Dissing Cape Town’s Topia.

The Creator feels obliged to buy The Big Issue. Vendors are fairly persistent and probably have keys in their pockets. Telling them to go away and boil their bums is socially unsympathetic, furthermore raises the possibility of bodily harm. Therefore one buys a large amount of glossy paper which cannot be used for any productive purpose other than sorting the stems and seeds from a quantity of poor-quality dagga; one buys this horrid magazine simply so as to be able to wave it defiantly at the next vendor. How we all suffer in our small ways.

It might be different if there were anything in the magazine at all worth reading, but there isn’t. Notwithstanding, Lauren Beukes provides a near-pastiche of something worth reading in her column, to which the Creator invariably turns with a degree of glumness, flipping past the celebrity and corporate propaganda. Beukes does not much like celebrity and corporate propaganda. Of course, challenging celebrity and corporate propaganda in a text devoted to celebrity and corporate propaganda might be seen as futile, or even as collaboration. Then again, this celebrity and corporate propaganda is being used to allegedly serve the interests of the people socially marginalised by the system which feeds on celebrity and corporate propaganda. Perhaps this confuses Beukes almost as much as it confuses the Creator.

Hence, having heard that Beukes had written a book called Moxyland, the Creator waddled off and bought it and gradually, over the ensuing ten days, attempted to read it. It could be assumed from the cover and the blurbs, not to mention the avowed position of the author, that the book would be opposed to celebrity and corporate propaganda. Therefore it would be worth reading. Or would it?

A few days later the Creator found a remaindered copy of James Hawes’ Speak For England (significant that it was remaindered), a book written by a disaffected Briton opposed to celebrity and corporate propaganda. Like far too many allegedly funny books these days, it criticises “reality TV” (Moxyland’s comparable target appears to be the weblog) but it does find a few interesting things to say about the contemporary world. Speak For England has, as its hero, a confused, self-loathing schlemihl nostalgic for the good old days of the Flying Scotsman and a time when you could kid yourself that anything in the press was worth taking seriously, a man disappointed by everything in his universe, especially himself.

However, by circuitous means he comes upon some people who genuinely believe in everything which he has lost — survivors of a Comet IV air crash living out a bizarre Anglophilic cargo-cult existence in the New Guinean jungle — who might, just possibly, serve as a contrast to the lost souls of Blair’s Britain. Among these lost souls are Blair himself, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, who appear as their unnamed selves (respectively geekish idiot, preening moffie and Glaswegian hardman). But there are more — the youth (who are awful), the central character’s schoolmates now in media and public relations (who are awful), the press lords (who are awful) — what has happened is that Everybody has Lost Touch with the Values of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.

Well, fair enough. Of course, Hawes is internally ironic about the whole thing. Who could take Dan Dare seriously, other than one of the Argentinean Air Force heroes of the Malvinas conflict and his gorgeous and clueless daughter? Notwithstanding, though Hawes may not believe in the ideals the book sets forward, though his hero is a Pooter among Pooters, Hawes delights in depicting the decadence into which Merrie England’s inhabitants have fallen — people who do nothing (because there is nothing to do), care about nothing (there’s nothing to care about) and yet are scared of everything except a cocktail or a line of cocaine or an engorged phallus. Things Can Only Get Better, sang New Labour in 1997, and Hawes is peeved that they lied. Perhaps he voted for them, or something.

Beukes is seemingly trying to do something vaguely similar to Hawes, but her method is remarkably different, because unlike Hawes she employs not one character who is remotely likeable on any scale of values which the Creator can comprehend. Possibly the characters are pretty, or entertaining if one is sufficiently drunk or stoned. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine waking up next to any of them with any pleasure, because they would all talk about the things which interest them, and the things which interest them are absolutely uninteresting.

How can this be? It is because not one of these characters is in any way a productive human being. All of them are absolutely alienated from other people; none is in a sexual or emotional relationship. The political activist despises and manipulates the people in his clique because he is secretly taking orders from someone he met in cyberspace. The corporate publicist holds her corporation in contempt. Admittedly the videoblogger believes in what he is doing (if there is such a thing as a positive character in the text, it must be him) but what he is doing is plainly garbage and his entire life is a cardboard monument to self-centredness. As for the professional medical guinea-pig, she surfs through life without ever understanding anything around her. All these people are convinced that they are the centre of the universe. All of them are clearly a hideous waste of valuable oxygen.

It’s hard to believe that this is accidental. It is true that the Creator has known plenty of people who have some of these characteristics, and if Beukes works in the field of media, propaganda and spurious arts she probably knows even more. However, most people have at least some redeeming features; Beukes’ characters seem to have been carefully chosen to have none. Is there a message here?

Perhaps it is intentional, perhaps unintentional, but there is certainly a message. In the future, corporations rule. Well, there’s a novel proposition for you; have we ever heard it before? Oh, yes, in 1952, in The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth. William Gibson’s Neuromancer was written way back in 1983, when Beukes was just a teeny tot (Moxyland is pretty ostentatiously cyberpunk, though without much in the way of cybernetics and a definite dearth of punkishness — the elements of both are a sort of veneer beneath which is the same old South Africa.

What South Africa? There is no South Africa, just Cape Town. As is common in Cape Town, nobody goes anywhere outside of town. Rural areas are spoken of with a shudder; apparently they are just too awful for words. In any case, somehow the government won’t let you go there (nobody says why). Government? What government? In South Africa now, everybody talks politics incessantly, but in Beukes’ Cape Town there is no Mayor, no President — a brief mention of a Minister of Safety and Security is all there is, and nobody cares about him (or possibly her). The only evidence of the existence of a government is the occasional appearance of police suppressing demonstrations. (There is no crime, or to be precise there is no foregrounded crime although it is vaguely talked about.) Again, however, the demonstrations are small, diffuse and lack support. Hardly anybody cares.

But on the other hand, nobody cares about the corporations. They are the air everybody breathes. Everybody has a logo on everything and everything fixed has a billboard stuck on it. This is accepted by everybody except the political activist who wishes to protest against falsity, although he has no idea of what reality might be, having no personal experience thereof.

Everybody is efficiently controlled by their cellphones. You can do anything with a cellphone, and anything can be done to you. If you misbehave your cellphone turns into a stungun and knocks you over. It’s monitoring you, and it can easily demonstrate your misconduct — which justifies your cellphone being cut off. Without a cellphone you cannot access the Web (a fate worse than death) and you cannot access your bank, so you cannot buy anything. It is clever of Beukes to make an icon of hideous consumerism into an icon of authoritarianism.

However, of course, most people don’t have those cellphones. Most people don’t have jobs. Such people exist in the background of the book; they are the suffering masses on behalf of whom the activist acts (never, of course, communicating with them in any way, except to demand that they show up at rallies — Beukes seems to have had some experience of such activists in the real world). The money to build the affluent enclaves in which the entirely bourgeois cast of characters live must have come from somewhere — but where? Nobody seems to make anything or do anything, nobody has power over their lives. It’s a society existing in a void.

By this time it seems that Beukes has been reading a lot of Naomi Klein; the hostility to advertising reflecting No Logo and the vague notion that big business wants to reduce government to the level of a police force reflecting The Shock Doctrine. If so, all credit to Beukes again for making the concepts so accessible. But within this, there is a problem.

Fredric Jameson (all rise and uncover, please) once remarked that every dystopia contains a utopia. Zamyatin’s We has its enclaves of freedom which the Benefactor must suppress. Huxley’s Brave New World has its Savage; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has the inside of Winston’s and Julia’s heads and the inside of Julia’s thighs. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is located in a future where Gilead has already been destroyed. The whole point about a dystopia is to propose an alternative to the horror in the foreground.

Unfortunately, Moxyland seems to have no alternative. Are these odious, childlike people living in a city-wide padded cell really the future? The critique of radical resistance which Beukes presents is powerful, as is her presentation of the omnipotence and omniscience of corporate culture. But if the bad guys are inescapably in charge, there are no actual good guys and the people who think they are good guys are deluded, gullible clowns, then the book itself becomes nothing more than corporate propaganda with an illusory dose of attitude.

In other words, the book appears to be a substantial expansion of Beukes’ column in The Big Issue. Does this mean that she does not know what she is doing? Or is she the most sophisticated corporate propagandist around, doing knowingly what the characters in Moxyland are doing unconsciously?

Alternatively, is the book a cunning satire on the political defeatism of the South African middle class, whites, coconuts and all? Is it a brilliant jest against our false liberators? The Creator is perhaps dumb — a stunning acknowledgement to make — but it seems impossible to tell. Only Beukes knows for sure, and if Moxyland is any guide, she isn’t going to tell us.

