The Sunday Mail
By Tafataona Mahoso
The regime-change strategy which toppled former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (Unip) from power in 1991 has now shifted to South Africa, having been applied in Zimbabwe (since 1997) and failed.
But in South Africa it has an added viciousness because of the concentration of Anglo-Rhodesian forces relishing a chance to punish the African National Congress of South Africa for failure of the illegal regime change campaign against Zimbabwe.
Unfortunately for the ANC, the difference between SA and Zimbabwe is that in SA too many Africans, including those in the ANC and in the Congress of the People (Cope), have willingly accepted and installed the white neoliberal definition of Nelson Mandela and his legacy; whereas in Zimbabwe the African majority condemn in the strongest terms all the neoliberal and Anglo-Saxon attempts to redefine Mugabe for the African.
The standing ovation given to President Mugabe at the last Sadc Summit in Windhoek and that summit's willingness to suspend the white neoliberal project misnamed as the “Sadc Tribunal” constitute the final signal that the overwhelming majority of Sadc Heads of State and Government have also rejected the neoliberal Anglo-Saxon efforts to define Mugabe and Zimbabwe for Africans.
Zimbabwe as a state is feared and revered in Anglo-Rhodesian and neoliberal circles because it has overcome five challenges which have proven to be fatal elsewhere:
IMF-World Bank-imposed structural adjustment; urban destabilisation through riots and strikes sponsored by white industry; illegal sanctions; direct financial warfare; and an unwieldy and cumbersome coalition government made up of ideologically incompatible forces.
It is this appreciation of the Zimbabwe reality which has made it possible for the majority of the people here to despise the white racists' efforts to redefine Mugabe and Mugabeism for the African.
Now, before I explain how the white creation of a Mandela myth and how it relates to the struggle for tangible resources and for real power, let me first explain what those behind the current destabilisation of SA aim to achieve.
Three years ago, through his book called “Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other”, Professor Bernard M. Magubane warned Africans about the strategy of the counter-revolutionary forces in South Africa. He used the example of the Democratic Alliance, which at that time was led by Tony Leon and is now led by Hellen Zille.
“Tony Leon (now Helen Zille), the Machiavellian leader of the Democratic Alliance . . . claims that his (white-led) party stands for (a suddenly) ‘colour blind’ society in which ‘merit’ alone should be the criterion for advancement, rather than race-based affirmative action. Colour blindness is most improbable in a society divided by class and by gender and spatial (material) disparities, born of the structural injustices of (apartheid) capitalism, themselves entrenched by a long period of white minority domination guaranteed by white privilege.”
Any perceptive reader will notice that the white image of Nelson Mandela as the saint of the neoliberal human rights crusade is based on this myth of miraculous colour blindness. Mandela went to Robben Island Prison as a radical pan-African revolutionary fighting white supremacy, only to emerge “colour blind” 27 years later!
In other words, the neoliberal and imperialist strategy was to make Mandela champion the values of the white minority, such as those in the DA, from inside the African liberation movement in the ANC.
But what is the strategic programme these values are meant to advance? It includes the following:
l Rapid, wholesale privatisation of the public sector intended to deny the incoming African government the resource base required to meet the expectations of its constituency, the African majority, who were dispossessed and excluded from the centre of the economy for 300 years;
l Downsizing the state to a bare-minimum needed to facilitate the corporate needs of white capital while minimising the social needs of the masses. This means using the ideology of balanced budgets and cash-budgeting in order to enforce massive budget cuts at the very time that the deprived African masses expect expanding education and social services;
l Intense demands for law and order, to be defined narrowly as intended for the protection of private property, property rights, exclusive middle-class suburbs and foreign tourists at the expense of the povo who are always suspected of crime until proven innocent;
l Massive restructuring of the working class by encouraging mass retrenchments, reliance on part-time and casual jobs, expanding the informal sector and re-creating the segmented apartheid labour force on the basis of class;
l Re-integrating South Africa into the Western capitalist system against Africanist and South-to-South tendencies;
l Co-opting the new derivative African elites into white consumer culture and encouraging them to celebrate conspicuous consumption as a substitute for real power and real production;
l Condemning as “reverse racism” the popular demands for African land reclamation and demands for indigenous ownership of the economy; and
l Using the former apartheid media, still dominated by whites, to equate African leadership with corruption while cleansing all the white beneficiaries of apartheid and UDI and re-presenting them as the champions of social mobility based on merit, efficiency, good governance, democracy, human rights and transparency.
