An editorial tribute to Nelson Mandela in the Mail & Guardian on July 18 (Madiba, we thank you) contained the following sentence: “He took a country whose political system had embodied the worst excesses of Nazism, capitalism, communism and racism and turned it into the world’s moral beacon.”
The “worst excesses” of Nazism and communism? That type of throwaway comparison is becoming all too prevalent in a world that is beginning to forget (or has never taken the opportunity to learn about) the true horrors of those systems.
There is no defence for apartheid, its perpetrators and its ruthless application. But to say that it embodied the worst excesses of the Nazi, the Stalinist, the Maoist or the Pol Pot regimes is to distort fact and history.
Where, in apartheid South Africa, were the extermination camps, the gas chambers, the purges? Where was there a system of deliberate and active genocide?
Indeed, there are parallels and the country will live for generations with the horrific aftermath of deliberately engineered poverty and illiteracy. There was truly appalling political repression, detention without trial, torture, the murder of detainees and other political opponents (although, mercifully, the numbers of political murders in South Africa cannot begin to compare with those in Germany or Russia). There was banishment, house arrest, forced exile, discrimination purely on the grounds of race, denial of access to decent education, to jobs, to amenities.
Certainly there are similarities. The removal of whole communities to bleak and barren racially separate townships and fictional, unsustainable “homelands” could be likened to the confinement of whole communities in ghettoes in Western Europe and the banishment of tens of thousands of people to remote areas of Russia or China.
But there are also great differences. Neither Nazism nor Stalinism nor Maoism permitted any form of opposition, any suggestion of freedom of thought in universities or freedom of expression in the press or on the country’s stages.
Would any of these regimes have countenanced in any form whatever the existence of a Black Sash, an End Conscription Campaign or a United Democratic Front; the editorial policies of a Rand Daily Mail; the writings of academics at some of the more enlightened universities; the type of theatre that appeared on the stages of the Market, the Space or the Baxter?
Most importantly though, would they have allowed even the suggestion of a fair trial for those they considered enemies of the state?
If in no other way, the apartheid state distinguished itself from those totally repressive regimes by the maintenance of a justice system (however flawed) that permitted committed lawyers to appear before judges (frequently politically tainted, but not always evil) to defend their clients in a Treason Trial, a Rivonia Trial, a Pretoria Twelve Trial, a Delmas Trial.
Not all the trials were fair, especially those in the rural areas (the Eastern Cape being a prime example). The dice were always loaded in favour of the state. But the fact is that many people accused of politically motivated activities were acquitted either initially or on appeal. Not so under the Nazi and communist systems where, if there were trials at all, they were nothing more than kangaroo courts with lawyers and judges mere puppets in a rigged system.
Apartheid was evil. It is not necessary to exaggerate its horrors, as has become the wont of political commentators and polemicists or people engaged in historical revisionism.
Nothing in apartheid begins to equate with the Holocaust. Nothing even approximates to the horrors of the Stalinist tyranny. A far more appropriate comparison would be with the excesses of the regimes of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and the like.
There are many prominent people in this country today whose lives would have been worth nothing had they pursued their political opposition in mid-20th century Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia or other fascist or communist states.
The very fact that the world was able to celebrate Madiba’s 85th birthday and that he is surrounded by so many of the remarkable men and women of the struggle era (who would simply have been annihilated under Nazism or communism) gives the lie to the “worst excesses” proposition.
Raymond Tucker is a Johannesburg attorney who acted for numerous political activists in the Seventies and Eighties.