How Does It Feel To Be Such A Freak? (I)

It appears that disaster happens whenever the Creator is asleep at the switch. Only a few months ago the Creator arrived in Cape Town, turned on the wireless talking-type radio, and bejeezus but that Zuma bhoyo was the new President of the ANC. Took a lot of Glenmorangie to wash that one down. Now the Creator arrives in Cape Town, purchases a sheaf of printed corporate propaganda, and heilige scheiss, that Zuma kêrel, bless his little cotton socks, has fired the Premiers of the Eastern and Western Cape. Maybe the Creator should just stay home. Maybe the Creator should just never get out of bed.

However, the interesting thing about this stuff is not the corrupt and criminal activities of the Zuma gang. You do not get very far by demonstrating that a bunch of corrupt crooks will act like a bunch of corrupt crooks. Nor is it odd that there are a lot of corrupt crooks out there. Nor is it surprising when, say, the good Mr. Malema of the ANC Youth League talks and acts like a brain-damaged psychopath. After all, he undertook to do that when he was installed in his post. That is what such people are expected to do, and what they are paid to do. It does not mean that Mr. Malema is indeed a brain-damaged psychopath; nor does it mean that even if he is a brain-damaged psychopath, he will be permitted to do anything psychopathic with his brain-damage.

Instead, what he is doing is playing a role absolutely vital if the ANC is to be discredited and corporate-controlled neoliberalism is to take charge of the country — that of a person unfit to hold his position but nevertheless secure in it. It is vital that South Africans be persuaded to despise the government and hate and fear the political process. After all, the political process is the only thing which can endanger corporate-controlled neoliberalism. (More on Lauren Beukes much later.)

No, none of this is particularly interesting once you understand that this is a puppet-show. It is mildly interesting to trace some of the strings. The puppets, however, are not intrinsically interesting. Nor is the plot of the show either good or original; we have seen it before in many other countries; Russia under Yeltsin, Argentina under Menem, and so on. Populist front-men for big business, backed by media lies and Western imperialism — nu?

What interests the Creator instead is the people who can watch the show and somehow manage to persuade themselves that it is not a puppet-show, that it is revolutionary, radical, people’s power, and that they must support it to the best of their ability without actually spending money or (in extreme cases) getting out of their recliner-chairs.

The Creator is not talking about “pundits” and “journalists” and “independent political commentators”. This category of people, like Sipho Seepe or Richard Calland or Anthony Butler, is not at all interesting. They do it for the money and always have. No doubt this is in part because of their reactionary ideological positions. However, broadly speaking, attending to such people is about as interesting as listening to a sound-track of the noises a whore makes while striving to bring her customer to orgasm. However, there are other people who are, or might conceivably be, capable of doing other things. These people are intelligent enough to perceive arrant bullshit, and independent enough to mention the fact. How do they brainwash themselves into redefining shit as sugar and then stirring tablespoonfuls of said ordure into their steaming cuppas?

Comrades and colleagues, meet — or rather don’t — Mr. William Saunderson-Meyer. He used to write a column called “Jaundiced Eye” in which he was cynical about the political system. Hoorah for such things, because while perpetual cynicism is utterly powerless, at least it is not necessarily co-opted. However, sadly,

 

Brother Billy has both guns drawn,

He ain’t been right since Vietnam,

 

as Warren Zevon carolled on “Play It All Night Long”, and sadly, while Brother Billy S-M indeed now has both guns drawn, he ain’t been right — in the sense of accurately reflecting the nature of the physical, psychological or spiritual universe — since he partially recovered from a nasty car accident. Fortunately he has full capacity as a South African journalist. Do not ask what that says about South African journalists.

The Creator’s eye fell on Brother Billy while paging through a courtesy copy of the Argus last week, wishing it were something else. (Hence no direct quotes — sorry, but then again, why be sorry?) Brother Billy’s putative jaundice was being applied to Jacob Zuma, and it was as yellow as anyone could expect. The gist of the article was to begin by saying that Zuma was behaving awfully by allowing his supporters to threaten the judiciary and the Democratic Alliance, two issues which frequently cause white reactionaries to change their trousers. So far, utterly banal and crapulous. Yet the article wafted out of this and into the realms of cerebral paresis with amazing vim and speed.

Brother Billy’s ensuing line was to cry ¡Hola! Zuma is not really a criminal at all! He is a victim! He is a victim of an evil conspiracy! Of an evil conspiracy by the spiteful and conspiratorial Thabo Mbeki! (At this point, Brother Billy apparently had to reach out and wipe himself with a handful of Baby-Soft. Then, pulling up his fresh brown trousers, proceed.) This conspiracy is evil! How do we know that it is evil? Because of all the people who are just as bad as Zuma or — come to think of it — much worse, but have not ever been tried, but have been cossetted, protected, defended, indemnified by the evil Mbeki! Look at Jackie Selebi! Ooo, isn’t it ‘orrible? That Mbeki is so bad! At least Zuma is a good guy! By comparison with the real bad guys out there who are all Mbeki supporters! Hats off to Jacob Zuma, donchaloveim? Whoop! Hooraw!

At this point the article stopped, possibly because the attendants came in with a Thorazine injection and some stout leather straps. The Creator may not be giving quite the flavour of the article, but the above paragraph is a faithful presentation of Brother Billy’s factual content and argumentation. Except for the bit about the Baby-Soft, which is purely conceptual.

Let us nevertheless consider and analyse this. Jacob Zuma’s bank account revealed that millions of rands had been paid into it by the French arms company Thint (formerly Thomson-CSF, formerly Thales — these people change their names as often as if they were thieves) and by Zuma’s “financial advisor”, multi-millionaire Schabir Shaik. It is not clear what this money was paid for, although Zuma subsequently performed services of a financially advantageous nature for both parties in his capacity as Deputy President and supremo of the arms deal involving Thint and Shaik’s brother. Jacob Zuma’s tax records reveal that he paid no tax on any of this money. Case to answer, not so? Heavy stuff, not so?

All right. Is it credible that this was all constructed by Mbeki? No, it appears not; it’s inconceivable that he could have fabricated so much material without Zuma’s knowledge.

Is there any actual evidence that Mbeki had any grudge of any kind against Zuma which might lead to such fabrication? Mbeki supported Zuma in his run for the Deputy Presidency of the ANC in 2002. In return, Zuma supported Mbeki as President. The two seemed eminently cordial, up until the evidence of Zuma’s criminal corruption began to leak out, and Mbeki defended Zuma’s right to remain as Deputy President of the country up until Zuma’s financial adviser was put away for bribery and corruption involving Zuma. So the answer to the question must be no.

Okay. But at least Mbeki’s Cabinet is full of crooks who have accepted huge sums of money in exchange for favours, not so? No, indeed, not so. Mbeki’s Cabinet is certainly full of people who have been accused of such behaviour by their (and Mbeki’s) political enemies, and such accusations have been extensively hyped by newspapers owned by their (and Mbeki’s) political enemies. However, not a single such accusation has contained enough information to warrant legal action. There is no hard evidence of bribery and corruption in Mbeki’s Cabinet, despite plenty of investigation, and despite the obvious fact that the press, the Democratic Alliance, and a large number of non-governmental organisations will pay vast amounts of money if any such information were provided. It isn’t possible for Mbeki to prevent such information from getting out, or to stop action from being taken on it. He doesn’t have that kind of power. Nobody does.

Oh, and Jackie Selebi, Commissioner of Police, was dismissed from his post although there was no hard evidence against him, because the Scorpions found a criminal who was prepared to testify (without hard evidence) against Selebi. It remains to be discovered whether the criminal is telling the truth. (The criminal was threatened with life in jail if he refused to testify.) Brother Billy was not aware of this.

So — Brother Billy’s argument is obvious hogwash. Nothing that he said was true; there is a vast amount of evidence suggesting that Zuma is guilty, there is no evidence that Zuma is a victim of a conspiracy (other than some indications that Mbeki tried in vain to protect Zuma, or at least protect his party from the horrible consequences of Zuma’s indictment) and there is no evidence that Zuma has been singled out while others have escaped scot-free. This is so bad, it is actually good, for poor Brother Billy surely must believe the lies he is telling. In order to bullshit us, he has surely bullshitted himself first. How has he done this?

The answer seems to be a form of cognitive dissonance. Brother Billy knows — because he has been told frequently — that Mbeki is evil. He would be incapable of accepting that Mbeki is anything else, because that would entail questioning what he is told. Evil must be counterbalanced by good; he has also been told that. Therefore, if Zuma is evil, the whole structure of Brother Billy’s world is in danger of coming unglued. How can there be two evils, both opposed to each other? And yet the same people who tell Brother Billy that Zuma is evil are telling him that Mbeki is evil. Somehow the facade of reality must be saved, but how?

Solution — Mbeki double, double evil! So evil he evilled Zuma into evil! Zuma’s evil is all the fault of Mbeki’s evil! And, therefore, not only by comparison, but also by the law that shows that when evil is evilled it turns into good, Zuma’s evil becomes good and all that evil evils off onto Mbeki’s double-evil, so Mbeki becomes treble-evil! Aaaah! That feels so much better, just like an enema, although having the opposite effect because it fills one up with even more shit than before!

