{"id":82312,"date":"2023-09-18T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2023-09-17T20:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=82312"},"modified":"2023-09-15T21:45:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:45:14","slug":"reality-is-catching-up-with-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reality-is-catching-up-with-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality is catching up with South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Time can be cruel. Infatuations and honeymoons must reach their end. Emotions subside, our better selves fall, exhausted, by the wayside, and deeper character traits will out.<\/p>\n

A truly democratic South Africa, a \u2018rainbow nation\u2019, was always an illusion, a phantasm that could never be sustained. But it is still painful to see the myth peeled away, the layers of which are deeper, wider and more numerous than many believed.<\/p>\n

An understanding of how the legend was formed can helps us to see how far the process of exfoliation might go and what the substrate might look like. In the 1950s and \u201960s, with the rise of nationalism in the developing world and the modern human rights movement in the West, the clumsy, heavy-handed crudity of post-war apartheid proffered beguiling material for the creation of a fairytale.<\/p>\n

Tellingly, the man who became the face of the struggle, Nelson Mandela, was one who believed<\/a>, from the outset, that \u2018appearances constitute reality\u2019. It is extraordinary how consciously Mandela and his second wife, Winnie, cultivated and nurtured their image from the 1950s, well before their fame, as documented in a recent joint biography<\/a> by scholar Jonny Steinberg. It\u2019s also notable how quickly their contemporaries in the African National Congress recognised their photogenic, propagandistic potential and thrust Mandela into a junior leadership role.<\/p>\n

He was arrested in 1962 after a period on the run, during which he had donned a Che Guevara\u2013style beard and was dubbed \u2018the Black Pimpernel\u2019 by the journalists whom he had carefully chosen to broadcast his escapades. His flamboyant and ineffective disguises were more suited to the movie set than the world of the underground operative, and had much to do with why he was caught.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Mandela\u2019s imprisonment and the banning of his visage in South Africa\u2019s media fuelled his myth<\/a> rather than extinguishing it. Steinberg observes that Mandela became an iconic brand in the 1980s, a new era in which commercialism intersected with political causes and fashion and style became emblematic of political attachment. His was a brand promoted by people who had never met him, and by his friend, Oliver Tambo, now the exiled head of the ANC, who hadn\u2019t seen him for 20 years and didn\u2019t consult party colleagues before choosing to do so.<\/p>\n

The finest hour for South Africa and Mandela came in the mid-1990s during the transition and its early aftermath. Steinberg argues that he sought to head off a white counter-revolution and black \u2018majoritarian excess\u2019 by reverting to what he did best\u2014displays of spectacle and theatre. It spoke of \u2018great discipline and vocational pride\u2019, because the actor suppressed an angry and resentful inner man.<\/p>\n

But there were glimpses of that man and of practices better known to South Africa\u2019s north: Mandela remonstrated bitterly during his acceptance speech for a Nobel Peace Prize; he subverted party processes to get Winnie elected to office, on one occasion using thugs to intimidate delegates; he cajoled longstanding international supporters to suspend funding rules when Winnie was charged with kidnapping and assault; and he spirited witnesses out of the country when she was taken to trial.<\/p>\n

In the main, though, it was Mandela\u2019s discipline and the conjurer\u2019s magic that won out\u2014and that have come to be despised by many South Africans. For them, his darker side is more attractive, because they have gravitated towards those who display the untamed animosity and whiff of criminality that hovers around his wife\u2019s memory. A revisionist narrative that presents him as a \u2018sell-out\u2019 has gained currency<\/a>, particularly among the young, though it stands alongside his ongoing representation as a saint.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s South Africa leaves a lingering sense that most of the lauded artefacts of the transition were faux, not real. They continue to be lionised by those who don\u2019t live by them, and they are scorned by those who see no need for the pretence.<\/p>\n

Among the first category, Mandela\u2019s contemporaries have led the way. They will be remembered less for their struggle credentials than their hypocrisy. They have relentlessly white-anted South Africa\u2019s nominal ideals, and have at times commanded frontal assaults.<\/p>\n

The most extolled and most important of those paradigms is the country\u2019s constitution. It is frequently said to be the \u2018best in the world\u2019, yet many of those who negotiated it have shown by their actions that it was not theirs; it was the quixotic vision of liberals who secured considerable but temporary influence during apartheid\u2019s demise. That was another of the transition\u2019s sleights of hand. The focus of world acclaim, many in the ANC were carried away by the mood and chose to play a part they didn\u2019t ultimately believe in.<\/p>\n

The terminally optimistic would regard that as too harsh an assessment. They point to the instances when the powerful have had to comply with the rule of law (well, at least in the immediate aftermath). But it is not the high-profile \u2018test cases\u2019 that should be underlined, selective though such an exercise would need to be. It is the fraying at the edges. ANC governments have been defying court orders<\/a> for years on matters in which the targets are powerless or the risk of political blowback is considered minimal.<\/p>\n

Neither is there a sense that the masses hold the law and the liberal tenets of the constitution with great affection. Aside from the fact that South Africa\u2019s crime and corruption metrics place it among the most lawless countries on earth, the notion that all citizens share equal rights is loosely held. The suspension or removal of such rights for those considered foreign or privileged, where that would benefit the \u2018greater good\u2019, is a conception widely held. It\u2019s difficult to see how that, along with the elite\u2019s disdain of the weak, will lead to anything but the law of the jungle should it persist. In such a scenario, the few who win, win big, and the rest lose everything.<\/p>\n

The next 18 months bear watching. The economy and the ANC\u2019s popularity are in steep decline, and elections are due next year. The formation of unstable, shambolic coalitions is a distinct possibility, in which case another of South Africa\u2019s ersatz phenomena\u2014the acquisitive, pseudo-socialist Economic Freedom Fighters party\u2014may procure significant leverage. Should that occur, it will remove further layers of the thinning foundation and bring South Africa face to face, sooner, with grimmer realities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time can be cruel. Infatuations and honeymoons must reach their end. Emotions subside, our better selves fall, exhausted, by the wayside, and deeper character traits will out. A truly democratic South Africa, a \u2018rainbow nation\u2019, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":829,"featured_media":82315,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,753,3634,376,2146],"class_list":["post-82312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-democracy","tag-election","tag-nelson-mandela","tag-politics","tag-south-africa"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReality is catching up with South Africa | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reality-is-catching-up-with-south-africa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reality is catching up with South Africa | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Time can be cruel. 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