“I hate George Bush.” Johannesburg domestic Christina Cele’s four-word philippic appears to sum up the black South African view of this war.
There have been no formal soundings here, as in many countries. But in the past six weeks one has not heard a single black person endorse the United States invasion of Iraq, or seen one black letter of support in the media. Anti-war protests, including a march by 6 000 people in Pretoria, have overwhelmingly drawn Africans and South African Indians.
If talk shows and letters to the editor are any pointer, the average white South African feels very differently. Perhaps two-thirds of the letters written by whites to the Mail & Guardian on the subject of Iraq have been of the flag-waving pro-war variety.
What has been very striking is the emotionally over-wrought, hard-breathing tone of much of this correspondence. The M&G‘s editorial condemnation of the war is denounced as “shallow”, “an insane rant”, “infantile and demeaning” and “hysterical” by readers who then go on to suggest (without hysteria, of course) that it was penned by Zimbabwe demagogue Jonathan Moyo, the Iraqi communications minister or Osama bin Laden.
The analysis is not a sophisticated one. It makes no reference to the sidelining of the United Nations, apparently considered a trifling matter. The intimation that the M&G has lost its marbles ignores the emphatic rejection of the war by the mass of continental Europeans —never mind the people of the Middle East and the broader Third World.
No attempt is made to show that the invasion meets well-defined legal criteria for just war. No defence is offered for the US’s rape of another’s sovereignty, while being so acutely protective of its own. There is no sense of the humbug of the US — the strong right arm of every despot and torture state during the Cold War — in cloaking its geopolitical interests in the sticky rhetoric of liberation. And no apparent distaste for the evangelists and corporate carpet-baggers now swarming in behind the smart bombs.
Instead, we are treated to the platitudinous fact that Saddam Hussein is a rotter. This has become the only defence now that the initial pretext for the invasion, Saddam’s doomsday weapons stockpile, looks increasingly like a CIA pork pie.
Behind this lurks a much more insidious argument — or perhaps less an argument than an ideological reflex. In part it is what George Orwell called “bully worship” — the idea that the successful exercise of power is its own justification. In some letters, the glee over the triumph of American arms is palpable.
But there is also the assumption that the US can be trusted to act unilaterally, in defiance of international law and opinion, because it is keeping the world safe for “us” — the “civilised world” of well-heeled Caucasians.
It is a reasonable inference that South Africa’s white Gulf warriors instinctively back Ariel Sharon against the Palestinians, just as they almost certainly backed Jonas Savimbi against the MPLA, the Contras against the Nicaraguan government, Protestant against Catholic in Northern Ireland, Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and the Green Berets against the Viet Cong.
Their instinct is to back whites against blacks, right against left, north against south, strong against weak, rich against poor. Theirs is a settler-colonial perspective, where the primary bond is with metropolitan power rather than their black fellow-citizens. Keeping alive South Africa’s former colonial connection, they identify particularly strongly with the English-speaking world order. There is some evidence, from letters to the M&G and the Afrikaans press, that Afrikaners are less enamoured with what is essentially an Anglo-Saxon military escapade.
The memory of the concentration camps is not entirely effaced, and Afrikaans-speaking intellectuals have historically leaned towards Paris and Berlin, rather than Washington and London.
It is on the ideological plane, more clearly than the economic, that President Thabo Mbeki’s “two nations” thesis holds true. More blacks may be clawing their way into the middle classes, but their world-view remains irreconcilable with that of most whites.
One group strongly desires the expansion of US hegemony over the globe, and is encouraged by the violent overthrow of a regime in the ideologically threatening and economically vital Middle East, well outside the traditional US “sphere of influence”.
Liberating ordinary Iraqis from Saddam is not the root issue, any more than the Falklands War was about toppling Argentina’s military junta. For a minority that considers its way of life and values under siege, the invasion of Iraq has a reassuring symbolism.
For the other South Africans, the war recalls a centuries-long tutelage and subordination at the hands of white Westerners, and the forcing of Western economic, political and social forms down unwilling throats. The fact that the US brushed aside the complaints of the UN, Non-Aligned Movement and African Union underscores their impotence and rekindles their humiliated sense that they are still children and pawns on the world stage.
One consequence of this is the reinforcement of wrong-headedness on the human rights and governance crisis in Zimbabwe. It does not help that the Western powers pressing for change in that tortured country also spearhead “the coalition of the willing”.
And it has implications for South Africa’s domestic politics. The Democratic Alliance has stopped short of outright endorsement of the war, but its attacks on government policy, and general posture on the Middle East, leave little doubt as to where it stands.
Communist leader Jeremy Cronin has made the point that the DA is of neither the left nor right — it is of the West. Until it can forthrightly condemn outrages like the Iraqi invasion and Israeli policy on the Palestinians, the party will remain fundamentally alien to the great majority of black voters.