In other words, the ideology which Saunderson-Meyer serves is both invulnerably bullet-proof and indefinitely protean. The secret is to define the enemy as demonic. Once one has done that, anyone becomes good by comparison. Then, the person one sees in the mirror in the morning becomes a paragon of rectitude because that person supports the good, the true and the beautiful. What is more, a demon is not just bad, but omnipotent — and therefore, the person in the mirror (and anyone that person likes) becomes enormously brave by being prepared to take on the devil incarnate.

A meaningful ideology should be testable against reality. But this one is not, because any failure in the ideology can be explained through the invincible evil of Mbeki and his allies. Whatever Mbeki does or says can then be explained in terms of evil — does he oppose something in Zimbabwe? Why, that shows his devilish cunning in trying to lure people into the trap which is surely intended to serve the evil Mugabe (another demonic figure). Does he stand up for foreigners against xenophobia? Why, the language he uses can be parsed into proving that secretly he hates foreigners — he did not say enough, and that means that he actually desires to see all foreigners killed! If he denies it, that means it must be true! If he doesn’t deny it, that means it must be true — or else he would deny it!

Mbeki-hatred is much like campaigning against witchcraft. Jab her with a pin — if she flinches, it is a sign of a guilty conscience! If she doesn’t flinch, it is a sign of the lack of sensitivity which all witches have! Throw her in the water! If she floats, she’s a witch! (No, that particular test wasn’t invented by Monty Python.) If she sinks — well, better safe than sorry.

Meanwhile, is Mbeki good or bad in the real world? The wondrous impact of the Saunderson-Meyer ideology is that it’s impossible to tell. Viewed through such a lens it is tempting to say that Mbeki, or Balindlela, or Rasool, are parfit gentille knights. Most likely, in fact, they aren’t. In the real world they are, however, probably better options than the alternatives put forward by the obvious crooks of the ANC’s National Executive Committee or the Central Committee of the SACP.

A probability which the ideology is clearly designed to prevent anyone from seeing.

 

Zimbabwe in Crisis, Pope Still Catholic, Bear Crap Found in Woods.

Yes, Virginia, Zimbabwe is in a crisis as a result of Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to withdraw from the Presidential elections. It was in a crisis before that, it will be in a crisis after that. The Creator is starting to suspect that Zimbabwe will be in crisis when the sun goes nova and the last star falls from the sky.

The Creator has been hanging out with some MDC supporters, insofar as it is possible to “hang out” with paranoid-psychopathic xenophobes. It was not a pleasant experience. MDC people believe bizarre things. (This no doubt applies to the leading lights in the party, the dimmer bulbs and the trusting masses simply hanging on their lips like fake-surgical-steel implants.) They believe that all the problems of Zimbabwe arise from Robert Mugabe. They believe that everywhere in Africa outside Zimbabwe is equally evil and corrupt, but that South Africa is more equally evil and corrupt than anywhere else. They also believe that Robert Mugabe is channelling the Great Satan, Thabo Mbeki.

They indeed believe that some non-African foreigners, such as France and China, are definitely evil, and they are not keen on the Americans (they do not quite say that the Yanks let good old Smithy down, but it’s in the background), yet they do dearly love Britain who will save them and solve all their problems. (Much like someone at a ventriloquist show saying “I don’t think much of the guy sitting on the stage, but that little wooden chap on his knee has a lot of talent!”) What is more, they won’t shut up about any of this garbage.

This helps to explain why Zimbabwean politics is a load of poisonous nonsense and why the press is even more poisonously nonsensical on Zimbabwe than on any other issue. (The Weekly Mail recently ran a story trumpeting an “exclusive” that Thabo Mbeki has secretly criticised the Zimbabwean government. What is he trying to hide, they ask; why has this been hidden from us? Perhaps, you hideous dolts, because you shut your eyes, stuck your fingers in your ears, and then stuffed your heads up your arseholes, which at least improved your appearance slightly. Mbeki’s criticism of Zimbabwe has been a regular feature of unreported news for the last nine years.)

Tsvangirai says that he has abandoned the Presidential elections because of the violence which was going on. In the past he never abandoned any elections because of violence which was as bad, or worse, though slightly less hyped in the media. Things do seem to be a little worse now than they were in 2000, but it is impossible to be sure because of the misleading coverage. Anyway, Paris is well worth a Mass, and Harare is well worth a small pile of corpses which amount to a day’s, or a weekend’s, South African road carnage.

Right-wingers who supported apartheid are fond of comparing the Zimbabwean situation with the South African anti-apartheid struggle (naturally, to South Africa’s detriment), but in the run-up to the South African 1994 elections dozens of people were being killed by the white right and Inkatha, with the approval of the apartheid government, every day. Nobody thought it would be a good idea to pull out of the elections. It is hard to see that Tsvangirai’s protestation of humanitarian concerns carries any weight at all.

In that case, why has he dropped out? There seem to be two possibilities. One is that he, or his handlers, feared victory. Victory could lead to two obvious problems; one is that ZANU (PF) or its military allies would simply seize power, annul the election and defy the planet to do its worst. (This is what the Southern African Development Community has been afraid of; it would simplify the situation, since then SADC would no longer be obliged to support the Zimbabwean government, but it would also make it impossible to resolve by the diplomatic methods which have hitherto been pursued.)

Also, possibly, the MDC’s handlers were not altogether ready for victory. No doubt they assumed that ZANU (PF) would simply steal the Parliamentary election, as Westerners would try to do under similar circumstances. However, like the Americans in the last Iraqi elections, the ZANU-ites were too optimistic and so ended up with the worst possible situation. They managed to finagle the Presidential side of the election, but who could say whether they would be able to rig the current one properly? Meanwhile, however, were the handlers prepared to grab all that they wanted from Zimbabwe? What if someone called Britain out on its billion-pound bribe offer to Zimbabweans if they voted for Tsvangirai? Were the troops ready to intervene if things went astray after Tsvangirai’s inauguration? Most likely not. Much better wait until one does not have to depend on unreliable elections.

Of course, there was also the strong probability that Tsvangirai might lose. This is not because of intimidation (intimidation is not very good at winning elections) but because Tsvangirai is not a very solid Presidential candidate, being politically inept. Lots of people who are keen to get rid of Mugabe for all kinds of reasons, are much less keen to replace King Senile Stork with King Rotting Log. And if Tsvangirai loses, then what? On one hand, ZANU (PF) could justify holding power for a few more years, perhaps until they could replace Mugabe with someone less doddery and more flexible, which would pose problems for the MDC’s handlers. Also, defeat might lead to internal rebellion against Tsvangirai from the lower levels of the MDC who might be impatient with Tsvangirai’s conduct and seek someone remotely competent — but also, who might be less submissive to foreign instructions. That would also be a big problem for the MDC’s handlers.

Much safer, therefore, to denounce the whole election and hand everything over to the big drum of Western propagandists. The US has now come over to Britain’s side (whereas previously it saw Zimbabwe as too trivial to bother with, now that the US is in serious recession it needs a small country to plunder — conceivably the British, having done all the work, will now be shouldered aside by big brother porker dipping his snout into the Zimbabwean trough). Maybe they will be able to bully the UN into fabricating excuses for sanctions (in violation of the UN’s Charter, but that has never been a problem in the past) — not that sanctions are likely to do much harm to an economy which has already free-fallen from 20 000 metres onto the tarmac. Sooner or later the MDC will start sounding like Bush apologists instead of Blair acolytes. Or, perhaps, they will be able to climb on board the Obamarama.

Meanwhile, there is also Zimbabwe. Still no sign of any actual solutions to the country’s problems. The political problem could possibly be eased by a “government of national unity”, or what P J O’Rourke once rightly called “Cats and Canaries United”; at least if everybody was stealing together, there would be less conflict over who gets to steal what. But what about the actual problems? What about the lack of foreign exchange, the collapsing infrastructure, the desperate unemployment rate only concealed by the diaspora, the disintegrating social system concealed by mutual propaganda?

Zimbabweans love to pretend that their country is a paradise, or would be but for whatever invented demon they happen to endorse. Taking responsibility for their own plight, and acknowledging the catastrophe which has befallen them, is unheard of. In fact, black Zimbabweans are replicating white Rhodesians so closely, it’s as if they took them for a model. Given that white Rhodesians were so prominent in setting up the MDC — and, for that matter, played a leading role in turning ZANU (PF) into a permanent government thanks to the operations of the CIO and the Special Branch in the early 1980s — perhaps that isn’t surprising.

ZANU (PF) is keen to negotiate. To be precise, is keen to hand over all the responsibility for the problems which they have created (or at least helped to create) to the MDC. The MDC doesn’t want to take responsibility, which is one reason why the MDC hasn’t come forward with any plans for resolving Zimbabwe’s problems; if they had a policy, someone might expect them to implement it. (Recently the Mail and Guardian had an article on “How to Fix Zimbabwe” — of course nothing in the article explained any such thing. To be fair, Time also had an article on how Tsvangirai was going to sort out Zimbabwe’s problems — any fool who turned eagerly to the article to learn the answer to such questions was, of course, disappointed; Time is not stupid enough to expose Emperor Tsvangirai’s nudity.)

