Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa
by Allister Sparks
(Jonathan Ball)
In 2004 South Africa celebrates 10 years of freedom. A publishing and literary boom is imminent as authors, academics and a range of think-tanks add their tuppenny’s worth, assessing how far South Africa has come — or gone, depending on where one stands.
Allister Sparks, a grandfather of South African journalism, has fired one of the first volleys in the 10-year assessment with Beyond the Miracle, the third in his series on South Africa. It follows The Mind of South Africa and Tomorrow is Another Country, taking the reader into the country on the eve of its 10-year retrospective. It is an even-handed work, almost encyclopedic in its breadth. Sparks traverses all the important political terrains — from Parliament to government and into the turbulent newsrooms of the SABC (where he did a stint as editor-in-chief).
It is filled with the details that one wants in such a political account: from Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel’s pique at the portraits of former finance ministers he found outside his first office; to former transport minister Mac Maharaj’s decision to fire Neil Barnard, the ex-spy who was ensconced as his first director general.
I enjoyed Sparks’s fly-on-the-wall account of a parastatal in transition from state to public broadcaster. He sees the SABC as a microcosm of South Africa: its every fit and start (and there have been many) has resonance for the other institutions that have had to be changed — “transformed” in post-1994 parlance. His skirmishes with a new black leadership at the SABC, notably Snuki Zikalala, who effectively replaced him as top news czar, are similar to skirmishes at the Land Bank and in several government departments. Since then, the SABC has lost two more news chiefs, symbolic of the difficulties of changing organisations.
The third part of Sparks’s trilogy is arguably a broader work than a purely national account, for it tackles globalisation — the process of opening economies and developing free trade that was heightened with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
South African freedom came in tandem with this era of globalisation, when all old ideologies were rocked and the African National Congress came to power in a vacuum of political ideas. It had to fashion its own space and Sparks’s jury is out on many of the choices it has made, most notably the economic direction.
His account of how the ANC came to adopt the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, overturning the more interventionist and redistributive recommendations of its own think-tank, the Macro-Economic Research Group, is a fascinating insider’s account of how revolutionary mantles were exchanged for a set of economics far more blue-suited than anyone could have imagined in the days of the Freedom Charter.
Beyond the Miracle chronicles this most challenged and fraught of journeys — from Nelson Mandela’s ditching of nationalisation at a World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland to several conferences inside and outside the country, most notably the elaboration of the market-savvy Mont Fleur scenarios at a Stellenbosch estate.
President Thabo Mbeki emerges a paled leader in this account — both his handling of Aids and of Zimbabwe is held up to a scrutiny and criticism quite unusual for Sparks. In this book, Mbeki is found to lack, in office, the spark and strategy the author first discerned in many meetings he held with the then exiled leader in London and Lusaka.
Like many of the books written about the Mbeki years, these parts are unsatisfactory, though Beyond the Miracle avoids the traps that other works have fallen into. Those published until now veer between the hagiographic — painting him as a leader of near Nkrumah-like proportions — and the virulently oppositional, which fall for the stock portrayal of the tragic hero, impaled on his own sword. All lack the biographer’s minutely observed account, which is why we await Mark Gevisser’s biography with such lust.
A small gripe about Beyond the Miracle is the number of errors in the text that glare at the regular political observer and which other reviewers have already pointed to.
I’m collecting all the 10-year works because these have been the interesting years, the years that have taken us from the feel-good rainbow nation into the altogether more edgy and uncertain future. Beyond the Miracle will be in the top five on my book-shelf.