How Big Money, Washington and the IMF Trumped Mandela
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
11 December 13
[http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn_quote.jpg][http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn-T.jpg]he nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modifications of our views in this regard is inconceivable," wrote Nelson Mandela<http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/how-mandela-shifted-views-on-freedom-of-markets/?_r=0> in January 1990, two weeks before he was released from his long captivity on Robben Island. He was assuring his comrades in the African National Congress that he remained loyal to the socialist economic program enshrined in their mid-1950s Freedom Charter. The ANC would, he promised, give back to the people of South Africa the riches that wealthy whites had stolen from them under British colonial rule and the years of Afrikaner-led apartheid.
Four years later, he would become president of all South Africa, democratically elected in the country's first election in which the overwhelmingly non-white majority was allowed to vote. But by that time, Mandela and his closest aides had secretly agreed to precisely the change of views that he had called "inconceivable."
The ANC gave up nationalization and a radical redistribution of wealth. They promised to repay $25 billion in debt that the apartheid government had amassed. They removed exchange controls, allowing the largest corporations and richest whites to send their money abroad. And instead of top-down state socialism, as once practiced by the now defunct Soviet Union, or preferably a Scandinavian mixed economy, they went whole hog<http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism-ebook/dp/B003KVKQB4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386682175&sr=8-1&keywords=Naomi+Klein+Shock+Doctrine> for the privately controlled, "free market," trickle-down economics preached by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, American president Bill Clinton, and "the Washington consensus.<http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045302946.html>"
The result of this neo-liberal economic agenda has been both tragic and predictable. Along with its justly praised one-person, one-vote political democracy, South Africa now suffers a greater gap between rich and poor, white and black, than under apartheid. "Mandela deserves great credit for ending racial apartheid," says the Belfast-born, American-educated political economist Patrick Bond<http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10362&updaterx=2013-12-06+11%3A38%3A18>, a veteran of the first ANC government. "But his legacy includes the continuation of mass poverty."
The full history of Mandela's turnabout has yet to be written. But part of the story is told by the country's best known and most well-connected economist Sampie Terreblanche, in his widely quoted "Lost in Transformation<http://www.amazon.fr/Lost-Transformation-Africas-Search-Future/dp/0620537256/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386665955&sr=8-1&keywords=Terreblanche+%22Lost+in+Transformation%22>: South Africa's Search for a New Future since 1986," published in 2012. As he tells it, there was basically a quiet capitalist coup, and its chief organizer was South Africa's leading industrialist and one of the world's richest men, Sir Harry Oppenheimer, the retired chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines.
Known as a big business opponent of apartheid but not a supporter of the ANC, Oppenheimer began in 1991 to host a series of secret meetings of the country's mining and energy leaders, along with the bosses of U.S. and British companies active in South Africa. Also present were young American-trained ANC economists, who were reporting back to Mandela. The meetings began at Oppenheimer's Johannesburg estate, Little Brenthurst, and then shifted to the African Development Bank on the road to Pretoria, where it was easier to maintain the secrecy. Oppenheimer also lunched regularly with Mandela, who went out of his way to consult the mining magnate on issues of economic importance.
According to the now octogenarian Terreblanche in an interview this past August<http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1749>, Uncle Sam played a major role in tandem with Oppenheimer and his Brenthurst Group. The Americans – first under George H.W. Bush and increasingly under Bill Clinton – threatened the ANC "in a rather diplomatic way" and told them "if you are not going to accept our proposals, we can destabilize South Africa." Terreblanche also speculates that the Americans passed money "under the table."
All this came to a head in 1994, when the International Monetary Fund agreed to loan South Africa $850 million for the transition, but only if the ANC would sign off on the economic deal they had worked out with Oppenheimer, his Brenthurst Group of fellow moguls, and the Clinton Administration in Washington. For South Africa's best-known white revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils, a leader of the South Communist Party and co-founder with Mandela of the ANC's armed wing, "Spear of the Nation," this was "our Faustian moment." With all its strings, the loan precluded a radical economic agenda, as did all the other concessions that the ANC made "to keep negotiations on track and take delivery of the promised land for our people."