So negotiation should be happening, but it isn’t — or if it is, it’s at glacial pace when it should be happening in a hurry. Everybody is immensely concerned about who is going to win. Obviously Tsvangirai is going to win in the end — if you can call it winning. Obviously ZANU (PF) is going to lose in the end — if you can call it losing. But will Zimbabwe ever be able to get up off its knees again? Million percent inflation can no doubt be curbed somehow, even if it is a structural product of the economy rather than an artifact of global finance. But then what? Who’s going to invest the money the country needs? Will the skilled Zimbabweans now making big salaries abroad go back and take huge pay cuts? What happens if they don’t?

Don’t watch this space for the answers. The Creator is growing weary of Zimbabwe. Granted, it is a sad situation. Whether it is a tragedy, however, is a very moot point indeed. Maybe it is just a nation-sized farce in which the cream of the joke is supposed to be that the people slipping on banana-skins are actually breaking their necks.

The Rich Are Eating Us.

Cannibalism is a glory and a wonder. In Brazil in the last century it was used as a metaphor for postcoloniality; the Brazilian was supposed to eat up the Europeans and thus absorb everything good about them without being dominated by them. (This metaphor was handy for the Americans, who ate up Brazil like a sugar-sprinkled doughnut while Brazilian intellectuals were bragging about how free they were from foreign influence.) In Lesotho during the crises of the early nineteenth century rumours of cannibalism flooded the country, rumours which endure even today. Evidently bad times breed cannibalism (and cannibals also bring bad times, especially for the people they eat).

But now there is a worldwide food crisis. The cost of food has shot up and the force of gravity has been repealed. Luckily, good restaurant prices are little higher than they were (you don’t pay for food, you pay for status, and the kind of person who goes to such restaurants has the moolah to pay twice as much with no crisis). The rich are getting a lot more money without spending proportionately more. They are devouring our bank accounts through our food budgets. This puts a more realistic spin on the anarchic early-1980s British movie, Eat The Rich, or on the conclusion of Godard’s Le Weekend; the rich are actually eating us. As per usual.

Outside movieland, the truth is — well, similar to that, only of course, more complicated. It’s a problem which can be solved, but with a lot of difficulty. So therefore few people are calling for any solutions. Fuhgeddaboudit! COSATU, for instance, demands action against food companies which are allegedly colluding to keep prices high. Doubtless when COSATU’s leaders find that their houses are on fire, they go straight out and picket the nearest match factory. (The Creator realises that COSATU needs to keep its membership dynamised without any actual political education; this is a process which understandably requires a lot of bullshitting.) More influential people call for privatisation of something, or deregulation of something else, and blame the government, because they want more money and power, and blaming the government is cost-free.

Given how much the Great and Good in our society have royally stuffed things up, their opinions are never reliable, but the Great and Good own the newspapers and most of the media. (How they constantly shriek about the horrid existence of the SABC! However, they will change their tune once they control it.) The Great and Good are not criticised in the media. Therefore it has to happen here.

The food crisis is caused by the convergence of the effects of a series of bad decisions, all of which were taken because some corrupt rich person somewhere stood to make a profit out of it.

(The Creator apologises for shocking everybody.)

The biggest bad decision was a combination of a reluctance by Western investors to invest in Africa and other impoverished parts of the world, and a determination by the leaders of African and other impoverished nations to rob their people in order to enrich themselves. Both are products of identical Western capitalist greed. One result is that African agriculture is unproductive — even where it is highly capitalised it is unsustainable. Across much of the world, agriculture is in crisis because of under-investment or mis-investment. Agriculture is seemingly (officially) not profitable except when performed on a massive monocultural industrial scale, and it is easiest to do this in developed nations. When the people of impoverished countries are upset, it is the city people who count, since they can march on State House; the people on the land usually do not matter. Hence poor countries tend not to invest in the countryside, preferring to bribe the inhabitants of the cities.

All this is a product of greed, to which capitalism is the biggest contributor.

Then we come to the specific problems which afflict us now that we already have this horrible discrepancy between rich and poor nations. Why is the system not working?

The obvious problem is the world commodity market. There shouldn’t be one. There should, actually, be national commodity markets, some of which sell their surplus produce on a wider market. Instead, as Thomas Friedman said, the world is flat — meaning that the capitalist imperialist steamroller has run over it and squashed it into a bloody pulp some of which can be scraped up and put to use by the owners of said steamroller.

O dear, the Creator is driving under the influence of metaphors again. But, not really. Once upon a time in South Africa, agricultural produce was all sold to the government which then sold it to the companies who sold it to the consumer. Hence the government could decide if spare food should be stored or sold. The producers got a guaranteed price which could be subsidised in bad times or used to subsidise the government in good times. Overproduction did not lead to bankruptcy any more than droughts. So it was supposed to work, and while it was often corrupt and dysfunctional, it at least had the potential of being efficient in preserving people working the land in order to feed the nation.

But that went out of the window in the 1980s (no, it wasn’t the evil ANC, despite what you hear). Even before the World Trade Organisation was founded, farmers were expected to sell their goods directly to massive bureaucratic organisations — but because these massive bureaucratic organisations were privately owned, none of the media (themselves privately owned by massive bureaucratic organisations) complained. Instead, people like Friedman were paid lavishly to celebrate and to explain that it was good for the consumer. So it was, while the farmers were ground under the bureaucratic heel without redress — since the companies buying their goods were in other countries. Smaller companies, sensibly, refused to pay more than the bigger companies — why should they? So commodity prices were pushed down, and the consumers benefited — or thought they did.

But now that conditions have changed, the cost of producing and transporting food has increased and there is nobody to subsidise the costs. Nor is it possible for the corporations to grind the farmers further without running the risk of driving them off the land. Small farmers have already been crushed and the bulk of the farms are themselves corporatised. So the price skyrockets with nothing to hold it down, and the consumers whine and wail and the corporate media explain that there is nothing that they can do (to be precise, nothing short of reducing either the profits of the company, or the perquisites of corporate bosses and their immediate lackeys, the capitalist fat of the land).

They promised that everything would be better once the system was changed to benefit the owners of the system rather than the producers of goods. This was a lie, of course. It seemed better for a while, just as a pension scheme based on the stock exchange seems better than a normal one based on company input, when the stock exchange prices are rising. But when stock exchange prices are falling (as they are with painful speed at the moment) then such a pension scheme is revealed as a fraud, although the trouble is that it is much too late to do anything about it. Similarly, it will be very difficult to restructure the food marketing system so as to bring prices down to where they would have been had we not allowed it to be handed over to crooked businesspeople.

It might be possible to do something; for instance, to forbid the export of food, as has been done in Brazil. The problem is, however, that crops are sold many months ahead. Another problem is that there are not necessarily other marketing structures which can replace the foreign buyers. Therefore, such a decision will not solve the problem at once, nor will it solve the problem by itself. We will still have to restructure our marketing arrangements.

But this would be controversial, wouldn’t it? Specifically, if food is going to be brought under control, why shouldn’t other goods also be brought under control? People are already wondering why it isn’t possible to subsidise petrol, diesel and paraffin. (That, again, is because the fuel price, although not deregulated, has in recent decades been allowed to drift up to whatever the market would bear. The state could subsidise fuel, just as it used to subsidise food.) But in that case, the deluge. Why not regulate everything? Why allow businesspeople to rob everybody as a result of factors which the businesspeople do not control, but which the system is rigged to enable them to exploit? Therefore, big business doesn’t want the government to do anything effective.

Besides, it would create the impression that the public can turn to the government for help, and that’s the last thing that big business wants the public to think. At the moment the chief objective of big business is to discredit government as much as possible. (Hence their promotion of Jacob Zuma.) Neither of the edges of this particular sword appeals to big business. Government knows this. Government is always afraid of big business, and particularly now when big business can pick whichever faction in the ANC it chooses to wield as a club over the other factions, using money as the lead in the clubhead. So, once again, government chooses to do nothing.

The unusual thing is that this time the left chooses to do nothing as well.

In the background, of course, are two related problems to the food crisis which are making things worse. These are the growth of fuel-from-food and the growth of bourgeois eating practices within the global proletariat.

One of the biggest and most profitable industries in the world is, of course, the oil industry. The oil industry has hooked us all on liquid-fuelled transport systems. To keep those systems alive as long as possible, the oil industry needs to promote liquid fuels. Hence the promotion of alcohol fuels which can be mixed with petrol, or with vegetable oils which can be mixed with diesel. Thus people can be conned into continuing to use oil-fuelled transport systems. The fact that this means taking vast amounts of food and turning it into fuel, or taking farms which could be used for growing food and putting them under fuel-oriented seed crops, does not bother the people making the profit. As a result, the food problem becomes just a little bigger (while, of course, global warming grows just a tiny bit worse).

