It was at the height of the total onslaught. The communists were around the corner in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe. They were even among us, stirring up the natives who otherwise would have been happy that they were better off than the rest of Africa. The world was calling for sanctions, disinvestments and boycotts, and our only link to the outside world was Sun City, a pension fund for has-been stars.
The Rubicon lay before us like a seductress, tempting us towards re-integration into the world, and rugby beyond the Currie Cup. Behind us lay prisons full of future government leaders, streets full of angry T-shirts, graves full of unnatural causes and townships full of freedom-fighter candidates, all because of policies empty of morality and human rights.
This was the era of Reagan’s constructive engagement. It was the time of Thatcher’s quiet diplomacy. It was also then that the rand first went bungee jumping, tied only to PW’s middle finger.
I was on an exchange programme, part of which took me to the Nicaragua of the Marxist-oriented Sandinistas. It was an inspiring experience.
Here was a little country that had just rid itself of the Samoza-dictator dynasty, and was now addressing the primary needs of its people. Within a few years, polio had been eliminated through health brigades travelling all over the country, inoculating children against the scourge. Illiteracy had been reduced significantly, again through bands of literacy teachers trawling the countryside. Electricity was made available to even the lowliest of wooden shacks. University students and city professionals volunteered to help harvest sugar and coffee crops in order to generate the maximum foreign currency needed for development purposes. The floating stage set in a beautiful crater in Managua that had once been reserved to entertain the corrupt elite, was now open to all.
But if things were so different now, why were some engaged in a counter-revolutionary war in the eastern part of the country, we asked the Sandinistas. The short answer was that the United States couldn’t allow Nicaragua to succeed, or it could lead to a domino effect in Central America, posing a threat to US interests in the region, hence their backing of the war and political opposition.
World affairs, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, are conducted not on the basis of the pursuit of human rights, freedom and democracy, but on the basis of self-interest.
”Sure, Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” was the US foreign policy towards Nicaragua when human rights, freedom and democracy meant little there. Yet, now that the Sandinistas were making major gains in improving the lives of their people, there was the US engaged in a war to eliminate them, at the same time that they were constructively engaged with the apartheid regime and its abysmal record of human rights abuses, lack of democracy and absence of freedom.
What would you have done differently in dealing with the people who live on the eastern side of Nicaragua and who had experienced a different form of colonisation to those who live in the west, we queried. Ah, said the Sandinistas, then we sent in our tanks and our soldiers. Now, we would send our social anthropologists to help us to understand the people, their culture and their concerns, and then we would respond appropriately to these.
A recent conference in Maputo focused on the cultural indicators of human development. Interestingly, countries that historically were not renowned for Western-style democracy and human freedoms — like the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Cuba — feature high on the UNDP Human Development Index.
South Africa celebrates its 10th year of freedom and democracy and its 10th Human Rights Day. Yet we feature at number 111 on the list of 175 countries ranked according indices such as literacy, school enrolment, gross domestic product and life expectancy, which stands at a shocking 51 years for South Africa.
Yes, there have been many improvements in the past 10 years, but given what the Sandinistas were able to achieve in a five-year period with much more limited resources and with greater political opposition, one cannot help but think of what could have been if our leaders had had as much political will and commitment to human development as they have concern for their golf handicaps.