In the new introduction<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error> to his memoirs "Armed and Dangerous," Kasrils blames himself as well as Mandela for having "chickened out," his exact words. "Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, there was no other option, that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet Union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses."
Would hanging tough have brought on the bloodbath that Mandela feared? "To break apartheid through negotiation, rather than a bloody civil war, seemed then an option too good to be ignored," Kasrils recalls. But "to lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable." The country's vast mineral reserves and the declining morale of the old order would have allowed far greater gains at the negotiating table. "If we had held our nerve, we could have pressed forward without making the concessions we did."
Without extensive historical research, no one can know with any certainty. But the lack of democracy within the legalized ANC, the secrecy of all the negotiations, and the movement's willingness to go along with Mandela, who had been locked away for 27 years and never really understood the alternatives to joining a privately controlled global economy, gave Oppenheimer and his allies an enormous bargaining advantage.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Anunoby, Ogugua [AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 11:55 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; Wanazuoni
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism?
Who is the hijacker? I want to know?
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chambi Chachage
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 4:44 AM
To: Wanazuoni
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism?
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Riaz K Tayob <riaz.tayob@gmail.com<mailto:riaz.tayob@gmail.com>> wrote:
The Hijacking of Mandela's Legacy
By Pepe Escobar
December 09, 2013 "Information Clearing House<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/> - Beware of strangers bearing gifts. The "gift" is the ongoing, frantic canonization of Nelson Mandela. The "strangers" are the 0.0001 percent, that fraction of the global elite that's really in control (media naturally included).
It's a Tower of Babel of tributes piled up in layer upon layer of hypocrisy – from the US to Israel and from France to Britain<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-hypocrite-naming-nelson-217464>.
What must absolutely be buried under the tower is that the apartheid regime in South Africa was sponsored and avidly defended by the West until, literally, it was about to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. The only thing that had really mattered was South Africa's capitalist economy and immense resources, and the role of Pretoria in fighting "communism." Apartheid was, at best, a nuisance.
Mandela is being allowed sainthood by the 0.0001% because he extended a hand to the white oppressor who kept him in jail for 27 years. And because he accepted – in the name of "national reconciliation" – that no apartheid killers would be tried, unlike the Nazis.
Among the cataracts of emotional tributes and the crass marketization of the icon, there's barely a peep in Western corporate media about Mandela's firm refusal to ditch armed struggle against apartheid (if he had done so, he would not have been jailed for 27 years); his gratitude towards Fidel Castro's Cuba – which always supported the people of Angola, Namibia and South Africa fighting apartheid; and his perennial support for the liberation struggle in Palestine.
Young generations, especially, must be made aware that during the Cold War, any organization fighting for the freedom of the oppressed in the developing world was dubbed "terrorist"; that was the Cold War version of the "war on terror". Only at the end of the 20th century was the fight against apartheid accepted as a supreme moral cause; and Mandela, of course, rightfully became the universal face of the cause.
It's easy to forget that conservative messiah Ronald Reagan – who enthusiastically hailed the precursors of al-Qaeda as "freedom fighters" – fiercely opposed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act because, what else, the African National Congress (ANC) was considered a "terrorist organization" (on top of Washington branding the ANC as "communists").
The same applied to a then-Republican Congressman from Wyoming who later would turn into a Darth Vader replicant, Dick Cheney. As for Israel, it even offered one of its nuclear weapons to the Afrikaners in Pretoria – presumably to wipe assorted African commies off the map.
In his notorious 1990 visit to the US, now as a free man, Mandela duly praised Fidel, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Col. Gaddafi as his "comrades in arms": "There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights." Washington/Wall Street was livid.
And this was Mandela's take, in early 2003, on the by then inevitable invasion of Iraq and the wider war on terror; "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America." No wonder he was kept on the US government terrorist list until as late as 2008.