Probably a bigger problem, though, are the cows and pigs in the factory-farms beside the roads used by those liquid-fuelled transport systems. These animals have to be fed on something. Apart from being fed on each other, they are mostly fed on food which is relatively easy to transport, meaning that it has to be food of high nutritional value. In other words, food which could go to humans; however, it is more profitable to feed that food to animals whose meat can be sold at a higher price than the price of the food the animals ate.

One of the minor causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the premium on meat dishes. The USSR’s elite decided to provide more meat to the public, thus proving that life was better, against all other evidence. But it couldn’t provide more grain, because its agricultural industry was so inefficient. So the USSR started importing grain, paying for it by exporting oil. Then the oil price fell and it had no means of paying for the grain.

The world is in a similar position; people want meat, partly to compensate for the unlovely life we live, and people want to sell meat, because of all the money it provides. So we dump food that humans could eat into the throats of meat animals. Fast food. Tasteless junk food that makes us fat. Toxic food stuffed with bizarre organic chemicals which gets into our metabolism and does who-knows-what to us. Luckily, meat is slowly becoming too expensive to afford.

Maybe we should start eating each other, starting, preferably, with the privatisers, the oil industry and the owners of the meat factories . . .

Some Of Our Failures.

A recent contributor to these parts challenges the Creator, claiming that AZAPO was a victim of the evil Charterists and never colluded with, or served the interests of, the apartheid state. One may pretend that if one wants to. However, in order to learn from the history of South African politics one must pursue the truth and then try to make sense of it. Hence one should not base arguments on ridiculous lies. Why did AZAPO and the PAC both fail to win persistent support, and then why did they betray the cause of liberation and serve the desires of quasi-fascist white colonialism? (A nice long phrase, that last one; the Creator hopes never to use it again.)

The contributor is talking partisan bosh. The records of the 1985-6 period in the Eastern Cape shows that, sadly, there was a serious outbreak of violence between AZAPO-supporting thugs (led by the “Black Cats”) and the Charterists of the UDF. It was hardly likely that the Charterists went out to seek trouble with the gangsters; much more likely that AZAPO, seeing its support dwindling, tried to use violence to protect its control, in much the same way that Inkatha was doing on a far greater scale in Natal. (Occasionally, similar violence was linked with AZAPO on the Rand as well, but it seems to have been strongest in the Eastern Cape.) Of course much of this was no doubt due to local tensions, but AZAPO’s leadership never repudiated this behaviour — instead it tried to capitalise on it.

Why do we know so much about this, when much less is known about the huge conflict in Natal? Because AZAPO enjoyed the support of the English press, which represented the conflict as a sign that the UDF was evil. AZAPO’s leadership played along with this rather than acknowledge their faults, even though the “Black Cats” were enjoying the support of the police, and reputedly of the “Hammer” death-squad, allies which AZAPO should have very strongly repudiated.

AZAPO also enjoyed the support of the SA Institute of Race Relations, which under the leadership of John Kane-Berman had become a major apartheid propaganda organ. The SAIRR used the clashes between the UDF and AZAPO to attack the former, promoting AZAPO’s propaganda position as much as it could. AZAPO claimed to be a socialist organisation with black-conscious inclinations, whereas the SAIRR was a free-market organisation with white-supremacist leanings — but AZAPO no longer concerned itself with such matters. Momentary interest was all that mattered to it — hence it eagerly took advantage of its lenient treatment under the State of Emergency.

Indeed, in the 1980-94 period AZAPO opposed every genuine anti-apartheid initiative while producing none itself. It showed up at the “Patriotic Front” conference purely to undermine it; it played no useful role in post-1990 negotiations. It is hardly surprising that it was seen as a tool of the apartheid state by most outsiders. It is again natural that AZAPO has dwindled to insignificance as a result of its opportunism and its intellectual bankruptcy. This could be the future which awaits the ANC.

If AZAPO took advantage of the support of the apartheid state, the PAC actually collaborated completely with the apartheid state’s atrocious military, police and propaganda structures.

The PAC was treated gently by the apartheid state after 1980, apparently realising that the PAC, like AZAPO, posed no real threat to it. However, only in the late 1990s, when former PAC President Mogoba (a friend to the SAIRR who eventually gained high office in that odious organisation) applied for a high post-apartheid government job and faced a security vetting, did the truth came out. The President of the PAC had done a deal with the apartheid secret police; in exchange for immunity from prosecution or ill-treatment (he was never detained under the State of Emergency when over 30 000 activists, mainly Charterists, were jailed) he did whatever they told him. He even betrayed his own military commander. Effectively, the PAC in the last years of apartheid was an annexe to the apartheid armed forces.

Nobody in the PAC’s leadership (except those benefiting by the betrayal) seems to have noticed that President Mogoba doing anything odd. If anything, however, worse was to follow. With the unbanning of the PAC, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, their military wing which been largely quiescent in the darkest days of apartheid, suddenly sprang to action. In the early 1990s APLA committed a flood of atrocities, murdering a large number of civilians, chiefly but not exclusively whites.

When the apartheid government found how the ANC’s uMkhonto we Sizwe had set up a secret command structure, exposed in 1990, there was a spate of detentions, tortures and murders of ANC activists. Nothing like this confronted APLA, even though the PAC was thoroughly penetrated by the apartheid spy system. Only in the run-up to the 1994 election did President De Klerk order the murder of a houseful of PAC-linked children in Umtata.

What was going on? Nothing can be proved because all the records have been destroyed, but it seems that APLA’s terror campaign was endorsed by the apartheid state. It was, effectively, a campaign to unite the white community against blacks, discouraging the kind of non-racialism which characterised the ANC. Admittedly, the PAC may have hoped that this campaign would benefit it, since it could claim that it, unlike the ANC, had not abandoned the armed struggle — the fact that it was a toy struggle taking place under the auspices of the apartheid state was unimportant to them.

But this Faustian bargain turned out to be important to most South Africans. Hence the PAC’s support remained minute. (The PAC retained enough support in Cape Town to be able to hand control of the city to the Democratic Alliance, the successor party to the apartheid National Party, in 2006 — probably the PAC’s final, and most pathetic, betrayal.)

All this is not simply ancient history; we should ask why it happened. What went wrong with the PAC and AZAPO? Why did they do what they did, why did they fail so utterly, why did they sell out so needlessly when they had so little to sell in the first place?

Consider the Pan-Africanist Congress, which had been part of the African National Congress until Robert Sobukwe began telling everyone who would listen that he had a new logo and a new organisation, different and better, like a brand of washing-powder. The real reason for the PAC splitting from the ANC was that the leadership of the PAC were second-raters who could only appear to be first-raters by avoiding competition with people like Tambo and Mandela. Also, the PAC was supposedly opposed to whites and therefore resented their presence within the ANC (the underground SACP and the overground Congress of Democrats). More importantly, the PAC loathed socialism of any stripe (even though it worshipped Kwame Nkrumah who had set up what he called a socialist state).

Sobukwe has been treated with respect since then, but in the Creator’s opinion he was a nincompoop who set the struggle back a decade. The PAC was a disaster; the most if accomplished was that occasionally its demonstrations did not lead to massacres. It had no notion of how to set up a military wing, so its initial effort in this regard — Poqo — was quickly destroyed by the apartheid police and Poqo’s successor, APLA, never amounted to anything. When driven into exile (and although the PAC precipitated the banning of the PAC and the ANC, the PAC had made no proper plans to set up an external wing as the ANC did) the PAC was a conspicuously greater failure than that of the ANC (which was far from successful until the late 1970s). Basically, the PAC promised more and delivered far, far less.

Why was this? Largely, the Creator thinks, because of doctrines. Pan-Africanism is not a practical creed; it is rather a collection of banal but reassuring slogans invented by Westernised African leaders wishing to distract their people from the real problems of their societies. Absorbed at second- or third-hand in South Africa it led to blind faith in action — as if by simply assembling a bunch of unarmed people in the street you could push the enormously strong apartheid state over. (In part this was a product of an ignorant contempt for the well-justified caution which the ANC pursued after the collapse of the Defiance Campaign.) As a result, the PAC threw away opportunities for organisational gains in pursuit of what seemed to be momentary opportunities for success, but which turned out not to be even that.

Fast-forward a decade to the rise of Black Consciousness. On the face of it this was a more promising doctrine. The South African Students’ Organisation arose in an organisational vacuum and thus quickly came to the fore. It was led by intelligent people who could speak and write well. At the same time it was happening in a much more favourable environment than the late 1950s and early 1960s; by this time, many white businessmen felt that apartheid was a doubtful investment. It was obvious that the plans of grand apartheid were unlikely to work, and it was also clear that South Africa needed a well-educated black middle class, which implied that they had to be co-opted with concessions. Initially at least, the “verligte” or “progressive” supporters of the apartheid state saw SASO as a possible platform for this.

