The lizard-skin-shoe class still prospers in South Africa
The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela’s death at the
good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that,
though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation,
the psychological defense mechanism against unwanted thoughts described by
Freud that leads to exaggerated expressions of precisely opposite thoughts. The Guardian and the Observer, Britain’s
two foremost liberal-left newspapers, had between them approximately fifty
broadsheet pages devoted to Mandela, many times more than the return and
re-crucifixion of Christ would have received. Methinks these newspapers (and
many others) did protest too much.
This is not to say that Mandela was without importance or that he merited
no praise. His greatest achievement by far, and an important one, was the
avoidance of the interracial violence that had long been predicted as
“inevitable” in South Africa and the only way things would ever change there.
He did this by his dignity and lack of rancor after his release from prison and
during his presidency, the first presidency post-apartheid. For example, his
enthusiasm for the South African team in the rugby World Cup, whether genuine
or not, was a wise and shrewd way of trying to prove that South African
patriotism should transcend racial divides, for of course the team was mostly
white. No better way of calming fears symbolically could well have been
imagined; Mandela played the part to perfection, and all honor to him for that.
“There is nothing like adversity to produce both swine and admirable people.”
But we should not exaggerate, either. The event that saved his historical
reputation was not under his control. It was the downfall of the Soviet Union,
for it was surely not a coincidence that the un-banning of the African National
Congress and the release of Mandela himself happened only after the implosion
of the Soviet bloc. Until then the Communist Party of South Africa, both the
most Stalinist and the most resolutely pro-Soviet of communist parties anywhere
(not always an easy balance to preserve), had what in Soviet langue de bois was called “a leading role” in the
ANC.
As it happened I was in South Africa about the time of the great
transition, shortly after the ANC was legalized, and I interviewed Joe Slovo,
one of the communist leaders of the ANC who had just returned from exile. (His
wife, Ruth First, a woman who liked every revolution however disastrous its
effects, was murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of a letter
bomb.)
Slovo, who wrote Pravda-style langue de bois fluently, was a pleasant man, but I
found him to be not particularly intelligent. When I asked him whether during
his many visits to the Soviet Union he had noticed anything about it—for
example, the absence of goods in the shops and the lack of freedom—he replied
that what I had to understand was that the Soviet Union had always supported
the freedom struggle in South Africa and that he was always the honored guest
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and that therefore he was always
driven in limousines from the airport to excellent accommodation where he was
very well fed and watered.
This did not strike me as a particularly impressive answer. I asked him
whether he thought it was not a little foolish to recommend an entire socioeconomic
system for South Africa on the experiential basis of flattery of his person and
the consumption of banquets, and he rather feebly agreed that perhaps it had
been.
By then, of course, there was no possibility of South Africa following the
Soviet path; by then Russia had neither the means nor the will to support or
prop up yet another catastrophically failed state in Africa, this time on a
scale far exceeding its previous efforts. Prominent leaders of the ANC whom I
met had by then dropped all ideological pretensions of a Soviet hue and had
gone over to sharp mohair suits and lizard-skin shoes.
Read more at:
http://takimag.com/article/south_africas_dubious_liberation_theodore_dalrymple#axzz2nbkKdcmw
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