From terrorism to sainthood
In the early 1960s – when, by the way, the US itself was practicing apartheid in the South - it would be hard to predict to what extent "Madiba" (his clan name), the dandy lawyer and lover of boxing with an authoritarian character streak, would adopt Gandhi's non-violence strategy to end up forging an exceptional destiny graphically embodying the political will to transform society. Yet the seeds of "Invictus" were already there.
The fascinating complexity of Mandela is that he was essentially a democratic socialist. Certainly not a capitalist. And not a pacifist either; on the contrary, he would accept violence as a means to an end. In his books and countless speeches, he always admitted his flaws. His soul must be smirking now at all the adulation.
Arguably, without Mandela, Barack Obama would never have reached the White House; he admitted on the record that his first political act was at an anti-apartheid demonstration. But let's make it clear: Mr. Obama, you're no Nelson Mandela.
To summarize an extremely complex process, in the "death throes" of apartheid, the regime was mired in massive corruption, hardcore military spending and with the townships about to explode. Mix Fidel's Cuban fighters kicking the butt of South Africans (supported by the US) in Angola and Namibia with the inability to even repay Western loans, and you have a recipe for bankruptcy.
The best and the brightest in the revolutionary struggle – like Mandela – were either in jail, in exile, assassinated (like Steve Biko) or "disappeared", Latin American death squad-style. The actual freedom struggle was mostly outside South Africa – in Angola, Namibia and the newly liberated Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Once again, make no mistake; without Cuba – as Mandela amply stressed writing from jail in March 1988 – there would be "no liberation of our continent, and my people, from the scourge of apartheid". Now get one of those 0.0001% to admit it.
In spite of the debacle the regime – supported by the West – sensed an opening. Why not negotiate with a man who had been isolated from the outside world since 1962? No more waves and waves of Third World liberation struggles; Africa was now mired in war, and all sorts of socialist revolutions had been smashed, from Che Guevara killed in Bolivia in 1967 to Allende killed in the 1973 coup in Chile.
Mandela had to catch up with all this and also come to grips with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of what European intellectuals called "real socialism." And then he would need to try to prevent a civil war and the total economic collapse of South Africa.
The apartheid regime was wily enough to secure control of the Central Bank – with crucial IMF help – and South Africa's trade policy. Mandela secured only a (very significant) political victory. The ANC only found out it had been conned when it took power. Forget about its socialist idea of nationalizing the mining and banking industries – owned by Western capital, and distribute the benefits to the indigenous population. The West would never allow it. And to make matters worse, the ANC was literally hijacked by a sorry, greedy bunch.
Follow the roadmap
John Pilger is spot on pointing to economic apartheid<http://johnpilger.com/articles/mandelas-greatness-may-be-secured-but-not-his-legacy> in South Africa now with a new face.
Patrick Bond has written arguably the best expose<http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/the-mandela-years-in-power/> anywhere of the Mandela years – and their legacy.
And Ronnie Kasrils does a courageous mea culpa dissecting how Mandela and the ANC accepted a devil's pact<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error> with the usual suspects.
The bottom line: Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism. And that's the dirty secret of him being allowed sainthood.
Now for the future. Cameroonian Achille Mbembe, historian and political science professor, is one of Africa's foremost intellectuals. In his book Critique of Black Reason<http://www.amazon.com/Critique-raison-n%C3%A8gre-Achille-Mbembe/dp/2707177474/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1386415859&sr=8-2&keywords=achille+mbembe>, recently published in France (not yet in English), Mbembe praises Mandela and stresses that Africans must imperatively invent new forms of leadership, the essential precondition to lift themselves in the world. All-too-human "Madiba" has provided the roadmap. May Africa unleash one, two, a thousand Mandelas.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.
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* EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
* EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>. [Now free in two download formats]
* Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global Emancipation of Labour<http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>
* Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
* EBook 2011, Under, Against, Beyond (Compilation 1980s-90s) http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
* Paper 2012: The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade Unions
<http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
* Paper 2012: Marikana, South Africa, The March of the Undead<http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/marikana-south-africa-elsewhere-the-dance-of-the-undead>
* Chapter, 2013. 'Many New Internationalisms!', in Corinne Kumar (ed), Asking, We Walk: The South as New Political Imaginary, Bangalore: Streelekha Publications.
