Category Archives: Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela: The Crossing

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1865

by Richard Pithouse

[D]eath is always close by, and what's important is not to know if you can avoid it, but to know that you have done the most possible to realize your ideas.

– Frantz Fanon, 1961.

As a boy without a father of his own and living as a ward of the Thembu Regent, Jongintaba Dalindyebo, at his Great Place at Mqekezweni in the green hills of the Transkei, Rolihlahla Mandela heard stories about people like Nongqawuse and Makana, people who had passed into the realm of myth. When he washed the last of his childhood into the Mbashe River in 1934 he couldn’t have known that in life he too would pass into myth.

In 1942 returning to Mqekezweni from Johannesburg to honour Dalindyebo’s passing he found his thoughts occupied by a proverb: Ndivelimilambo enamagama — I have crossed famous rivers. By the time he gave his speech from the dock in 1964 his name, and the bright strength of the intersection of his courage and ideals, had crossed the oceans and entered the grand stage of universal history.

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The Nation: After Mandela

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http://www.thenation.com/article/174945/after-mandela#axzz2XP7WFOyd

After Mandela

Although most black South Africans revere Mandela and his party for defeating apartheid, many are realizing that fighting inequality and achieving full citizenship will mean taking on the ANC.

Sean Jacobs

I returned home to South Africa a few days before Nelson Mandela was readmitted to hospital. This is the fifth and longest period he has been under observation by doctors since last December, and many here are convinced this may be his final visit. Mandela has not been active in South African politics for at least a decade, but he remains a potent symbol of the promise of the “rainbow nation.” The anxiety is apparent—especially in the media: What will happen when Mandela goes? Andrew Mlangeni, who served more than two decades with Mandela on Robben Island prison, told a Sunday newspaper that South Africans had to release Mandela spiritually and let him go. Most ordinary South Africans have resigned themselves to that fact and are saying their goodbyes, though some wish he’d stay with us a bit longer. School children and clerics turn up at the hospital to pray for him and leave messages. Though some in the press wanted to turn the lack of detailed updates by government spokespeople on Mandela’s condition into a “press freedom” issue and a scandal, local TV and radio coverage is mostly somber.

Even as the vigil continues, South Africans debate Mandela’s legacy and the history he so powerfully embodies. For example, despite Mandela’s lifelong membership in the governing African National Congress, these days an opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (a largely white political party which governs Cape Town and the surrounding province and commands only 20 percent of the national vote) claims it—and not the ANC—is Mandela’s true heir. It has even released advertisements with Mandela’s image and have been pilloried for inventing history (though the campaign seemed to have galvanized their supporters). President Jacob Zuma, who is also the leader of the ANC, corrected them: “The way he is being portrayed by the DA is as if Madiba was born in 1994—there was no life before.”

But one can see why the DA cannot help but overreach. Mandela is the most recognizable figure in twentieth-century South African, and perhaps world, history. In the popular imagination, both at home and abroad, he is as close as our world gets to a saint. Mandela personifies the narrative of the righteous struggle against legal apartheid, as well as the supposed miracle of racial reconciliation at the twentieth century’s end. This is a tremendous story, and a good deal of it is true. South Africa today is dramatically different than the one Mandela re-entered from prison in 1990. It has a black government, a growing black middle class, vibrant media, stable and vital democratic freedoms (with three sets of free elections and counting) and a growing economy.

Mandela can take credit for convincing white South Africans of the virtues of liberal democracy, thus ensuring the economy’s stability in the wake of 1994, if at the cost of preserving the white population’s disproportionate wealth and influence. Subsequent presidents have continued in this vein. Despite an initially heavily armed white population (and the persistence of racist views among some whites), today race makes little political turbulence. To be sure, some whites gripe about discrimination and “reverse racism” and organize themselves in “civil society organizations” (like the Afrikaner-led organizations Afriforum and Solidarity, which, among other things, oppose renaming streets and affirmative action). But in general white South Africans have never been more prosperous, mobile and free.

A recent report by the South African Institute of Race Relations—a frequent critic of the ANC government—concluded that whites are actually doing way better than expected since the end of apartheid. A separate study revealed that the majority of CEOs and managers are still white, and Africa Check, a South African version of factcheck.org, corrected inflated statistics about white poverty (touted by Afrikaner interest groups): “The claim that 400,000 whites are living in squatter camps is grossly inaccurate. If that were the case, it would mean that roughly 10% of South Africa’s 4.59-million whites were living in abject poverty. Census figures suggest that only a tiny fraction of the white population—as little as 7,754 households—are affected.” So white South Africans are doing very well in post-Mandela South Africa, and many are therefore anxious about what will happen to them when Madiba passes.

This anxiety is due in part to the realization that transformation has been slow to come to the vast majority of South Africans. Mandela excelled at the rhetoric of the rainbow and reconciliation that still pervades South African public discourse, but he presided over a disastrous economic policy for the country’s poor, black majority. The result is that South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world today by most measures. Inequality is still defined by race, despite the fact that inequality amongst blacks has also expanded. Since 1994, the number of South Africans living on less than a dollar a day has doubled, but so has the number of South African millionaires .

Successive South African governments (starting with Mandela) have been reluctant to address South Africa’s fundamental historical inequalities, whether by implementing any meaningful land reform or tampering with racial residential patterns. Though the government should be credited for massive public housing construction, most new housing and suburbs are still built on land far away from city centers or constructed next to existing racially segregated townships. Almost 280,000 families countrywide lack basic sanitation. In Cape Town, where the opposition Democratic Alliance governs, some of the poor have desperately resorted to dumping feces at the doorsteps of the provincial parliament or on the bodies of public representatives.

The ANC’s market-friendly policies began under Mandela, even though many associate such policies with Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki. It was Mandela who in mid-1996 presented the government’s neoliberal GEAR policy (Growth, Employment And Redistribution) as “non-negotiable.” Although there continues to be conflict over economic policy within the ANC, as well as with its alliance partners in the trade unions and the Communist Party, and there are traces of a “development state” (a national healthcare plan, social housing, massive AIDS roll-out since 2009 and welfare grants), government still prioritizes the interests of business.

The poor know this, and though the majority of South Africans revere Mandela and the ANC for defeating apartheid, many are realizing that true citizenship means taking on the ANC. For many, the ANC has come to represent a callous government whose police evict them from already cramped and substandard housing, shut off their water, lock them up or murder them when they protest. In the most extreme case, in August last year, police shot thirty-four striking miners in the Northwest province; people here just say “Marikana” when they talk about the killings. One year earlier, in broad daylight, police murdered an activist, Andries Tatane, who had led protests over bad services in his small town in the Free State province.

Dissatisfaction is not new. In the early 2000s, Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki was the focus of frequent protests over service delivery, unemployment, poverty and inequality. ANC members and others worked successfully to unseat Mbeki, who was praised by business interests for his management of the economy. Instead they got Jacob Zuma, who although more personable than Mbeki, is hobbled by a messy private life and charges of corruption. Storms swirl around Zuma, but on a macroeconomic level, little changed under him too. For a while, Julius Malema, a bombastic and brash ANC youth leader, held center stage and threatened to bring economic inequality to the center of attention. Yet he fell out with Zuma and his support fizzled as stories emerged detailing his own problems with corruption and excess.

Still, impatience with Zuma’s government is growing. Not all protests take an organized form or are sustained over time, but they are always there—one can’t miss the din of protest about housing and evictions, over water, electricity and education. These movements frequently invoke Mandela as a symbol, even as they chide his government’s legacy. He is both an obstacle and an inspiration. Many participants are very young—barely alive when Mandela came out of prison or when he was elected president. Take Abahlali baseMjondolo, a slumdwellers’ movement outside Durban that protested evictions at the hands of the ANC-led city council, as profiled in a new film Dear Mandela. In one scene, a teenage leader, Mazwi Nzimande, tries to fire up the crowd. Nzimande denounces people who discriminate against shack dwellers and criticizes political parties. When, however, he shouts: “Down with the ANC party, down!” he is greeted with silence. Mandela’s party still has a powerful hold over most black South Africans. For many, in spite of its failings, it is still seen as the only organization that will be able to fundamentally restructure South Africa’s political economy. In the film, Nzimande sits down, momentarily defeated.

Nzimande’s colleague, Mnikelo Ndabankulu (in his early 20s), takes a different approach. Speaking after a fire that destroyed 200 shacks in his neighborhood, he responds to criticism by ANC and government supporters: “They say, ‘Why are these people marching because these times [of oppression] have gone. We are in a democracy. What are they marching for?’ [However] the real motive behind our struggle is this thing [pointing to conditions in his squatter community]. It’s not a matter of disrespecting the authorities. It’s being serious about life. This is not life.”

Then, referring to Mandela’s steadfastness when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, Ndabankulu says: “You don’t need to be old to be wise. That is why we think we need to show our character while we are still young so that when your life ends, it must not be like a small obituary that said, ‘You were born, you ate, you go to school, you died.’ When you are dying you must die with credibility. People must talk about you saying good things, saying you were a man among men, not just an ordinary man.”

Sunday, June 16, was National Youth Day, commemorating the day in 1976, when black students in Soweto rose up to resist forced instruction in Afrikaans, but also to protest conditions in their schools (at the time government spent R644 a year on a white child’s education, but only R42 on a black child). The movement spread countrywide and combatted the repressive political environment of the time (most were inspired by the Black Consciousness movement whose leader, Steve Biko, would be murdered by police the next year). Much has changed since then. Public education is now free in principle, government spending does not discriminate by race and no one is forced to learn Afrikaans. However, little has been done to improve black schools that are characterized by overcrowding, no electricity or water supply and dilapidated infrastructure.

The next day (a public holiday), I joined a march by a few thousand school children to Parliament. Equal Education, a NGO that has taken the minister of education to court over the conditions of the schools that most black South Africans attend, organized the march. (Full disclosure: I have been sending groups of New School students to intern at Equal Education every summer since 2012.) At a rally in front of parliament, one of the Equal Education leaders reminded protesters that they were meeting on a solemn occasion “as Mandela, the father of our nation lay dying and as we commemorate the Soweto Uprising led by students.”

It was inevitable that he would then make a direct connection between the march and Mandela, who in the wake of Soweto 1976 wrote from prison: “That verdict is loud and clear: apartheid has failed. Our people remain unequivocal in its rejection…. They are a generation whose whole education has been under the diabolical design of the racists to poison the minds and brainwash our children into docile subjects of apartheid rule. But after more than twenty years of Bantu Education the circle is closed and nothing demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of apartheid as the revolt of our youth.”

I wondered what Mandela would make of these protesters for whom freedom has meant unequal education and who now see the government he was part of willing into being, as an obstacle to them enjoying their full rights in the new South Africa. Perhaps he would recognize himself in them.

Dagsavisen: Kampen fortsetter

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http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1002/subcat1021/thread277160/#post_277160

Kampen fortsetter

Åsne Gullikstad

Om bare Mandela kunne komme og se dette, ville han gjøre noe med det.

Ordene kom fra en 16 år gammel gutt som bodde i skur i et slumområde i Sør-Afrika. Han var en av de mange slumbeboerne som ble intervjuet da filmskaperne Dara Kell og Christopher Nizza skulle lage dokumentar om folk i slummen og deres kamp mot myndighetene. – Det var slik en uskyld over denne uttalelsen, har filmskaperne fortalt.

Det var mange som uttrykte det samme ønsket – at gamle Mandela skulle komme og ordne opp. Det var bilder av ham på veggene. Fjorten år etter at han gikk av som president, og mange år etter at han trakk seg helt ut fra offentligheten, er Mandela fortsatt et referansepunkt og et håp for så mange. Filmen, som kom ut i fjor, fikk navnet «Dear Mandela». En bønn til en leder fra historien – men om forholdene i dagens Sør-Afrika.

For slik er situasjonen i regnbuelandet, to tiår etter apartheid: Det foregår fortsatt en kamp om likhet og bedre levekår. Tross enorme forbedringer de siste 20 år i Sør-Afrika, er fortvilelsen stor over at Mandelas visjoner for mange sørafrikanere ikke er blitt virkelighet.

Det har boblet lenge under overflaten. Sterkest kom det til uttrykk under protestene som ledet til massakren i Marikana i august i fjor, da 34 mennesker døde. Fortsatt arbeider granskningskommisjonen, som skal gå gjennom hendelsene, med å få klarhet i hva som skjedde.

Men det var ikke slutt etter den tragiske dagen i august i fjor. I månedene som har gått, er flere mennesker blitt drept eller tatt livet sitt i gruvedistriktet, der arbeiderne fortsatt kjemper for bedre arbeids- og levevilkår. I går lå det igjen an til streik blant gruveansatte ved gruven der Marikana-massakren skjedde.

Men kampen for et bedre liv foregår langt utenfor gruvedistriktene også. Dokumentaren, som er nevnt ovenfor, tar for seg slumbeboernes kamp mot sørafrikanske myndigheters forsøk på å kaste dem ut og utradere slumstrøkene, uten å ha noe annet å tilby dem. Det foregår en kamp mot lokale myndigheter, der drap, utkastelser og korrupsjon er ingredienser, og der lokale politikere og administratorer slår hardt ned på motstandere. Men også en nasjonal kamp, der slumboerbevegelsen vinner fram i høyesterett med at loven som åpner for slumraseringer er grunnlovsstridig.

«Vi har et Marikana hver dag. Forskjellen er bare antallet personer som blir drept på en dag», sa S´Bu Zikode da jeg intervjuet ham for en stund siden. Han er leder for slumboerbevegelsen Abahlali baseMjondolo, og en av personene i filmen «Dear Mandela». Han pekte på at det hver dag pågår konflikter om rettigheter i Sør-Afrika, en kamp som av og til har døden til følge. Som så mange andre føler han at ANC har sviktet sine egne, og arven etter Mandela.

Det er i denne brytningstiden Sør-Afrika nå forbereder seg på et farvel med sin helt. Han har vært ute av det offentlige bildet lenge, men likevel tross alt vært her. Det begynner å bli en utålmodighet og frustrasjon blant store deler av befolkningen som ikke lenger kan holdes tilbake. Mens de to siste tiårene har vært preget av innstillingen blant sørafrikanere om at det vil bli bedre, det vil bare ta litt tid, har tvilen overtatt plassen. ANC-regjeringen har klart å skaffe millioner av sørafrikanere et bedre liv, men likevel har forskjellene bare økt. Men det er ikke bare fraværet av goder som frustrerer mange. Det er dette kombinert med de åpenbare selvberikelsene man kan se på alle nivåer hos myndighetene.

Presidenten selv, Jacob Zuma, har ikke vært spart for kritikk, blant annet for de enorme offentlige summene som er blitt brukt til å oppgradere hans privathjem i hjemstedet Nkandla. Sør-Afrika har de viktige grunnstenene i et demokrati, hvor en sterk presse er en viktig faktor. Landet har også et rettsvesen som gir muligheter for dem som vil utfordre makten, slik saken til slumboerbevegelsen var et godt eksempel på.

Og i et politisk landskap der én politisk aktør er blitt så dominerende som ANC, er ikke bare den formelle politiske opposisjonen viktig, men også et sivilsamfunn med sterke bevegelser og organisasjoner. Etter apartheids fall mistet mange av disse noe av sin kraft fordi man trodde det ikke ville være nødvendig å passe like mye på etter at ANC kom til makten. At slike grupper likevel trengs til gagns også i dag, er åpenbart, og også det er slumboerbevegelsens kamp et godt eksempel på.

Om det kanskje ikke for alle sørafrikanere oppleves slik i hverdagen, er Sør-Afrika et langt bedre sted i dag enn for 20 år siden. Men selv om den siste generasjonen av de gamle ANC-kjemperne er i ferd med å bli borte, fortsetter kampen for idealene de kjempet for. Som et Marikana hver dag.

City Press: What is Mandela’s legacy?

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http://www.citypress.co.za/Columnists/What-is-Mandelas-legacy-20120718

What is Mandela’s legacy?

by Sean Jacobs

The legacy of Nelson Mandela is as fraught and complicated as post-apartheid South Africa itself.

On the one hand, Mandela personifies the narrative of reconciliation and the long, triumphant march against legal apartheid.

In some ways, South Africa today would be unrecognisable to the one Mandela re-entered from prison in 1990.

South Africa has a black government, a growing black middle class, a vibrant media, democratic freedoms (with three sets of free elections and counting) and a growing economy.

Mandela is also credited with convincing whites of the virtues of liberal democracy. Despite an initially heavily armed white population (and the persistence of hard racist views among some whites), the transition is passing with little political turbulence.

Whites may complain of discrimination and “reverse racism” (a symptom of entitlement), but they have never been more prosperous, mobile and free.

As artist William Kentridge told a writer for The New Yorker a few years ago: “The main beneficiaries since the ending of apartheid are white South Africans. No sacrifices have been required. No one’s lost their beautiful house.”

On the other hand, Mandela aided the empty “rainbowism” which draws on sports victories (especially rugby) while presiding over a disastrous economic policy for the country’s poor majority, resulting in South Africa remaining the most unequal country in the world today by most measures.

That inequality is very much defined by race, although inequality among blacks has also expanded.

Since 1994 the number of South Africans living on less then a dollar a day has doubled.

Successive South African governments have been reluctant to implement any meaningful land reform or tamper with racial residential patterns (most new housing developments are still built farther away from city centres, for example).

Though many associate the post-apartheid government’s overly market-friendly economic policies, the GEAR (which has had numerous name changes but retains its substance), with Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki, it was Mandela himself who in mid-1996 presented GEAR as “non-negotiable” to his supporters.

Government since then has been mostly, in the words of some its critics, intent on “out-IMFing the IMF”.

Though white men still make the really big money, the state is fast becoming the preferred way to accumulate private wealth for a new black elite. (Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, at the time a government minister, told a group of businessmen: “Blacks should not be ashamed to be filthy rich.”).

Mandela’s name has been commodified to no end.

Two years ago Mandela’s eldest daughter and grandson launched “House of Mandela” wines and last year the Nelson Mandela Foundation launched an “international clothing line”, which exploits his prison experience and is out of reach of most South Africans.

Though the majority of South Africans revere Mandela and the ANC for defeating Apartheid (they still return comfortable majorities for the ANC), many are realising that true citizenship means taking on the ANC.

For many of the poor, the ANC has come to represent a callous government whose police evict them from already cramped and substandard housing, who shut off their water (cholera is on the increase in some provinces) and who can find money for sports stadiums but not for new schools.

Some showed their disappointment by joining the internal ANC power struggle to unseat Thabo Mbeki.

Having succeeded they are growing impatient with the new president, Jacob Zuma. Others will be indifferent to the celebrations for Mandela’s birthday because they have nothing to celebrate.

But in some instances, the demand for citizenship takes a more sustained and organised form – and they often take their inspiration from Mandela.

Like the characters in the new film, Dear Mandela, where young activists growing up in squatter communities outside Durban on South Africa’s northeastern coast at one and the same time chide Mandela and invoke his name as they resist slum clearing laws by the local municipality.

Halfway through the film, one of the young people at the heart of the film, Mazwi Nzimande, tries to fire up the crowd.

He denounces people who “disrespect our leaders … discriminate against shack dwellers” as well as the local opposition party, the IFP.

When, however, he shouts: “Down with the ANC party, down!” he is greeted with silence, displaying the hold of the ANC, personified by Mandela’s lead of past struggle, over the political imagination of South Africans.

But things are not that straightforward. Another activist, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, speaking after a fire that destroyed 200 shacks in his neighbourhood, responds to criticism by ANC and government supporters: “They say, ‘Why are these people marching because these times [of oppression] have gone.

“We are in a democracy. What are they marching for?’ [However] the real motive behind our struggle is this thing [pointing to conditions in his squatter community]. It is not a matter of fame, it is a not a matter of power hunger. It’s not a matter of disrespecting the authorities. It’s being serious about life. This is not life.”

Then, channelling Mandela’s single-mindedness before he was sentence to life in prison in 1964, Ndabankulu says: “You don’t need to be old to be wise.

“That is why we think we need to show our character while we are still young so that when your life ends, it must not be like a small obituary that said, ‘You were born, you ate, you go to school, you died.’ When you are dying you must die with credibility. People must talk about you saying good things, saying you were a man among men, not just an ordinary man.”

Mandela would be proud.