infections
`One of the tragedies of life, sir, is that it’s possible to become like that which we hate most,” Bishop Peter Storey said in powerful testimony to the truth commission’s hearing into Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her football team this week. The primary cancer, he owned, was the oppression of apartheid, but “secondary infections have touched many of apartheid’s opponents and eroded their knowledge of good and evil”.
We would not presume an easy equivalence, for instance, between Winnie Madikizela- Mandela, herself a victim of apartheid thuggery, and Eugene de Kock, the most notorious of apartheid’s bad guys. Yet there are uncomfortable similarities between the reign of terror directed from Orlando East and the evil that flowed out of Vlakplaas. The heads of both places had overwhelmingly strong personalities, holding sway over thugs and psychopaths attracted to their cause – and who eventually betrayed them in public.
In both cases, the bottom line was the ruthless abuse of power. The big difference, of course, is that Vlakplaas was set up with the specific purpose of eliminating the opponents of apartheid and remained under a command structure.
With Madikizela-Mandela, the command structure, we suspect, stopped with the lady herself. The African National Congress’s involvement was more an attempt to hide the truth, to limit the damage, an initiative which resulted in what Storey called a “suffocating fog of silence and lies”.
While one has to cite the bravery of local activists who risked community ostracism and death in their struggle during those dark days of paranoia and state manipulation to bring Madikizela-Mandela into the structures in a disciplined and dignified way, the ANC in Lusaka saw her as royal game.
Despite her conviction for kidnapping, the ANC allowed her to became an MP, and then a deputy minister. Scandals continued to attach themselves to her, but the only transgression that was regarded as serious enough to cost her her job was when she defied the president by taking an unauthorised trip to West Africa.
There is much speculative talk about Madikizela-Mandela’s “constituency” and maybe there are numbers of diehard supporters out there – but frankly, it’s a stereotype, to cast the poorest of the poor as a wild mob without a head who will be swayed by every populist impulse.
We are convinced that the real support base of Madikizela-Mandela will be shown to be exaggerated. Already the crowds who once thronged at her court cases have dried up like vapour. Like everything staged for the cameras, when the make-up comes off, life as we know it goes on.
The problem is that Madikizela-Mandela, despite her hurt and wounded pride, has always known how to play the ANC better than it knows how to play her.
We only hope that when Madikizela-Mandela takes the microphone she will address herself to the victims, the little people who have had to bear the wounds of all this. It is time to stop playing politics. To heal our damaged past, compassion and humanity must reassert themselves.
A bout of Asian flu
Bill Clinton and his regional summiteers in Vancouver this week assembled to contemplate a very different sort of miracle from the one they are accustomed to discussing. The Japanese Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, joined him with a nervous eye after Monday’s decision in Tokyo on the Yamaichi Securities shutdown. President Kim Young-sam has told the Korean people that they must expect “bone-carving pain” as his country scrambles for help from the International Monetary Fund.
Out goes the success story of a “booming Asia”, which offered an enviable model to the Western world. In comes a counter- miracle of plunging markets and shaky finances propped up by corrupt and dubious political structures which, as the United States State Department said last weekend, could give everyone a nasty bout of Asian flu.
It was Clinton who elevated the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation Forum in 1993 to a regional summit, as he shifted Washington’s vision towards the Far East. He was reinforcing what had already become a main strand of US diplomacy. In spite of the occasional glance towards Europe, the Pacific Basin was really the only vision on the horizon.
As the tigers grew sleek and were joined by China, the region seemed set to dominate the new century: the task for the West was how to adapt this to its best advantage. There was an important political corollary as the Cold War came to an end. What was happening in Asia was seen to underline the end of ideology and strategic contention that had held back global development for decades. Geo-economics would in future prevail more than geo-politics, just as long as the market economies continued to grow.
There was an unwillingness to contemplate the other side of the picture. The earlier bursting of Japan’s bubble economy should have sent a signal. The political weakness and corruption of countries such as Thailand and Indonesia were discounted. Even though the World Bank has begun to focus attention on China’s basic weaknesses – including lack of political reform and approaching environmental disaster – there has been reluctance to explore the adverse effects upon China of a wider economic collapse in the region.
The question being asked is whether the miracle will turn into a nightmare. But, equally, this wave of alarm may prove as unbalanced as the tide of euphoria that has ebbed so fast.