Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 4, August–September 2009, pp. 149–158
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A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream
Mark Gevisser. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. $29.95/£18.99. 376 pp.
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid
R.W. Johnson. London: Allen Lane, 2009. £25.00. 701 pp.
After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future
Andrew Feinstein. London and New York: Verso, 2009. £14.99/$26.95. 301 pp.
After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa
Alec Russell. London: Hutchinson, 2009. £18.99. 312 pp.
The overcoming of apartheid was one of the great moral and political issues of the late twentieth century. Barack Obama, visiting South Africa when he was still the junior senator from Illinois, said apartheid was what had first moved him to become politically active. For many of those who opposed white rule and its system of institutionalised discrimination, the complicated and sometimes grubby realities of the country’s post-apartheid democracy are now a source of concern. But from today’s vantage point, 15 years after the first all-race elections, it is easy to lose sight of the dire outcomes that were widely feared at the time.
The transition from apartheid could well have given rise to civil war, social upheaval or massive retribution, and the fact that it didn’t is a tribute to leadership on both sides. The African National Congress (ANC), a movement that had received its biggest support from the Soviet Union, recognised that its only realistic option was to negotiate rather than pursue victory by force of arms, and the National Party, after imposing its own rules for more than four decades, came around to talking itself out of power.
Under Nelson Mandela, South Africa emerged as a liberal multiracial democracy with a progressive constitution and bill of rights, more progressive in some ways than the attitudes prevailing in large parts of its own society. The country that, in Mandela’s words, had become the ‘skunk of the world’ returned to the international fold. The ANC, a movement with a core of senior members schooled in doctrinaire communism, learned to live with capitalism. Although many did not like it, the new government dumped its original programme and switched to a pro-market stability policy. An economy that had been virtually closed off to outsiders evolved into one of the most open in the developing world.
Such were the hopes inspired by the new South Africa that it was always going to find it hard to live up to them. This was, after all, a middle-income country with huge inequalities, struggling to find its place in a global marketplace and emerging from a system that deliberately set out to prevent members of its black majority from acquiring the kinds of skills that were now badly needed. The nightmare of a bloodbath or other revolutionary excesses never happened, but many black South Africans would say that nothing especially positive happened either, at least in terms of their own material circumstances or work prospects.
Expectations abroad…
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David White is a former correspondent for the Financial Times and was the paper’s Africa Editor from 2003–06.
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