The white demand for strict law and order in protection of white property and white privilege is most tragic for the African government because it serves as a double sword for white racist interests and against the liberation movement in government.
On one hand, whites accuse the government of not being tough enough, being ineffective in clamping down on criminals and subversives, when that interpretation suits the racists. These racists go as far as claiming that at least the apartheid regime maintained perfect law and order. They may even instigate their Anglo-Saxon cousins in Europe and North America to issue bogus “advisory” warnings to their citizens against travelling to SA.
On the other hand, if the government gets though on suspected criminals and subversives in order to maintain peace and the rule of law, the very same forces turn around and accuse it of all sorts of brutality and violations of human rights.
The experience of Zimbabwe and the speech given by President Mugabe at the Sadc Summit in Windhoek in August 2010 become important in relation to the South African struggle: if you do not own the structure you cannot own the superstructure. The African Commission on Human and People's Rights and the Sadc Tribunal cannot defend Africans using donor funds. In the same way, the people of South Africa have never been able to own Nelson Mandela. At Robben Island he was apartheid’s prisoner. As president of the new South Africa the Nelson Mandela he projected on TV and through other media was defined and driven by those who own the economy and the media. When the Africans begin to own the real economy in South Africa they will also determine how the media frame their country and its first president.
In the case of Zimbabwe, the Sadc Tribunal was suspended for its outrageous judgments precisely because the people who gave it donations no longer control the land, the subject of the Tribunal’s outrageous judgments against Zimbabwe. So the outrage provoked by the neoliberal judgments became so unbearable because they were also unrealistic in relation to the real (though still emergent) structure of society in Zimbabwe.
Let me state the ideological problem facing South Africa: While apartheid controlled the person of Mandela at Robben Island for 27 years, the Africans at home and abroad owned the myth of Mandela as a weapon against apartheid.
In 1991, the whites staged a prisoner swap: They gave the African liberation movement the exhausted physical, mortal, Mandela in exchange for the myth of Mandela which they have since emasculated and controlled. The white neoliberal establishment now control Mandela the media icon as if it is their intellectual property.
A look at just the Mail and Guardian for April 17 and April 24 2009 respectively helps to demonstrate the problem. In the April 17 issue the current ANC president was presented as a threat to “freedom” and a threat to the constitution of South Africa. The Zapiro cartoons of recent South African history, from Nelson Mandela in 1994 to Jacob Zuma in 2009, in the same issue of April 17, helped to sum up the white racist media’s caricature of South Africa.
The first panel shows former South African president Nelson Mandela as a towering, inimitable political and moral giant. The second panel shows former South African president Thabo Mbeki as a political and moral midget who could hardly walk in Mandela’s big shoes.
The third panel shows Mbeki in his second term in 2004. Here according to the cartoonist, Mbeki has so deteriorated morally and politically that he now almost sinks completely into just one of Mandela’s big shoes.
In the final panel Jacob Zuma comes in, in 2009, as a thug who grabs one of Mandela’s big shoes and pounds a fallen Thabo Mbeki with it.
The message is as blunt as it is presumptuous: Jacob Zuma is not only the worst candidate for president of the ANC and of South Africa; he is not even ANC. He has taken over the ANC presidency but he is alien to the ANC, as far as Zapiro, the Mail and Guardian and the rest of the white- dominated media are concerned.
The problem which became visible at the abrupt removal of former president Thabo Mbeki from power while he was still in the middle of executing one of Africa’s most important diplomatic achievements has now become clear:
The now white-imprisoned myth of Nelson Mandela functions as a lethal weapon against the African National Congress and against all African liberation movements in government in Southern Africa.
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