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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Handing on the baton
By Gamal Nkrumah
One man single-handedly forged a new image of African statesmanship for the 1990s. That man was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Devoting his entire life to the struggle against apartheid and injustice, he led his people to political freedom. Nor did that victory come easily.
On Sunday, South African President Nelson Mandela introduced the wife of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Safiya Farkash Albarassi, to the South African and international media at his residence in Genadendal, Cape Town. Mrs Gaddafi was invited by South Africa's first lady Graca Machel Mandela (photo: AP)
This week, Mandela can rest happy in the knowledge that he will soon be handing over power to a most capable successor. His sharp and politically shrewd lieutenant Thabo Mbeki was the clear winner of the country's second racially-inclusive general elections which were held last Friday.
President-elect Mbeki, who is scheduled to step into Mandela's giant shoes on 16 June, has been running the day-to-day affairs of the government for the past two years. All observers agree that the transfer of power will make very little difference to South Africa's domestic and foreign policies. The burning question, rather, is can Mbeki find a way to improve the economic well-being of a nation in which the white have remained rich, while most of the black have grown poorer?
"The people have directed us to move faster with our programme of reconstruction and development so that the goal of a better life for all is achieved sooner rather than later," Mbeki said in his victory speech.
Mbeki, who is considered by colleagues to be a safe -- if somewhat conservative -- pair of hands, starts from a strong position. He has been highly acclaimed by the essentially white world of South African corporate life. He has kept the militants, both within and outside the ruling African National Congress (ANC), at bay. It now remains to be seen whether the 56-year-old British-educated economist can also deliver some measure of the prosperity that continues obstinately to elude the people at large.
Thanks to Mandela, South Africa no longer feels like a country under enemy occupation. But in many respects it is still a nation at war. While many are calling on Mbeki to spearhead black South Africa's battle against poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy and ill-health, the forces arrayed against him are legion. The unemployment rate stands at a staggering 42 per cent among indigenous Africans, as opposed to only 4 per cent among those of European descent. Observers are concerned that if things do not change tangibly, and soon, the crime rate will soar even further, prompting a white exodus, while black political discontent will be expressed in ever more violent and destructive ways. Already, the politics of envy are omnipresent, and the black population, though its temper is somehow not yet at boiling point, is simmering with barely-repressed anger.
Homelessness and joblessness are two of the facts that black South Africans have learnt to live with over the last few years. Both are legacies of the apartheid era. Over ten million Africans currently live on rural reserves or in urban slums on land they do not own and cannot rent. Their country also boasts one of the world's highest crime rates, perhaps the highest incidence of AIDS, and a flagging economy with growth rates that have hovered below two per cent for the past three years.
Politically, South Africa's whites are a spent force, though they still wield enormous economic power. What do you do with an old crocodile that has lost its teeth? If you are a Nelson Mandela, you tame it. If you are a Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, you skin it alive. But if you are the South African electorate, you dump it unceremoniously in the dustbin of history. That is precisely what happened to the old National Party, now ingeniously renamed the New National Party (NNP), which enjoyed an exclusive hold on the reins of power during the apartheid era, in last week's general elections.
The ANC won a resounding two-thirds majority of the seats, with the Democratic Party (white liberal, anti-apartheid) coming in a distant second, with less than 10 per cent of the vote. The predominantly ethnic Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) trailed behind with a mere eight per cent, while the NNP came a very poor fourth with seven per cent. The extremist militant groups, both white and black, hardly figured in the count at all.
These results pay testimony to how far the nation has come under its charismatic leader. During the apartheid era, physical liquidation was always the "final solution", as witness the white supremacists' distribution of pills intended to render African women barren, or the perfection they achieved in the arts of chemical and biological warfare. But thanks in no small measure to Mandela's personal and political gifts, this "final solution" has been replaced by the "gradual solution", to cite South Africa's most distinguished journalist, Allister Sparks, who has predicted his country will have a key role to play in overcoming the economic divide between North and South. South Africa is now a testing ground for the viability of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious culture of compromise and negotiation.
While most of the militant fringe have been marginalised, a few battle-hardened and embittered individuals have survived to brand Mandela a "sell-out" and reject his message of forgiveness for one's enemies. The firebrands, among whom Winnie Madikizela-Mandela sometimes counts herself, are the children of the Soweto riots of June 1976, when black students went on the rampage in protest at the teaching of Afrikaans in their schools. These irreductibles see the late Steve Biko as their ideological mentor, and still adhere to the principles of his Black Consciousness Movement. Others regard themselves as the spiritual heirs of the late Robert Sobukwe and his Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.
The latent power of the angry masses coupled with the grassroot popularity of the militants still gives the ANC some cause for concern. Fired from his government by her ex-husband, Madikizela-Mandela made a triumphant political comeback, regaining the leadership of the influential ANC Women's League. But she remains an isolated case, and the potential of the rabble-rousers to inflict mortal damage on South Africa's nascent democracy must not be blown out of proportion. Despite the existence of pockets of renegade feeling, the vast majority of politically-active black South Africans have opted for Mandela's chosen path -- the "negotiated revolution".
Unquestionably, Mandela will be a very hard act to follow. His moral authority over the nation, and over other international statesmen, was forged during the 28 long years he spent languishing first in the hellhole of Robben Island, then in Pollsmoor Prison, and finally at Paarl, a vineyard in the vicinity of Cape Town.
Yet following his release, he confounded many of his anti-apartheid comrades by the great concern he showed to conciliate his white tormentors, even going so far as to appoint a particularly sinister character from his own past -- a former deputy commissioner of prisons -- as his ambassador to Austria.
A detailed analysis of Mandela's character as a prisoner, ordered by then Minister of Justice Kobie Coetsee, is most revealing in this regard. "There are no visible signs of bitterness towards whites...," wrote his assessors. "[Mandela] always behaves in a friendly and respectable way towards figures of authority."
The report added that Mandela had an "unflinching belief in his cause and in the eventual triumph of African nationalism. He is a practical and pragmatic thinker who can arrive at a workable solution on a philosophical basis."
Many of his black comrades, of course, were less philosophical, and thus less magnanimous, than Mandela. And who could blame them? Yet the underlying black antipathy to their chosen leader's willingness to turn the other cheek never translated itself into a major political backlash.
But perhaps the man's most remarkable characteristic is not his ability to forgive, however endearing we might find that, but the grace with which he has freely consented to pass on the baton to his chosen successor. This is an extremely rare gesture in contemporary Africa -- an act of singular courage and self-confidence. Would that those virtues were more widely shared by the continent's other leaders!