As history shows, this did not happen. Black Consciousness pursued an ambiguous course, but none of its leaders collaborated with apartheid. On the other hand, while it explicitly identified the destruction of the apartheid state as its goal, it did virtually nothing to accomplish this. As a result, when its activities led logically to the mayhem of the 1976-7 uprisings, it was incapable of turning these into anything more solid and productive. So Biko, banned, was eventually jailed and murdered, the organisation which he had built up was shattered, and those who had supported him were largely obliged to flee the country if they were not to be jailed. What is more, of those who fled and of those who were jailed, the majority ended up as Charterists — that is, as supporters of the “old-fashioned” ANC-style politics which Biko and his comrades had supposedly rejected.

Actually this was not altogether the case. Biko had considerable respect for the ANC, though it is far from certain that he would have joined it had he lived. On the other hand, those of his followers who did not become Charterists and who eventually formed AZAPO defined themselves almost from the beginning as anti-Charterists. They haplessly opposed whatever the ANC or (later) the UDF did, without offering anything particularly productive. They focussed on the middle class and failed to build up working-class and union support in the way that the Charterists did. (Ironically, the Charterists were helped here by NUSAS, the very organisation that Biko built his reputation by opposing.) After half a decade of consistent failure to organise or develop a policy basis, it is hardly surprising that AZAPO became shills for the apartheid state. They had nothing to protect them against this.

Why? Again, the Creator thinks that doctrine plays a big part in this. Black Consciousness was a Caribbean movement imported to the United States as a publicity stunt by some parts of the black Civil Rights movement who wanted a bigger slice of attention. (A bit like the PAC’s use of Pan-Africanism.) Obviously it is important to challenge white notions that blacks are somehow an inferior race. It is also important to be suspicious of sympathetic powerful whites who might have their own agendas (although neither the PAC nor AZAPO were suspicious enough). In the end, though, encouraging blacks to have self-respect does not take one very far, for the problem is not self-respect, it is oppression. The issue is not simply culture, it is economics. Significantly, when school students launched a campaign against unhealthy influences in Soweto, it was not the hair-straightening parlours they went for — it was the beer-halls which they felt were sapping people’s will to resist.

But in believing that decolonising the mind was the most important thing to do, the proponents of Black Consciousness, like the Pan-Africanists, were falling into the simplest of traps. They were believing that wishing it so would make it so. Had they been flourishing in the early 1960s they would simply have been trampled into the dust by apartheid brutality. Instead, in the early 1980s they were merely made irrelevant by other organisations with a more profound understanding of events, and a far greater ability to put their knowledge into practice — and then, sadly, they were co-opted in the very way that they pretended to warn people about.

Nowadays the PAC and AZAPO exist predominantly to warn us against what we should not be doing today. Sadly, plenty of people (especially in today’s ANC) are unwilling to heed this warning.

Confusion Now Hath Made His Masterpiece.

It’s a little puzzling to follow South African politics at the moment if you believe what the press say, as so many middle-class South Africans do (and even working-class South Africans are influenced by this).

Economic migrants to South Africa appear to be clamouring for forced repatriation, bitterly attacking the government (especially the President of South Africa) for allowing them to come here and for protecting and sheltering them when they were attacked by thugs. The West’s candidate for President of Zimbabwe is bitterly denouncing the President of South Africa, who negotiated the election deal which made it possible for him to seek the Presidency of his country (and pissing off powerful neighbours for no obvious gain is not often considered a smart move). The South African Communist Party is calling on its alliance partner, the African National Congress, to remove the President of South Africa by any means available, although this would be unbelievably destructive for the African National Congress, and also the SACP has no actual reason for demanding this removal. Meanwhile, the President of the ANC, ignoring all the actual problems, is visiting the Eastern Cape, trying to impose the opinions of the corrupt O R Tambo Municipality, one of the few regions in the province which support him, on the whole province, against the wishes of provincial government and electorate.

Hmm. Open the papers. Ah, it’s all so clear now. Like everything else, it’s all Thabo Mbeki’s fault. Just get rid of him and there will be no more xenophobia, Zimbabwe will be rich, the Tripartite Alliance will be at peace and the Eastern Cape will be contented. Actually, if you depend on the papers, this will probably be the case; all those things will indeed fill the papers once Jacob Zuma is in charge of the country. But those things will be no more true than anything that fills the papers now.

What goes on?

The Creator would like to cut through some of the fog. The fundamental issue is that not only South African, but global big business wants Mbeki out. Mbeki has been an extremely business-friendly President, but he has not been corrupt, and he has not been hostile to national development. Allow more corruption, and cut back on social and infrastructural spending (and ramp up privatisation) — these are things which big business wants and which Mbeki poses a threat to. These are also the things which the new ANC elite particularly fancy (and, sadly, which too many of the old ANC elite fancied, so Mbeki walked a tightrope between them and his own beliefs until he fell off last year).

Hence Tsvangirai’s kick at Mbeki. He is simply doing what his Western handlers tell him to do. He may even believe it, since in his cowardly flight from Zimbabwe this year he mostly sheltered among right-wing whites in South Africa, a category of people whose word Tsvangirai has always followed. Most importantly, he knows it will do no harm; if Mbeki falls soon, the Zuma faction may even give Tsvangirai a little handout for helping them. But if, against all expectations, the Mbeki faction holds on to power, they will not punish Zimbabwe or Tsvangirai for his rudeness.

The behaviour of the foreigners in the makeshift camps is also not at all odd. Anyone who has been chased from their home by marauding mobs is likely to be in a disturbed state of mind and will abuse almost anyone available to be abused. No surprise that they extrapolate from the handful of thugs to the whole of South Africa. No surprise, either, that they blame the government. Who else are they to blame, other than the thugs, of course?

What is slightly surprising is that the media, especially the press, is taking precisely this line, blaming the government a) for allowing the foreigners in — essentially, saying that the thugs have a point, b) for not acting sooner against the violence (which is unfair, but a potentially legitimate criticism), c) for not giving the foreigners better refugee camps (again a bit unfair, since the government desperately hoped that they’d be able to go back home — now, of course, more permanent camps are being set up, but for obvious reasons these can’t be seen as superior to the shacks which the foreigners were living in beforehand), d) for not blathering on about how xenophobia is bad. (This last shows where the press is really at; it’s all about propaganda, and to hell with reality — which explains why the convicted criminal who was fired from the Ministry of Home Affairs for incompetence and corruption, Winnie Mandela, is now held up as a glorious example by the press.)

However, the media’s urgent need to blame the government, to exploit the results of attacks on foreigners and to exploit the laughable babbling of the West’s glove-puppet in Zimbabwe, is not in itself easy to understand. OK, the media is owned by big business, and big business hates Mbeki. On the other hand, all this vicious and dishonest propaganda does obvious harm to South Africa’s socio-political and economic interests. Maybe South Africa’s interests are not exactly high on the agenda of our media bosses, who all have homes abroad, but surely it might count for something among the editors, some of whom spend winters in South Africa. What’s going on?

Oops, look at the time! It’s June! Gotta rush — August is just around the corner! In August, unless something intervenes, Jacob Zuma goes on trial for corruption, bribery and income-tax evasion. It’s a no-brainer; an honest judge would have the handcuffs on Zuma before he’d been in the dock for ten minutes. More probably, however, the case would go on for a long while, excruciatingly exposing the dishonesty and treachery of the man chosen by South African big business to be President of our country, and implicitly showing that the entire present leadership of the ANC’s National Executive Committee are either idiots or criminals or both.

What’s to be done? The problem is compounded by the fragility of the coalition behind Zuma. It consists chiefly of egomaniacal greedheads. Some of these greedheads pretend to be leftists, some pretend to be businessmen. (In each case the self-identity is dubious, although at least the businessmen possess the selfishness and corruption required, whereas a selfish and corrupt leftist is a contradiction in terms — albeit a sadly frequent one.)

These groups are at war. The leftists abuse the businessmen for not being leftists; the businessmen sideline the leftists and mock their principles through the newspapers they own. Within local branches and provincial executives of the ANC there is a perpetual jockeying for power which leads to chaos at conferences. Everybody is itching for a salaried government job, and the royal road to this lies through votes in local councils. Most probably, this is a big reason for the recent attacks on foreigners; someone has discovered that an easy way to mobilise people is through hatred of foreigners. Very possibly the leaders of those mobs carrying sticks and petrol-bombs are future mayors. Not a pleasant thought.

However, this is not a product of the times, or of poverty. It is a product of the deliberate decision by the Zuma clique within the ANC, to eliminate disciplinary action in the party. (This is why nobody is being threatened with expulsion, even though the violence often flared in ANC strongholds; it would be against the convenient position of the current leadership.) The lack of discipline makes it easier for minorities to disrupt or overrule democratic activities, and to promote intimidation generally. It cannot be stopped (despite all the spurious rhetoric about restoring discipline to the movement) because then the majority of ANC members would be free to express their anger at being sidelined and bullied by a minority who happen to have the support of the National Executive Committee. However, it is problematic because it is not easily controllable; what if another clique arises which resolves to use the same tactics against Zuma’s clique? What if the branches become ungovernable?

