in the country has doubled in that period, so has the number of people earning less than a dollar a day. The average white family earns six times what Black families earn.

Joblessness has also risen. According to Goldman Sachs, as many as 35 percent are unemployed, when people who have given up looking for work are factored in. This rises to 70 percent among Black youth. Millions live in shacks—often without electricity, sanitation, or water—and generally in segregated townships in which Black people continue to be further subdivided by apart­ heid-era racial categories (African, coloured, Indian). And at the same time, even some shack cities have been wantonly demolished by ANC governmental authorities, leaving the inhabitants homeless. This has spurred a new movement of people protesting in the streets with ban­ ners that cry, “Give us back our land!” as in the days of apartheid.

Meanwhile, a layer of billionaire capitalists, residing in suburban mansions behind locked gates, scoop up the lion’s share of the country’s mining and industrial wealth in private profits. Most of these super-rich, as during apartheid, are white—with a handful of Black capitalists newly added to their number.

Mandela, South Africa’s first Black president, had the authority and prestige to mobilize the country in a true emergency campaign to eliminate poverty. This could have been accomplished by carrying out revolutionary measures aimed at completely transforming the capitalist social system, and remaking it in the interests of working people and the poor. Instead, he and his comrades in the African National Congress settled for accommodations with big capital, in vain hopes that the proceeds of capi­ talist growth would trickle down to the masses. As University of Capetown Professor Robert Schrire put it (as cited in Bloomberg Businessweek): Nelson Mandela “recognized that for the poor to prosper, the rich had to feel they had a future in this country.” And true to design, the rich were greatly mollified, as giant multinational corporations swept into the country—often to gobble up weaker South African enterprises. But the poor benefited only minimally, and the unemployment checks that many workers received from the state hardly made up for the jobs they had lost.

Mandela played the central role in formulating the ini­ tial agreements between the liberation movement and the apartheid regime. At first, talks were carried out in se­ cret—even when Mandela was still in prison. Later, the process was formalized in the CODESA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) conferences of 1991-92. Joe Slovo of the South African Communist Party is credited (Right) Some of the 12,000 miners laid off by the Anglo America corporation in October 2012. The men are protesting continued murders of union activists—two months after police massacred 34 at the Marikana platinum mine.

at CODESA with offering the key compromise of a “sun­ set clause,” which guaranteed that a white-Black coali­ tion capitalist government would remain in power for at least five years.

In the midst of these negotiations, in June 1992, I vis­ ited South Africa as a reporter for Socialist Action news­ paper. The ANC had been legalized two years earlier, and its national offices now filled the skyscraper office build­ ing in Johannesburg that had once served the Shell Oil corporation. It appeared evident to me that the leaders of the ANC whom I met, and their legions of clerks and secretaries, no longer saw themselves as part of a popular liberation movement but instead had their eyes on portfo­ lios in the upcoming coalition government. I wrote at the time: “With the establishment of a tran­ sitional government, the [F.W.] de Klerk regime expects to give up very little in return for what it will gain. South Africa’s rulers hope to take their place once again as full members of the capitalist ‘family of nations,’ with full in­ ternational trading rights. They also hope for a relatively placid domestic situation, with non-political Americanstyle trade unions and a toothless opposition willing to participate in a parliamentary debating society. “From the government’s point of view, a major—if not the major—purpose of the negotiations process is to co-opt a segment of the Black leadership, to pull them into compliance with the dictates of the ruling circles, and thus to demobilize the mass movement and trade unions.”

Negotiations, regulatory commissions, and even a share of governmental power were the “carrot” that the apartheid regime offered the ANC and its allies in that period. The “stick” was a wave of vigilante massacres carried out mainly by the breakaway Inkatha Freedom Party, but supported behind the scenes by government security forces. In response to the violence and to per­ ceived inaction by government negotiators, the ANC and major trade unions seemingly made a shift toward militancy by undertaking what they termed the Mass Ac­ tion campaign. A general strike was called to address the continuing epidemic of job lay-offs and the need for a “living wage.”

Nelson Mandela expressed the major intent of the Mass Action campaign from the point of view of the ANC (continued on page 10, in “S. Africa’s Democratic Left Front comments on NUMSA initiatives T here is a spectre haunting the ruling”)

----- pull-quotes -----

12 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2014 South Africa today displays one of the steepest divisions between wealth and poverty in the world.