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By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
11 December 13
[http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn_quote.jpg][http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn-T.jpg]he nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modifications of our views in this regard is inconceivable," wrote Nelson Mandela<http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/how-mandela-shifted-views-on-freedom-of-markets/?_r=0> in January 1990, two weeks before he was released from his long captivity on Robben Island. He was assuring his comrades in the African National Congress that he remained loyal to the socialist economic program enshrined in their mid-1950s Freedom Charter. The ANC would, he promised, give back to the people of South Africa the riches that wealthy whites had stolen from them under British colonial rule and the years of Afrikaner-led apartheid.
Four years later, he would become president of all South Africa, democratically elected in the country's first election in which the overwhelmingly non-white majority was allowed to vote. But by that time, Mandela and his closest aides had secretly agreed to precisely the change of views that he had called "inconceivable."
The ANC gave up nationalization and a radical redistribution of wealth. They promised to repay $25 billion in debt that the apartheid government had amassed. They removed exchange controls, allowing the largest corporations and richest whites to send their money abroad. And instead of top-down state socialism, as once practiced by the now defunct Soviet Union, or preferably a Scandinavian mixed economy, they went whole hog<http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism-ebook/dp/B003KVKQB4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386682175&sr=8-1&keywords=Naomi+Klein+Shock+Doctrine> for the privately controlled, "free market," trickle-down economics preached by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, American president Bill Clinton, and "the Washington consensus.<http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045302946.html>"
The result of this neo-liberal economic agenda has been both tragic and predictable. Along with its justly praised one-person, one-vote political democracy, South Africa now suffers a greater gap between rich and poor, white and black, than under apartheid. "Mandela deserves great credit for ending racial apartheid," says the Belfast-born, American-educated political economist Patrick Bond<http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10362&updaterx=2013-12-06+11%3A38%3A18>, a veteran of the first ANC government. "But his legacy includes the continuation of mass poverty."
The full history of Mandela's turnabout has yet to be written. But part of the story is told by the country's best known and most well-connected economist Sampie Terreblanche, in his widely quoted "Lost in Transformation<http://www.amazon.fr/Lost-Transformation-Africas-Search-Future/dp/0620537256/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386665955&sr=8-1&keywords=Terreblanche+%22Lost+in+Transformation%22>: South Africa's Search for a New Future since 1986," published in 2012. As he tells it, there was basically a quiet capitalist coup, and its chief organizer was South Africa's leading industrialist and one of the world's richest men, Sir Harry Oppenheimer, the retired chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines.
Known as a big business opponent of apartheid but not a supporter of the ANC, Oppenheimer began in 1991 to host a series of secret meetings of the country's mining and energy leaders, along with the bosses of U.S. and British companies active in South Africa. Also present were young American-trained ANC economists, who were reporting back to Mandela. The meetings began at Oppenheimer's Johannesburg estate, Little Brenthurst, and then shifted to the African Development Bank on the road to Pretoria, where it was easier to maintain the secrecy. Oppenheimer also lunched regularly with Mandela, who went out of his way to consult the mining magnate on issues of economic importance.
According to the now octogenarian Terreblanche in an interview this past August<http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1749>, Uncle Sam played a major role in tandem with Oppenheimer and his Brenthurst Group. The Americans – first under George H.W. Bush and increasingly under Bill Clinton – threatened the ANC "in a rather diplomatic way" and told them "if you are not going to accept our proposals, we can destabilize South Africa." Terreblanche also speculates that the Americans passed money "under the table."
All this came to a head in 1994, when the International Monetary Fund agreed to loan South Africa $850 million for the transition, but only if the ANC would sign off on the economic deal they had worked out with Oppenheimer, his Brenthurst Group of fellow moguls, and the Clinton Administration in Washington. For South Africa's best-known white revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils, a leader of the South Communist Party and co-founder with Mandela of the ANC's armed wing, "Spear of the Nation," this was "our Faustian moment." With all its strings, the loan precluded a radical economic agenda, as did all the other concessions that the ANC made "to keep negotiations on track and take delivery of the promised land for our people."
