Truth, Reconciliation and the Creation of Saint Nelson
Following the last South African election, in which the African National Congress finally completed its multi-decade project of squandering its parliamentary majority, I have been commenting and watching the country more closely and not just because it is a more popular subject of dinner conversation in Dar Es Salaam than it likely is back in Vancouver.
Even before the election, I had been writing about the fundamental unsustainability of the deal hammered-out between the African National Congress and the South African National Party because of my views on what scholars euphemistically call “transitional justice” in Canada and my belief that our “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) was not the unalloyed good it was imagined to be. I argue, you may recall, that the reason we mistakenly view our commission as an unalloyed good is that we have the same mistaken view of the original South African TRC.
When I was a child in the early 80s, we used to go trick-or-treating on Hallowe’en carrying little boxes for UNICEF in which we collected pennies, or larger denomination coins if we found ourselves at one of those overly liberal houses that was giving out boxes of raisins instead of real candy. But as the global anti-Apartheid movement became a bigger deal in my home town, folks at my local Unitarian-Universalist Church made us little cardboard boxes, the same shape and size as the UNICEF boxes but for the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU).
Late in PW Botha’s presidency, under increasing pressure from the wave of democratization sweeping through Eastern Europe and mounting boycott and sanction campaigns, the South African regime’s stance towards the African National Congress began to soften and the international anti-Apartheid movement sought new, positive ways to highlight their support for the country’s main opposition movement. While the ANC’s offices were in Zambia and its president had been Oliver Tambo since 1967, the movement, at Tambo’s instigation developed a new international public relations strategy.
In this strategy, Tambo’s leadership was effaced in the public square and the true leader of the ANC and the global anti-Apartheid movement was presented as Nelson Mandela, the former president of the ANC who had been imprisoned and whom no one had seen in decades. And so, in July 1988, the movement staged seventieth birthday celebrations for Mandela all over the world, in community halls and stadiums and everything in between. They were a great success. Performers and activists genuflected to grainy black and white photos and footage of Mandela prior to his incarceration, the imposing, gun-toting burly communist guerilla leader and former boxer of the early 1960s.
This campaign to create a new public image for the ANC and its supporters around the world, one focused on Mandela, the elderly political prisoner, was a great success and led to Mandela making public appearances in 1989 and being released from prison the following year.
Another Important Dream
In the late 80s, my high school friends and I had a number of dreams that strongly influenced our politics, life choices and the increasingly distinctive lexicon of our small community. Oscar’s dream about the zombie invasion at Church’s Fried Chicken had been important. So was my sugar refinery zombie invasion dream. But then there were the Dreams of Steve, an extraordinary set of dreams and visions our friend kept a dream journal by his bed to record. And it is on the basis of this journal that I present: the Nelson Mandela dream.
Steve was fifteen years old and still in high school when the new, shorter, white-haired, peaceful-seeming, almost beatific Mandela began making appearances on the world stage in 1989. And in his dream, he learned that Mandela would be getting out of prison to celebrate his seventy-first birthday and that Steve had been chosen to host the affair in the small apartment in a three-storey walk-up, on Vine Street in Southwest Vancouver, that he shared with his mother.
Steve is one of the world’s great raconteurs and has a talent for offering up only the details most necessary to understand the shape of a story, like those economical paintings in which the artist renders an image using the fewest brush strokes possible. So, the narrative of the dream is awfully short:
“Once people showed up, everything was going just fine, until Nelson started doing his card tricks. And then, for an encore, he started passing little red plastic combs through his head. Then the police showed up and tear-gassed the sofa.”
But what Steve found most disconcerting in his evaluation of the dream was this: the Nelson Mandela who did the card tricks was the 1960s Mandela not the 1980s Mandela. He was a huge, broad-shouldered, tough man in a suit with a gun, the communist bomber and implacable foe of the National Party.
I have reflected on that dream many times in the decades since. Because somehow it captured something I could not fully express, until my pal David returned from his most recent trip to South Africa.
The 2024 South African Election and Its Aftermath
Earlier this year, South Africa held an election in which the ANC lost its majority, not just thanks to the corrupt and shambolic leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa but because the flaws inherent in the deal between the ANC and the National Party, between Mandela and, Botha’s successor, FW De Klerk, made South Africa’s current political crisis inevitable by kicking the resolution of major structural problems down the road rather than resolving them at the time.
Because the agreement was structured by the contemporaneous global embrace of neoliberalism that was taking place in the 1990s, not only did it immunize the vast majority of those who had terrorized, tortured and murdered black dissidents; it placed off limits any transfers of wealth or lands from the white population either to the black population or to the state. Not only did the deal radically constrain the state’s powers of expropriation and redistribution; it actually took land away from the black population. By decommissioning the Bantustans, the fake, internationally unrecognized countries like Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu, ruled by local strongman stooges for the South African government, there actually came to be less land in the country controlled by the black majority.
