With the end of apartheid, many hoped that life for the people of Southern Africa would begin to yield something entirely different from the unhappy past.
Across the sub-continent, leaders argued for a community in which people would matter more than potentates. Echoing them, economists predicted that one day a prosperous Southern Africa could easily feed itself. Taking the cue, bureaucrats busied themselves with recasting regional institutions, trying to turn them into multi-lateral instruments that could be used to secure social, economic and political development.
Unfortunately things have not turned out this way and the daily news from the hole in the region we still call Zimbabwe underlines this. So, what did happen to Southern Africa’s post-apartheid moment?
This was the question considered by activists and academics in Windhoek last week. Sponsored by the Catholic Institute for International Affairs, the symposium was both sobering and uplifting.
Nearly 10 years after the end of apartheid, living in Southern Africa remains a brutal experience: drought, disease and disaster have radically shortened life expectancies. And although it may not seem possible to add to the bleak list, unemployment, poverty and starvation have also ballooned.
The testimony and, yes, the anger of each participant at the symposium was plain: the politics of the times — markets and multilateralism — have failed Southern Africa’s people.
With this, there was sheer incredulity at the notion that big, brassy ideas, like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), offer hope of a better life, let alone liberation. How ever it was packaged and repackaged by political leaders or the experts who serve them, Nepad, it was argued, is a retreaded idea, cast within stylised language and set within a new authoritarianism. Rooted in the pathology of structural adjustment and market economics and shrouded in the discourse of democratic control, Nepad, not unlike the Southern African Development Community, promises trickle-down political opportunity and, if truth were told, very little hope for security.
The idea of security was very much in mind at the symposium. But whose security, the participants asked, really mattered? States? Leaders? Investors? People?
A striking image of a destitute woman in a rural area with a string of children to support and who had just found out that she is HIV-positive was powerfully cast by a Zimbabwean participant as emblematic of those in the region whose security should ideally be uppermost in governments’ descisions.
But few participants thought the bureaucracies of the region, whose universe is ruled by budgets, could show any lasting concern to those, like the symbolic woman, whose lives and futures had been blighted by what is celebrated as globalisation.
But, if security concerns and the grand schemes of politicians, were subjected to doubt, a mix of cynicism and irony was reserved for the region’s ”Big Brother”, South Africa. The country’s governing party was, participant after participant argued, a parody of its former self — unwilling or simply unable to confront either the crisis in Zimbabwe or of fashioning a vision for the region beyond its national interest.
South Africa’s post-liberation experience confirmed what had occurred across the sub-continent: politics had moved from being about ”controlled change to changed control”, to use the words of one participant.
To be frank, this country’s case was not made easier by a South African contributor who delivered a paper on the scenario for political change in each country in the region, except his own! Arrogance aside, how was it possible, participants wanted to know, to make this kind of gaffe. How, indeed!
But, if state politics have failed the region, so too, the symposium heard, have other forms of social organisation. A strong contribution from a northern-based activist argued that NGOs should abandon ”the missionary position”. They had to break with their long-established charitable paradigm and seek to empower people — especially women — in the places where they live.
Not easy this, especially in a world where funding for NGOs has become increasingly fragile and in which northern states exercise vigilance over these organisations. And yet, without a vigorous re-engagement with the politics of emancipation, there was little hope that northern-based NGOs could productively partner regional social movements.
So, what lies ahead for progressive politics in the region? This is impossible to predict. Nonetheless, after three days of talks, this participant offers a few sure bets.
There will be a strident questioning of the true purpose of globalisation and the policies that it has nurtured. Not only have these favoured the rich but, as importantly, they have cast blame on victims. In Southern Africa where access to support, financial and other, continues to be determined by race, the social malady of the urban world is both blamed on, and then exported to, a hidden countryside. (A rural grandmother looking after HIV-positive orphans offers another striking emblem of the region’s social reality.)
Then, irrespective of the determination of states to exercise social control, people-to-people links will deepen across the sub-continent. In this process, as in other poor corners of the world, networks — civil society, church and others — will be indispensable to building new forms of community.
Will these erase the national boundaries and recast the political lives of its people? Difficult to say really. But perhaps the question is irrelevant. What matters, however, is that new forms of solidarity — cultural, contemporary, circumstantial — will become a permanent feature of Southern Africa’s search for a different political universe.
Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela professor of politics at Rhodes University. His new book Security and Politics in South Africa: The Regional Dimension was published by UCT Press this year.