In the new introduction<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error> to his memoirs "Armed and Dangerous," Kasrils blames himself as well as Mandela for having "chickened out," his exact words. "Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, there was no other option, that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet Union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses."
Would hanging tough have brought on the bloodbath that Mandela feared? "To break apartheid through negotiation, rather than a bloody civil war, seemed then an option too good to be ignored," Kasrils recalls. But "to lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable." The country's vast mineral reserves and the declining morale of the old order would have allowed far greater gains at the negotiating table. "If we had held our nerve, we could have pressed forward without making the concessions we did."
Without extensive historical research, no one can know with any certainty. But the lack of democracy within the legalized ANC, the secrecy of all the negotiations, and the movement's willingness to go along with Mandela, who had been locked away for 27 years and never really understood the alternatives to joining a privately controlled global economy, gave Oppenheimer and his allies an enormous bargaining advantage.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Anunoby, Ogugua [AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 11:55 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; Wanazuoni
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism?
Who is the hijacker? I want to know?
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chambi Chachage
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 4:44 AM
To: Wanazuoni
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism?
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Riaz K Tayob <riaz.tayob@gmail.com<mailto:riaz.tayob@gmail.com>> wrote:
The Hijacking of Mandela's Legacy
By Pepe Escobar
December 09, 2013 "Information Clearing House<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/> - Beware of strangers bearing gifts. The "gift" is the ongoing, frantic canonization of Nelson Mandela. The "strangers" are the 0.0001 percent, that fraction of the global elite that's really in control (media naturally included).
It's a Tower of Babel of tributes piled up in layer upon layer of hypocrisy – from the US to Israel and from France to Britain<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-hypocrite-naming-nelson-217464>.
What must absolutely be buried under the tower is that the apartheid regime in South Africa was sponsored and avidly defended by the West until, literally, it was about to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. The only thing that had really mattered was South Africa's capitalist economy and immense resources, and the role of Pretoria in fighting "communism." Apartheid was, at best, a nuisance.
Mandela is being allowed sainthood by the 0.0001% because he extended a hand to the white oppressor who kept him in jail for 27 years. And because he accepted – in the name of "national reconciliation" – that no apartheid killers would be tried, unlike the Nazis.
Among the cataracts of emotional tributes and the crass marketization of the icon, there's barely a peep in Western corporate media about Mandela's firm refusal to ditch armed struggle against apartheid (if he had done so, he would not have been jailed for 27 years); his gratitude towards Fidel Castro's Cuba – which always supported the people of Angola, Namibia and South Africa fighting apartheid; and his perennial support for the liberation struggle in Palestine.
Young generations, especially, must be made aware that during the Cold War, any organization fighting for the freedom of the oppressed in the developing world was dubbed "terrorist"; that was the Cold War version of the "war on terror". Only at the end of the 20th century was the fight against apartheid accepted as a supreme moral cause; and Mandela, of course, rightfully became the universal face of the cause.
It's easy to forget that conservative messiah Ronald Reagan – who enthusiastically hailed the precursors of al-Qaeda as "freedom fighters" – fiercely opposed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act because, what else, the African National Congress (ANC) was considered a "terrorist organization" (on top of Washington branding the ANC as "communists").
The same applied to a then-Republican Congressman from Wyoming who later would turn into a Darth Vader replicant, Dick Cheney. As for Israel, it even offered one of its nuclear weapons to the Afrikaners in Pretoria – presumably to wipe assorted African commies off the map.
In his notorious 1990 visit to the US, now as a free man, Mandela duly praised Fidel, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Col. Gaddafi as his "comrades in arms": "There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights." Washington/Wall Street was livid.
And this was Mandela's take, in early 2003, on the by then inevitable invasion of Iraq and the wider war on terror; "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America." No wonder he was kept on the US government terrorist list until as late as 2008.
From terrorism to sainthood
In the early 1960s – when, by the way, the US itself was practicing apartheid in the South - it would be hard to predict to what extent "Madiba" (his clan name), the dandy lawyer and lover of boxing with an authoritarian character streak, would adopt Gandhi's non-violence strategy to end up forging an exceptional destiny graphically embodying the political will to transform society. Yet the seeds of "Invictus" were already there.
