Two years after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, Martin Woollacott, the Guardian’s leading commentator on the world’s geopolitics, visited South Africa
WHEN historians reassess the South African revolution, they may well decide that the old regime gave up less because of pressure from its enemies or because it belatedly realised its own wrong-doing than because the inexorable forces of population growth and urbanisation were beyond its capacity to control.
The twisted form that modernisation took in South Africa turned impulses experienced by all societies, the mechanisation of agriculture and the movement to the cities, into the engines of truly menacing social changes. The National Party handed over power at precisely the moment when power had become a burden that was too much to bear. Indeed, it had already ceased to have power, in the proper sense of the word: it only had problems.
These problems now stand at the centre of affairs, displacing the negotiations with old enemies and the creation of a new framework for government that has until now occupied so much time and taken so much energy. There will be a Government of National Unity for a while longer, but the African National Congress will soon squarely face the legacy of vast social dysfunction, under-education and armed anger, this last in particularly dangerous shape in KwaZulu-Natal.
White South Africans are now relieved, as a group, of both guilt and direct responsibility for those problems. From whatever perspective, whether it is that of business, of liberal values, or that defence of “cultural rights” which has become the rallying cry of many Afrikaners, they can take a critical and demanding attitude to government.
Ironic transformation: those who made the mess can now criticise those who have to try to clean it up. Yet the criticisms are not therefore to be dismissed. The anxieties and fears of whites, and of middle-class South Africans of other colours, centre around the autocracy that people now sense in President Nelson Mandela and around the enigmatic figure of Thabo Mbeki, his likely successor.
In spite of the miracle of the negotiated revolution, signs of insecurity are everywhere, from the barbed wire that decorates the suburbs to the falling rand. The scale of the problems that face the country seems to demand a super-effective government. Thus, every hint of corruption or incompetence, of intrigue or back-stabbing, can become magnified, a harbinger of the banana republic that is the common nightmare of both white and black.
But, in trying to measure these doubts and worries, it is worth remembering that insecurity — racial, social, economic, and ecological — has been a constant in South African politics from the beginning. The attempt to create stability out of unpromising materials is the central strand of the country’s history. For all the differences between previous regimes and the first multi- racial and democratic government, there are unexpectedly close parallels with the past.
Constitution-making in 1910, when South Africa was created, and Constitution-making in 1996, when it is being recreated, revolve around similar themes and similar dangers. Racial reconciliation, centralisation of power, the question of labour, including immigrant labour, and the achievement of a social and economic stability satisfactory to that perennial arbiter of South African history, the “outside investor”, were elements then as they are now. Lord Selborne, High Commissioner for South Africa at the time of Union, recommended it in a famous memorandum as a way of ending “fluctuations in political conditions” which bring ” constant destruction of capital.” He could have been writing today.
There are also great differences. Above all, racial reconciliation in 1910 was narrowly between Boer and Briton, and at the expense of blacks. Labour, then, was scarce, whereas now there is an embarrassment of it, yet the question of labour at a “proper price” is as central today as it was 90 years ago.
The broad danger, too, is the same: that the price for stability which appeases local elites and satisfies the foreign investor is at the exclusion of some large part of the population. Then, it was all blacks. Today it would be a more complex, graded exclusion of some sections of the black population. To say this is a danger of which anybody in South Africa is unaware would be nonsense. It is the danger of which they are most aware. But being aware does not mean that it is easily avoided.
Again, what links 1910 and 1996 is South Africa’s curious combination of wealth and vulnerability. It is a semi-arid country which can be made to grow food and fibre in prosperous quantities, but whose agriculture is always on the edge of viability. It has minerals, notably gold, but always, somehow, more difficult to extract than those in other mineral-rich countries. It can support a substantial manufacturing industry, but one that has usually been of mediocre quality. It has exhibited a constant dependence on outside investment, and could become the prey of the kind of international capitalism that moves in when all the factors are just right and then slips away when things change, leaving nothing of value behind.
The fragility of South African wealth is a weapon in the hands of those who want to defend the social status quo, to keep wages low or drive them lower, to preserve present patterns of land ownership, and to keep affirmative action in industry, government and academic life to a minimum. But it is also true that the wrong policies on the land or in industry undoubtedly could damage the country’s productive base, and its educational and professional standards are equally at risk.
The need to steer a truly skilled course between these rocks is what makes the question of the competence of the ANC government so critical. Mandela is a great man, one whose work is almost done. Mbeki is a shadowy figure, outlines sketched by rumour and anecdote. Business likes him, liberals are uncertain. South Africans of all colours ask whether he is a big enough man for the job, a question to which there is at the moment no clear answer.
He is consolidating his position, and there have been casualties, including his rival for the succession, Cyril Ramaphosa, and a particularly able and principled minister, Pallo Jordan. There are signals that debate and participation within the ANC are not what they used to be. More generally, there emerge, in South Africa, “shut-up” words, like “standards” on one side, and “racist” on the other — phrases intended to stop debate in its tracks.
Yet the future of South Africa will be best served by continued argument, in and out of government, that is conscious both of needs and of South Africa’s fragilities. The country’s history displays a strand of racial co-operation and common culture, although ambiguous and mingling oppression with intimacy, in response to the difficulties of livelihood in the sub-continent.
This is wonderfully demonstrated in The Seed is Mine, the new book by Witwatersrand University historian Charles van Onselen, recording the life of a black sharecropper family. An imperfect cross-racial tradition was sundered by agricultural modernisation and by the NP’s terrible ideological adventure, which abandoned what remained of human solidarity in a harsh country in favour of a brutal seizure of the majority’s assets. The fragilities of South Africa can drive division or unity, depending on how they are approached. In spite of all the changes, that remains the message of its history.