George W Bush draped his pro-rich, pro-military, pro-Halliburton and profoundly un-American post-9/11 budget in the American flag. He threw the book of compassionate neo-conservatism at Congress with distracting stars and stripes covers.
Now our compassionate neo-colonialist, RW Johnson, has swaddled his own book, South Africa: The First Man, the Last Nation (Jonathan Ball Publishers), in our South African flag. “What we share” — the Johnsonian lip trembles as bushy eyebrows float above tears — “is to love this beloved country on the southern tip of Africa and want only for its people that they wake to greet the coming sun without regret.”
Such a performance would normally attract no attention, but Johnson has helped shape thinking in the office of opposition leader Tony Leon. In Leon’s collected speeches, Hope and Fear, Johnson receives “special thanks” for “advice and help”. So Johnson is implicated in the current plight of South African “liberalism”.
While portraying South Africa’s ruling alliance as dangerously Stalinist, Johnson (unlike truer liberal, David Welsh) is shamefully acquiescent in Leon’s death penalty support. Johnson has openly derided international law, dismissed both the United Nations and the African Union, supported the Iraq war and speculated that Bush should postpone all state visits to South Africa pending a local “regime change”.
Johnson was rebuked by Helen Suzman for portraying Thabo Mbeki as “off his rocker”, again rebuked by Suzman for suggesting that “our enterprising Asian countrymen” had “captured” government and yet again rebuked by her for calling Nelson Mandela a communist. Johnson’s influence with Leon graphically demonstrates Suzman’s ebbing influence.
As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, breaking the Cold War logjam in Africa, Johnson was in the pages of the London New Statesman wanting “some sort of recolonisation” in Africa. “Sooner or later Africa Must Face Some Form of Recolonisation”, Johnson again wrote in May 2000, in the Tory-aligned London Daily Telegraph. And in August 2003 in Johannesburg’s Business Day he again wrote: “As much of Africa reverts to pre-colonial chaos, African countries are quietly shelving the old rhetoric of anti-colonialism and are asking to have the old colonial order back.” No rebuke from Leon has occurred.
In his latest book, shrewdly quiet on African re-colonisation, Johnson instead aims for what Edward Said calls “that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk”. He downplays certain excesses and hopes readers will overlook his self-contradictions.
Writing in London Review of Books in May this year, for example, Johnson gushingly praised the imperial ambitions of Jan Smuts: “Smuts, rather than Nelson Mandela, was South Africa’s man of the century.” Why? Smuts was determined to establish a “settler state,” explained Johnson, that “would undoubtedly have become a major player in world history.” But now Johnson’s treatment of Smuts in the new book (pages 114, 138) is far less congratulatory, more politically correct: now Johnson never at all compares Smuts to Mandela, let alone favourably. Instead, Smuts is castigated for “blind confidence in the permanency of white rule” and as “a man of a bygone era”. Johnson evidently hopes that the natives only read locally.
To boost the credibility of his overseas writings, Johnson advertises his “insider” status as a former member of the Communist Party of South Africa, resident in South Africa. Yet he has misstated the date of the Suppression of Communism Act (as 1952 rather than 1950) and has offered London readers such comic renditions of local realities as this one in April 2001: “This is a country in which nobody would object to someone entering a restaurant carrying a Kalashnikov …”
What’s up with Johnson? No mere apartheid-era racist, Johnson is instead a leading example of the global “Second Thoughts” phenomenon in local politics. The “Second Thoughts” tendency comprises those who, since the Sixties, have moved from hard left to viciously neoconservative positions, with all the erratic zeal of Shakespeare’s Laertes, first loving and then hating their old communist Hamlet, each time with equal intensity.
“His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal. His disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore intellectually and politically barren.” Thus wrote Isaac Deutscher in an early dissection of The God That Failed (1950), the ur-text of Second Thoughts. Hence, when Johnson thinks positive we get barren and sentimental sunrise chat or else opportunistic polemics on HIV/Aids. It was also “Second Thoughts” that pushed the former African National Congress acolyte, Howard Barrell, as Mail & Guardian editor, towards the right-wing Tory, Roger Scruton.
“For them,” Christopher Hitchens said of “Second Thoughts” as long ago as 1987, “the demand to release Nelson Mandela and recognise the ANC is a demand that opens the door to Stalinism.” The “ANC-SACP leadership” is, Johnson’s new book says, “perhaps the most Stalinist Communist Party still extant outside North Korea and Cuba”.
There is much frenzy, little tranquility and no omniscience here. He recently took Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils to task because, he said, only regimes like the Nazis had ministers of intelligence. Whites who agree with the ANC are defamed as “a freakish new tribe” just as Kasrils himself is, according to Leon, a “token white”. Ironically, it is the Fight Back “liberals,” not their opponents, who actively enforce a racialised black-white tribalism.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is writing a book about President Thabo Mbeki and his intellectual tradition