The fascinating complexity of Mandela is that he was essentially a democratic socialist. Certainly not a capitalist. And not a pacifist either; on the contrary, he would accept violence as a means to an end. In his books and countless speeches, he always admitted his flaws. His soul must be smirking now at all the adulation.
Arguably, without Mandela, Barack Obama would never have reached the White House; he admitted on the record that his first political act was at an anti-apartheid demonstration. But let's make it clear: Mr. Obama, you're no Nelson Mandela.
To summarize an extremely complex process, in the "death throes" of apartheid, the regime was mired in massive corruption, hardcore military spending and with the townships about to explode. Mix Fidel's Cuban fighters kicking the butt of South Africans (supported by the US) in Angola and Namibia with the inability to even repay Western loans, and you have a recipe for bankruptcy.
The best and the brightest in the revolutionary struggle – like Mandela – were either in jail, in exile, assassinated (like Steve Biko) or "disappeared", Latin American death squad-style. The actual freedom struggle was mostly outside South Africa – in Angola, Namibia and the newly liberated Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Once again, make no mistake; without Cuba – as Mandela amply stressed writing from jail in March 1988 – there would be "no liberation of our continent, and my people, from the scourge of apartheid". Now get one of those 0.0001% to admit it.
In spite of the debacle the regime – supported by the West – sensed an opening. Why not negotiate with a man who had been isolated from the outside world since 1962? No more waves and waves of Third World liberation struggles; Africa was now mired in war, and all sorts of socialist revolutions had been smashed, from Che Guevara killed in Bolivia in 1967 to Allende killed in the 1973 coup in Chile.
Mandela had to catch up with all this and also come to grips with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of what European intellectuals called "real socialism." And then he would need to try to prevent a civil war and the total economic collapse of South Africa.
The apartheid regime was wily enough to secure control of the Central Bank – with crucial IMF help – and South Africa's trade policy. Mandela secured only a (very significant) political victory. The ANC only found out it had been conned when it took power. Forget about its socialist idea of nationalizing the mining and banking industries – owned by Western capital, and distribute the benefits to the indigenous population. The West would never allow it. And to make matters worse, the ANC was literally hijacked by a sorry, greedy bunch.
Follow the roadmap
John Pilger is spot on pointing to economic apartheid<http://johnpilger.com/articles/mandelas-greatness-may-be-secured-but-not-his-legacy> in South Africa now with a new face.
Patrick Bond has written arguably the best expose<http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/the-mandela-years-in-power/> anywhere of the Mandela years – and their legacy.
And Ronnie Kasrils does a courageous mea culpa dissecting how Mandela and the ANC accepted a devil's pact<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error> with the usual suspects.
The bottom line: Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism. And that's the dirty secret of him being allowed sainthood.
Now for the future. Cameroonian Achille Mbembe, historian and political science professor, is one of Africa's foremost intellectuals. In his book Critique of Black Reason<http://www.amazon.com/Critique-raison-n%C3%A8gre-Achille-Mbembe/dp/2707177474/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1386415859&sr=8-2&keywords=achille+mbembe>, recently published in France (not yet in English), Mbembe praises Mandela and stresses that Africans must imperatively invent new forms of leadership, the essential precondition to lift themselves in the world. All-too-human "Madiba" has provided the roadmap. May Africa unleash one, two, a thousand Mandelas.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.
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* EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
* EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>. [Now free in two download formats]
* Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global Emancipation of Labour<http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>
* Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
* EBook 2011, Under, Against, Beyond (Compilation 1980s-90s) http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
* Paper 2012: The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade Unions
<http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
* Paper 2012: Marikana, South Africa, The March of the Undead<http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/marikana-south-africa-elsewhere-the-dance-of-the-undead>
* Chapter, 2013. 'Many New Internationalisms!', in Corinne Kumar (ed), Asking, We Walk: The South as New Political Imaginary, Bangalore: Streelekha Publications.
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