The best solution is to hold the party together with something that everyone can unite around. Unfortunately, the Zuma clique has no principles which the bulk of ANC members can share, so there is nothing positive with which to promote union. Hence something negative is needed. Hatred of foreigners might be one such solution, but it leads to embarrassing bloodshed. Much better is hatred of Thabo Mbeki, especially since the leadership of the NEC all have scores to settle with Mbeki; he has sidelined them in the past because of their incompetence or corruption, and must be punished. Hence the ANC NEC is promoting violent attacks on the President of South Africa, a member of the ANC who until last December was President of the country, and has one of the most impressive struggle track records of any surviving active member of the party. These attacks are often drawn, knowingly, from parties and organisations hostile to the ANC who have used attacks on Mbeki as springboards for attacks on the ANC itself.

In short, scapegoating Mbeki is a kind of suicide. After all, what does it say about the ANC? Either that the party has been so incompetent that it has elected the Great Satan to run it for ten years, or that it is now so dishonest and unreliable that it chooses to run a bogus campaign proclaiming one of its best leaders as the Great Satan for pure purposes of revenge and point-scoring. Either way, it’s not a party that any sane person would join, or vote for if there were any alternative. It’s an indication of how far the ANC has fallen under Zuma’s leadership.

Of course, there’s another side to it, the urgent one the Creator mentioned earlier. In August Zuma’s trial comes up. If Zuma can be made President of the country before then, by kicking Mbeki out somehow, perhaps this can be headed off. The President has potentially great powers of intimidation, through his powers of appointment and dismissal. Zuma seems to be more than a figurehead; he is virtually the only member of his clique who commands genuine popularity outside the corporate elite (people like Ramaphosa and Sexwale are forgotten men in politics; they are prominent only for their wealth). Hence, without him, the coalition would again be in danger of falling apart.

But what if he doesn’t manage to prevent the trial? That would then make things worse; the President of the country, rather than just the President of the ANC, would be going on trial, and probably going to jail, for crimes the mere suspicion of which should disqualify a man from holding high office. (Of course this is not a Rich-Poor world issue; look at Berlusconi in Italy or Dick Cheney in the United States.) Meanwhile, with Mbeki gone, the glue holding the coalition would have disappeared. It would probably fall apart, and bring down the ANC with it.

It’s possible that this explains the ambiguous attitude of the group. They’ve got themselves into a bind and don’t know how to get out of it. They’re thrashing around, kicking their own party to pieces and thus breaking apart the ladder on which they are standing. Mbeki is the man holding that ladder steady, so while they abuse him, they cannot really afford to get rid of him. But when he walks away next year, they will probably fall off anyway. Everything they do makes the ladder more unstable.

The only part of the coalition which is really happy with the situation is surely the SACP. They know that in the way things work, if the coalition holds together, they will get shafted and the tycoons will reap all the benefits. On the other hand, if the coalition disintegrates and the ANC splits up, the SACP is the only truly disciplined body involved in it — being completely undemocratic — and therefore has the potential to make gains. Not enough gains to get power, but enough to get it a few MPs in Parliament — perhaps even to be a tiny, powerless “official opposition” to the huge plutocratic foreign-dominated government which will probably be the successor to the ANC. And that, basically, seems to be what the SACP wants; a few jobs for the boys and an official opportunity to whine about the ever-worsening situation.

Welcome to the future; remember, you probably voted for it.

Rolling Back the Right Wing. (III) Rantin’ ‘Bout A Revolution.

One of the problems with small leftist political organisations is that they see themselves as Leninist;
most of them don’t admit it, but their structure and forward planning revolves around the possibility of
revolution. Go on the Internet, or talk to lefties when they are slightly unguarded or drunk, and similar
issues come up. “When the Revolution comes they’ll be up against the wall.” “After the Revolution
things will be different.” “The Revolution will not be televised.”
Yes, it would be, if it were going to happen.
A revolution is not the same as a civil war with a revolutionary objective, which is quite important.
If you have circumstances where the people are extremely unhappy with the government for clear and
justifiable reasons, AND there is no prospect of changing the government by more peaceful means,
AND the armed forces have lost their faith in, and support for, the government — bingo. You can then
organise a swift seizure of power by your radical forces and, having done so, start implementing your
agenda (assuming that it’s an agenda that the people approve of — otherwise you have problems).
Much more common, point (3) does not apply. The armed forces support the government and want
to defend it — to defend their salaries or their uniforms or just their doglike love of the bosses in power.
In that case you have to get the armed forces out of the way, which means building up a force of
equivalent power (if more dispersed in space and time). But in order to do that you have to militarize
your revolutionary movement and you can forget about democracy as part of the post-revolutionary
agenda. Also, of course, there’s an excellent chance you will lose. Besides, a civil war is exceedingly
bloody. South Africa’s proto-civil war cost tens of thousands of lives even though it was mercifully
called off in 1994, before it had really got going (though tell that to the inhabitants of Katlehong or
Sweetwater).
A revolutionary civil war is the last thing you want; the last, fatal option if you cannot bring change
by any other means.
When points (1) or (2) do not apply, but point (3) does, the chances are that you will have a military
coup, because a disgruntled military is usually the most powerful force for change in a country. In rare
cases, military coups can be progressive acts. Much more often they are reactionary, and if they don’t
start out reactionary they head that way fast, when Brigadier This of the Third Armoured tells Major
That of the First Parachute that he’s done his duty and now the Brigadier will take over.
When none of the points truly apply, you have a big fat waste of time. Examples of this are the
African Resistance Movement in South Africa, the RAF in Germany, Brigate Rossi in Italy, Angry
Brigade in Britain. Note the militaristic names of these European groupuscules, like the Red Army in
Japan. Even the Weather Underground in America was probably plugging into those TV movies about
the French Resistance in World War II. Note also that a brigade is about 3 000 people, whereas few of
these bodies would have been able to muster enough backing to make up the 200-person complement of
a short company.) Usually these movements strove to provoke repression from the government, in
which they often succeeded brilliantly, and through this repression to mobilise the masses, in which they
totally failed.
In recent years, the best example of a successful revolution where all three points applied is — um.
The Creator can’t really think of one. Perhaps the Iranian revolution comes close, and perhaps there you
have also an example of the problem even with a successful revolution. Is it really likely that those
people marching in the streets of Tehran and getting bowled over like human ninepins by the rifle fire
of the Royal Army — is it really likely that they thought they were dying for the right to have a
totalitarian religious dictatorship staffed by fuckwits who thought that provoking a proxy war with the
whole Arab world was a hell of a good idea? In a revolution you don’t get to choose your leaders. It’s
the purest lottery whether they’re any good or not.
The big illusion of revolutionary activity in the twentieth century was twofold. As it happened, there
had been a successful revolution against the middle class, in Russia. This caused the middle class to
become much more paranoid about working-class-led revolutions than ever before. Because the middle
class was scared of revolution, those who didn’t think that the middle class was up to much decided that
there had to be something to this revolution lark. Besides, a revolution had put Lenin and Trotsky and
Bukharin and Zinoviev and that other guy with the unpronounceable Georgian name in a fabulous
saddle where every leftie would love to sit. So Saul Bellow, who is no friend of the left but had no
particular reason to lie about matters in the late 1940s, talks about pre-war leftists looking for maps of
the Manhattan sewer system, in the hope that it could be useful when the Revolution came.
Which it never did.
The other illusion was caused by the collapse of colonialism. In practice, colonialism collapsed
because the United States wished to control the territories occupied by France and Britain and therefore
put pressure on them to get out; the United States had ideas for ways of controlling those territories
without being ostentatiously present itself. In a number of cases France and Britain and, at first, Holland
and, eventually, Portugal did their best to hang on to the colonies and murdered countless people.
Where they did this, you had a kind of revolutionary civil war. (In all foreign-occupied countries the
chief battle is against the locals who have sold out to the foreigners.) However, because of the foreign
occupation, the long-term goals of the civil war were often confused, reduced to the idea that getting rid
of the white devils who were killing us was a fine and decent thing and anyone willing to help out with
that was a good egg. Very often the end product was to put people in power who were anything but
good guys, as in Algeria when Boumedienne kicked Ben Bella out and added corruption to Ben Bella’s
existing tyranny. (Maybe “tyranny” overstates things, but Ben Bella was nobody’s democrat.)
So people fooled themselves that a wave of revolutionary liberation was spreading across the planet,
led by cool people with sharp-edged cheekbones in dishy berets. In fact the revolutionary nature of
Third World countries was almost invariably an illusion. What these governments, even the ones which
took power following serious struggles, wanted, was to hang on to power and (often) to personally
profit from it. As a result, the 1960s European and American revolutionary fetish of Third World
imagery was, more often than not, based on falsity. It was also a degree of compensation for the
disintegration of the hopes of the 1917 Revolution. Many Westerner lefties adopted what they called
Maoism, usually meaning nothing at all, and thus avoided having to pass through the calvary of
admitting that Stalinism had been a huge blunder and that revolution was not necessarily a good thing.
Today there is no prospect of revolutionary change in most countries. Where revolution, or
revolutionary civil war, is possible or worth contemplating, is mostly in peripheral countries like Nepal.
It’s far from clear how truly revolutionary the civil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia really are; in
great measure they seem to be intended to restore the situation (or the potential situation) before the
invaders arrived.
But it is simply impossible to imagine a revolution taking place in contemporary South Africa, for
example. None of the conditions apply; the government are not especially unpopular, the armed forces
are loyal to it, and if you really don’t like the government you can vote for something else with a
reasonable prospect of success — if your arguments are solid. As a result an attempted revolution would
misfire. The preparations for it would fail — as we have already seen in the case of the Boeremag. The
Boeremag was a right-wing equivalent of the Brigata Rossi, except that the South African government
had no special reason for preserving it in the way that the right-wing Italian government found the
survival of the Brigata Rossi a convenient excuse for repression and tyranny. Hence the Boeremag was
shut down quite quickly. Note that virtually nobody actually supported the Boeremag. The “Groep van
77″ right-wing Afrikaner separatists whose rhetoric was identical with the Boeremag’s and possibly
inspired them, sat on their hands and did nothing to help while their armed comrades were hunted down
and jailed.
Nor is there a revolutionary situation in the townships. Recently John Pilger, in his address receiving
his honorary doctorate at Rhodes, claimed that there had been 5 000 demonstrations in South Africa in
the previous year. Pilger’s South African statistics are usually unreliable, but supposing he is right, his
conclusions are wrong. Demonstrations are legal in South Africa (provided you notify the cops
beforehand you almost invariably get a permit) and the government loves holding demoes to show their
support. The bulk of those demonstrations were probably marches proclaiming the public’s love for the
new shopping-mall. Where they weren’t completely politically innocuous, the commonest kind of
demonstration is the “service delivery” protest, in which you go out on a march calling for the
government to hurry up and tar the roads like they promised last year, and maybe burn the mayor in
effigy because you’re darn sure he’s pocketed the cash earmarked for those roads.
This is not revolutionary, it is reformist, and it takes place within the structures of a social-
democratic government. In fact, most such demonstrations are led by governing-party members. Hand
out AKs to the members of such protests, and most of them would either hand them straight to the cops
for the reward, or write indignant letters to Gun Free South Africa. A small minority would nip off and
rob the local trading store, in the same way that service delivery protests sometimes end in people
ramming their point home by lynching a foreigner. This does not constitute a threat to the state. If it did,
would it represent a desirable change?
What it does indicate is that there may be a groundswell of dissatisfaction with government
performance within governing party structures. However, there’s no sign that anybody is in a position to
take advantage of this on any radical basis. (On the contrary, politicians — unsurprisingly — seem much
more concerned to take advantage of it to further their own careers and feather their own nests.) It might
be possible for left-wing parties to take advantage of this groundswell provided they do so with great
tactical care. It might also be possible for dissidents within the party to increase their lobbying capacity
by building informal — or even formal — structures to make legitimate criticism of party performance.
But that’s boring and does not fit in with most leftist fantasies, especially not ones which involve
spiffy uniforms and brief visits to dungeons to explain to one’s former friends how regrettable it is that
they betrayed the revolution, before they are taken out and shot. Until leftists can get over their
revolutionary hangover, this kind of attitude will remain and will choke planning and sensible
preparation. Unfortunately, these days revolution is not the royal road to power or success. It’s usually a
lot more difficult to arrange than reformism.
When reformism becomes powerful, of course, it becomes a potential threat to the status quo. In that
case, the establishment might seek to repress it. In that case again, the reformist movement would do
well to consider revolutionary activities (in the way that the ANC did not really do until it was much too
late in the 1950s). But that is a story for another day.

