President Thabo Mbeki governs an imagined South Africa — that much is clear from his regular ruminations on the internet. And any citizen or body of citizens who diverges in word or deed from the president’s imagined country is out. Dissent, and you face an on-line skewering.
Last week it was the turn of journalist and activist Charlene Smith, who has dared to wage a loud campaign against South Africa’s rape epidemic. Last month it was Tony Trahar, CE of Anglo American, who dared to suggest that aspects of South Africa pose a risk for investors. A while before it was the “ultra-left”, who dared strike on the eve of one of the mega-conferences the government so loves holding.
The country of Mbeki’s imagination is consensual, homogeneous, safe, prosperous and settled. All of these are laudable aims, which the mass of South Africans would like to see realised. But in key respects they constitute a dream to strive for.
South Africa is stable, democratic and on the way to better things — but it is a young nation still creating itself. It is also fractious, difficult, divided and not without baggage inherited from its past. Racial issues, temporarily displaced by the optimism of the immediate post-1994 rainbow years, rear their heads regularly. This week, for example, the acting Chief Justice, Pius Langa, was drawn into an ugly racial battle on the Cape Bench.
The feel-good years have been replaced by the get-real years. The politics of structural transition were always going to be tougher than rainbow nation politics, because power had to start changing hands, privilege to give way and wealth to be transferred.
As we face up to reality, one of the imbalances we have to redress is the subordinate position of women, which includes their vulnerability to domestic and sexual violence. South Africa is extremely unsafe for its women — a fact the president sought to downplay in last week’s on-line letter. He sneeringly questioned Smith’s views and Interpol’s global rape statistics, suggesting that rape is endemic in South Africa and that sexual violence is closely tied to patriarchy and tradition. For Mbeki, to say such things are racist — because they clash with his imagined country, where women are safe.
The reality is devastatingly different, as any plain-speaking woman will tell him. Urban yuppies of all colours now include among their accessories teargas sprays and panic buttons. For rural woman, largely black and of all ages, rape is also a very real danger.Â
The South African Police Service’s own statistics — about which Mbeki penned last week’s paean — show that rape is among the violent crimes that remain at a stubbornly high level. Â
This is the third time Mbeki has sought to downplay the rape scourge in South Africa. In October 1999 he questioned rape statistics in a speech to the National Council of Provinces; in July 2000 he attacked Smith as being “blinded by racist rage”. Now he has repeated the charge. While South Africa’s statistics are far from flawless, there should be no doubt that rape is one of the country’s most serious challenges. If women are not safe from sexual violence at the hands of strangers, lovers, friends and husbands, their equality is only half won. And while the government has tried numerous innovative methods to prevent and prosecute sexual violence crimes more effectively, its policy remains a work in progress.
In each attack Mbeki has castigated the use of rape statistics and the campaign against rape as playing into the notion of South Africa as “a nation of rapists”. Last week he described Smith’s suggestion that patriarchal sexual attitudes might fuel the rape scourge as tantamount to a “view … which defines the African people as barbaric savages”.
In the president’s imagined country, both Aids and rape are minor vexations, which have been exaggerated by racists who think of black people as having uncontrollable sexual appetites.
Instead of serious challenges which need management and bold leadership from the front, they have become festering sores in the presidential imagination, where each is conceived as an assault on the dignity of black people. Instead of making and implementing policies which confront the reality, Mbeki obsesses that both play into colonial stereotypes of black sexuality. The sad thing is that the stereotype exists largely in his own mind.
What is the country of our collective dream? It is one in which problems like Aids and rape are faced head-on. Where we are led through this troubled interregnum towards the truly non-racial society democrats fought for. And where all citizens can speak their minds fearlessly, without having to check their melanin levels or their ideological leanings to see whether they have the right to do so.
Mbeki comes down hard on all his opponents, but reserves his most biting venom for whites who dare differ from him. It is one of the paradoxes of the Mbeki era that apparatchiks of the apartheid state, such as Pik Botha and Marthinus van Schalkwyk, are in the president’s team, while people with a history of activism and solidarity with the liberation movement, such as Jeremy Cronin and Charlene Smith, are hung out to dry.
If the president were to log off from the Net and get out and meet his people other than on the highly orchestrated imbizo programmes, he might find that the republic, although not a Utopia, is a pretty cool place.
The bad-mouthing of South Africa he obsesses about is also far less pervasive than he imagines. No one, except perhaps a few far-right crazies, questions the legitimacy of his government. But diversity of opinion, the questioning of authority and a vigorous non-government sector must all, and always, be part of the beloved country.