Further constrained by capital flight and emigration by high income professionals, black-ruled South Africa had limited ability to use social programs or compensated expropriation to meaningfully transfer wealth to the black majority, whose land and labour had been stolen and exploited for decades. Effectively, the most politically viable strategy for converting black political power into black economic power naturally became government corruption, favouritism and self-dealing. By leaving almost 100% of the economic power with whites and almost 100% of the political power with blacks, the “compromise” reached by Mandela and de Klerk set South Africa on an inevitable course towards corruption, and via, corruption, to the return of tribalism.
The ANC lost its majority due to two main factors: first, the resurgence of actual socialists within the ANC demanding land reform and, the ultimate exit of that faction under the leadership of Julius Malema into a party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which began winning seats in the 2014 election. Second, the tribalization of the ANC spoils system and growing intraparty conflicts between the Xhosa majority and the Zulus, ultimately leading to former president Jacob Zuma’s exit and creation of another pro-land reform spinoff party appealing also to more economically moderate Zulus who felt that the ANC had become a Xhosa party and peeled 15% of the vote off the ANC.
Without a parliamentary majority, the ANC faced an impossible choice. A partnership with Malema and/or Zuma would almost certainly have entailed Ramaphosa’s resignation and replacement with a leader more acceptable to the pro-land reform parties and, more importantly, would almost certainly cause an immediate wave of capital flight, emigration and unrest in response to land redistribution, not to mention possible punishment by the World Trade Organization, World Bank and independent bond-rating agencies.
So, the ANC went into coalition with the Democratic Alliance, the main party of the white South African minority, a party committed to neoliberal economics and opposed to land reform. Now, not only do white South Africans continue to hold disproportionate economic power, for the first time since 1999, they also hold disproportionate political power, with white South Africans opposed to redistributive policies controlling the ministries in charge of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, immigration, infrastructure, public works and environment.
While this deal may have saved the ANC in the short term, it will almost certainly lead to the continued decline of the ANC’s popularity and a growing sympathy for Malema’s explicitly racialist, black nationalist take on what ails South Africa.
The Nelson Mandela Conspiracy Theory
It is in this specific political context, of the formation of South Africa’s first black -white coalition government in thirty years, that a new conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire, first among South Africans but now among African nationalists everywhere: the real Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s and the man who made peace with FW de Klerk was an imposter.
After his latest business trip to South Africa, my friend David reported the widespread popularity of this theory, backed by claims that the government has prohibited Mandela’s genetic information being compared against those of his descendants, that Winnie Mandela’s fall from power was due to her efforts to expose the imposter and that her atrocities were made-up, that access to Mandela by his old comrades was radically restricted during his presidency and a host of others.
Obviously, I think those claims, as literal claims, are hogwash.
But I have to say that the moment I heard the conspiracy theory, I felt like it was true on a deeper, more profound level than the literal or the historical. And I began to weep. The Marxist who believed that his people would never truly be free without redistributing the land, without nationalizing the mines, without taking control of the factories, did die in that prison.
And that, I think, is why Steve’s dream has stuck with me all these years because what made it uncanny was the irreconcilability of the two Mandelas, the way it referenced without articulating all the dreams the anti-Apartheid movement nurtured that were discarded in the peace deal with de Klerk, losses we never allowed ourselves to acknowledge and therefore were unable to grieve.
From the 1920s to the 1990s, the former German colony of Namibia had lived under South African rule, its small German colonial population placed in charge of a vast and diverse black population. In the 1980s, when Sam Nujoma, the leader of SWAPO (the Southwest African People’s Organization), Namibia’s equivalent of the ANC, was asked when his people would achieve freedom and independence from South Africa, he answered “when President Mandela gives them to us.”
Nujoma’s statement speaks to a global phenomenon of shifting our agency and aspirations from our home countries into the South African freedom struggle. As the Cold War wound down, socialists faced disappointment after disappointment, defeat after defeat, on the world stage. As our own domestic horizon of possibilities grew ever narrower and supposedly anti-capitalist regimes around the world were increasingly not just defeated but utterly discredited, we vested more and more of our hopes and more and more of our idealism in the anti-Apartheid movement, the ANC and the person of Nelson Mandela.
And so it was that his total capitulation to neoliberalism and his abandonment of the ANC’s socialist ambitions between 1990 and 1994 narrowed the horizon of possibility of socialists the world over. The total victory of Blairism within the social democratic parties of the Global North over the course of that decade would have been more of a fight had Mandela, our mythical hero, not made these capitulations acceptable through our overinvestment in the international personality cult Tambo had created.
It may not be true. But the world in which we live today, the one in which the left failed and has been replaced by a monstrosity shambling around in its flayed skin, functions as though the real Nelson Mandela died in a cell on Robben Island in 1987 and a doppleganger took his place.
