ROBIN WILSON - Mandela: explaining the magnetism
As South Africans prepared for the huge funeral of their former president, Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela, in Pretoria on Sunday, the memorial service in Johannesburg spoke volumes: 52 presidents and 16 prime ministers attended to share in the global political stardust attaching to the man, while his successor, Jacob Zuma, was booed by a section of the domestic crowd.
A more perfect embodiment of Max Weber’s transition from ‘charismatic’ to ‘bureaucratic’ leadership could hardly be imagined than that between Mandela and Zuma. The one who emerged from 27 years imprisonment, morally upright with no concern to be a crowd-pleaser, the other a populist tainted by corruption and misogyny who emerged only from the African National Congress machine.
Yet the Mandela magnetism is not so straightforward. Yes, he withstood the ignominy of his prolonged incarceration by a brutal regime with an iconic fortitude. But out of the enhancing spotlight of the global media, that glittering bronze political statue has a little tarnish. This for two reasons nothing to do with any personal blemishes but all to do with the very particular and extraordinary context in which he found himself.
First, apartheid South Africa was a key locus of the cold war. While leftists argued over whether the regime was or was not the best possible political shell for domestic and transnational capitalism—epitomised by the glittering gold and diamond mines with their super-exploitation of black workers—there was no doubting how much investment right-wing western cold warriors like Margaret Thatcher had in its survival and the Soviet Union in turn had in its demise, as with the neighbouring Portugues colonies. Hence the rather embarrassing recollections of what some of those who now offer obeisance at Mandela’s grave thought of the ‘terrorist’ in earlier times.
This polarised international context and intense repression at home meant that the main intellectual force opposed to the regime—the South African Communist Party—was a defensive Stalinist entity quite unlike the liberal-socialist Eurocommunists who emerged in the more open political atmosphere of western Europe in the 1970s. Through its ‘triple alliance’ with Mandela’s African National Congress and the trade union federation, Cosatu, it carried an influence way beyond its small size.
Secondly, Mandela’s exclusion from the world on Robben Island coincided with decades of its most intense ever globalisation. The man who emerged from prison on that day in 1990 when he was previously the centre of a global emotional outpouring—just months after the fall of the Berlin wall—may have had his fist raised in confident assertion. But that very gesture indicated how metaphorically he was coming out of a deep pool of darkness, squinting and blinking in a new world he would struggle to comprehend.
After protracted constitutional deliberations, in which the ANC’s main antagonist was the formerly ruling National Party, Mandela was to become South Africa’s first post-apartheid president five years later. Honestly assessed, his time in office was a stark failure.
Almost alone among the world’s states, after apartheid South Africa fell to an even lower position on the United Nations Human Development Index. The ANC, having been committed to a statist Reconstruction and Development Programme, engaged in a rapid bouleversement when confronted with the era of informational capitalism, when socialism is about the advancement of the broader public good through a liberal and pluralist democracy and a strong civil society, recognising that states can no longer be omniscient nor omnicompetent. Only really in housing, where an old-style, state-sponsored house-building programme was led by the Communist leader Joe Slovo, did Mandela’s government make a significant positive impact.
In the world of work, ‘black economic empowerment’ became little more than a vehicle for the enrichment of a new bourgeoisie, tragically embodied by the former mineworkers’ hero Cyril Ramophosa, reduced to being a board member of Lonmin when it massacred its striking workers at Marikana in 2012. With unemployment endemic among the black majority, South Africa’s already huge Gini coefficient of inequality became even larger still. read more:
