Category Archives: Sean Jacobs

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.

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.

The Uprising of Hangberg

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http://africasacountry.com/2011/02/22/the-uprising/

The Uprising of Hangberg

Sean Jacobs

“The Uprising of Hangberg” is filmmaking at its incendiary best. Part agitprop piece, testimonies, campaign document, and popular history, the film recounts the violent events of September 2010 when municipal police on the orders of the Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance (DA)-run council invaded the favela on the edge of the Hangberg mountain in Houtbay, outside Cape Town. What transpired is now the common response by authorities in South Africa when the poor majority demand rights. Houtbay, for those trying to place it, situated on the southern edge of Cape Town, is a combination of declining fishing industry and a reservoir of cheap black and coloured labor on the one hand, and, on the other, white privilege. With scenes recalling Apartheid’s police state, cops stormed into houses, dragged out residents, shot people in the eyes and assaulted pensioners and pregnant women. The residents are mostly coloured and loyal to the DA. The city council’s spin doctors quickly framed events in the local, compliant, media. As reports from Hangberg filtered over local radio and on TV news, a template emerged: the Hangberg residents were illegal squatters, were living on a firebreak, most of them were criminals selling drugs (especially the Rastafarians amongst them), and the city and provincial government (personified by its “Iron Lady” Premier, Helen Zille) had residents’ best interests at heart. Filmmakers Aryan Kaganof and Dylan Valley, decided to drive out to Hangberg and film events. What they pieced together–with help from footage shot by local activists–puts a lie to mainstream propaganda. Affected residents also turned on the DA. So much so that the city, and the DA tried to astroturf the film (see also below) with little success. With local government elections looming in South Africa, it is unclear whether the events will cost the DA, but the film suggests it may portend a shift in local politics–especially coloured working class politics–in the town and perhaps further afield in the Western Cape province. I sent Dylan Valley a few questions.

How and why did you get involved in the events at Hangberg

The politics of the events are complex, as the City of Cape Town went in to remove what they called “unoccupied” structures from a firebreak (a path that prevents fires from spreading and for fire fighters to gain access to fires) in Hangberg, Hout Bay. Hangberg is a “coloured” neighbourhood in the town of Hout Bay, one of the most picturesque areas in Cape Town and, as such, prime property. It turns out that people were getting evicted [without a] court order, [that] occupied structures were being demolished and people were literally dragged out of their homes by [the city’s police force]. The force with which the police went into the area was totally uncalled for, and at least four people had each lost an eye in the clashes with cops. I was not planning to get involved initially with Hangberg at all. I heard about it through the local media, but didn’t get a real sense of the urgency of what was happening there. The media reports, while seeming balanced, were very much one sided and made the residents seem unruly and violent. My co-director, Aryan [Kaganof] actually suggested we go and find out what was happening or possibly film some stuff. He llived in Hangberg briefly a few years ago and knew that the community he knew was not the one that he was reading about in the papers. Something was wrong with the picture.

Did you expect the kind of hysterical response from the governing party in the Western Cape, including what is probably a fake, negative review of the film.

I was actually expecting the worst. This project really opened my eyes to how easily disinformation can be spread. The same DA councilor, JP Smith, who forwarded us that review of the film, had hosted a press conference where he released photos of 3 of the Hangberg residents, who had each lost an eye, throwing stones at the police in a group photo. The intent was to show that their story of innocence was false, and that they had deserved to get shot. However two of the residents, Ikram Halim and Delon Egypt, were falsely identified in the police pictures, i.e. it wasn’t them. In the local newspapers, The Voice and The Cape Times, the Hangberg residents were branded as liars, totally unquestioning Councillor Smith’s story. In the film we expose this and find and interview the actual people in the police photograph.

How would you describe the Cape Town media’s reporting of class and race inequalities in the city?

I think we as a middle class have become quite used to media reports of “service delivery protests” that never quite convey the situation on the ground. Also in their subtle use of language, they generally seem to be on the side of the local government. I actually know someone who is a reporter, and who said to me once, “People in townships just want to catch on kak (cause shit).” And even when the journalists do try; I think the term “service delivery protest” is very similar in effect to what was called “unrest” during Apartheid. When middle class people read it they immediately think “that doesn’t really have anything to do with me” or “the government needs to do something” or “these people are just complaining for nothing.” I think people have an immediate response to the term, without going into the specifics of every incident or story.

City officials and the Premier of the Western Cape province, Helen
Zille, and some in the mainstream media, quickly declared the protests being the work of “The Rastas,” who were deemed as violent (as having provoked the police violence) and of doing drug dealers?

That was the most ridiculous thing. They singled out the rastas in the media because they are an easy target. Also the Rastas in the Hangberg are very politically savvy and are spreading an ideology of reclaiming their indigenous Khoi heritage. The Khoi were an indigenous group in Southern Africa, and are often spoken of as “the original people.” Most of what we call coloured people today in South Africa have some Khoi or San heritage. However with the creation of coloured identity in the South Africa, which was seen as better than black, an institutional rejection and amnesia of the Khoi and San occurred and people generally didn’t want to identify with any kind of African heritage.

Helen Zille is the face of government in the Western Cape and also the focus of residents’ anger. She is good with spin and PR. She also enjoys good press and can’t do no wrong, yet recently some of her government’s decisions have been exposed for its callousness, the toilet saga in Khayelitsha and now Hangberg. Did she and the DA overreach here? How are her whites constituents and supporters responding to it? How are her coloured constituents responding?

Helen Zille and the DA-run city council definitely overreached here … One white person who reviewed the film said he always supported and appreciated Helen Zille, but after watching the film he is questioning everything he believed about her. The majority of the (coloured) Hangberg community actually voted for the DA, but there is an overwhelming backlash against the DA now. We have yet to see what other “coloured” DA supporters think, but think that sentiment will spread as far as the film spreads. You can’t watch it without realizing how little they care for the poor. I also want to make clear however that it wasn’t our intention for people to vote for another party (like the ANC), but rather to expose the hypocrisy of the DA- led City of Cape Town.

Cape Town and the Western Cape is a graveyard of populism, pandering and divisive race politics to which both the governing DA and at times even the ANC are equally guilty of. What do you think are the hopeful politics that can emerge out of Hangberg? What is next for the people of Hangberg?

I don’t think party politics as the answer, as I believe none of the major parties in the Western Cape really care for this type of community. A unified community with strong leadership reaching for the same goal is the solution. I think this attack on the community has actually helped to bring people together. Also they have taken their case to not be moved to the Cape High Court and it is imperative that the community wins; which could have serious repercussions elsewhere in the country. Most of all, I would like for them to be acknowledge as the descendants of the Indigenes of the area, the Khoi peoples. There is a growing movement in the Hangberg community to embrace their Khoi heritage, as opposed to the blanket “coloured” identity.

You have been showing the film in venues around Cape Town. What has this taught you about film exhibition in postapartheid South Africa? Are you going to put the film online?

Well there is only one independent cinema in Cape Town, where we screened the film. We haven’t really tried to screen it in the mainstream cinemas, but unlikely that we would have been able to. Since we don’t have distribution funding as of yet, and we are not aiming to make a profit out of the film, we’ve handed out quite a few DVDs and they are apparently doing the rounds; people are copying the film and passing it on. We just want to get the story out there. We are planning to eventually put the whole film online. There is a condensed 6 minute version on www.hangberg.co.za.