Does Whiteness Make You Stupid?

Professor Frederik van Zyl Slabbert is probably the nicest, best all-around liberal goodie that one could come across in white South Africa if one searched all year. In consequence it is painful to have to admit that his book, The Other Side of History, is a load of complete asinine rubbish from beginning to end. With incredible consistency and facility, Slabbert misreads his sources and misinterprets his anecdotes, including things which happened to him, until he is safe and extremely happy and smug on Planet Bizarro.

This sounds a bit unfair, doesn’t it? Consider, however, his introduction which he devotes to identifying what he considers to be the contradiction between Mbeki’s inclusive “I am an African” speech and the fact that the concept of black economic empowerment identifies indians, coloureds — and africans. “I am an african too!” Slabbert wants to say, on the grounds of living in Africa. Now, Slabbert lived in the Western Cape in the 1980s. He should have been aware of the whole race debate and the conflicts within the UDF and some Trotskyite movements regarding racial differentiation, and why coloureds and indians were viewed as differently disadvantaged from africans, unless he was living in a cocoon. Apparently he was.

There are a number of comments which are simply pitiful. For instance, Slabbert quotes a Hoover Institute fellow named Sowell saying that “The advance of European imperialism around the world marked the retreat of the slave trade and then of slavery itself” (p.7). The Hoover Institute is a bunch of reactionary numbskulls among whom Sowell is one of the numbest, but this definitely takes the cake for bumptious nonsense. Of course European imperialism around the world created the slave trade and slavery in its mass sense, introducing industrial-scale slave plantations to the whole of the Americas and southern Africa. It is true that European imperialists helped to end the slave trade – except in the United States, and except for the fact that European imperialists then invented “indentured labour”, which is slavery under another name. The fact that Slabbert can endorse this scale of balderdash suggests either that he has become extraordinarily stupid, or that he has an altogether other agenda in view than telling the truth.

Also, he says, for good measure, “when the Berlin Wall came down . . . the ANC . . . became a movement with no discernible dominant ideology” (p.10). Yeah, he really says that, and he calls himself a political scientist. But he goes on, “The fact that it then proceeded to negotiate a liberal democracy . . . and a market economy . . . is the clearest evidence of this” (p.11). In other words, a liberal democracy and a market economy is not the product of an ideology. While Slabbert doesn’t seem to realise that he is saying this, it is pretty clear; an ideology is something that Slabbert doesn’t like, and thus by definition, it is wrong.

Indeed, he makes this quite clear when he says “do not let us invent the past or make ourselves and others ideologically hostage to it” (p.13). In other words, we must either ignore the past (which obviously he does not sant, or else he would not be talking about it) or we must not view it through an ideology, but we must rather understand the truth of the past. This truth is what Slabbert is unveiling to us. Just believe Slabbert and all will be well.

Well, fair enough; what is the truth? The truth is perfectly simple to Slabbert. He heard Frederik Willem de Klerk say “I made sure that I had my party, my people and the state behind me” before he unbanned the ANC and liberated Mandela. However, he says that De Klerk must be lying, because “the scope of De Klerk’s reforms, and the complete lack of consultation to prepare for the consequences, caught the security establishment off guard” (p.16). Note that De Klerk does not say he had the security establishment behind him; he says he had the state behind him. In fact it is quite clear that the apartheid military and police opposed De Klerk’s reforms, because they implied a grave weakening of their position. On the other hand, once they were in place they had no alternatives to De Klerk’s plans, as even Slabbert admits. So Slabbert is jeering at De Klerk completely unnecessarily.

However, take a closer look at this. What does Slabbert mean by the need for the armed forces “to prepare for the consequences” of unbanning banned organisations? Surely he is pleading that De Klerk should have given the armed forces a greater opportunity to head off the threat of democracy and freedom. In other words, the leader of the Progressive Federal Party until 1986, the light of the liberal world, is saying that De Klerk should have worked harder to undermine liberal democracy.

Does this seem too extreme? Surely not. Throughout the earlier parts of the book Slabbert relies heavily on the word of General George Meiring, former head of Military Intelligence and Chief of the SADF in the transition period. Meiring was strongly opposed to De Klerk, and Slabbert quotes him with approval. Slabbert’s sympathies for the military and police take him so far as to complain that “those in security felt that they were subjected to a witch-hunt” (p.19) when some of them who had committed murder were brought to trial for this, and when others who had defied the orders of their elected President, F W De Klerk, were dismissed from the armed forces (with full pensions and perquisites, of course). Slabbert, who has never heard a gun go off in anger, just loves a man in uniform.

Take Colonel Jan Breytenbach, commander of 32 Battalion, South Africa’s Angolan mercenary force largely expended in fruitless fighting in Angola and then dumped in the South African desert to starve. Slabbert practically sucks the good Colonel’s boot-blacking off. At one point he observes that “by killing SWAPO’s ‘terrorists’ and communists he was playing an indirect political role” (p.21). They gave this guy a Professorship, and then he writes things like this! No, Cde Slabbert, it was not an “indirect” political role, he was murdering Namibian freedom fighters and civilians and Angolan defenders and civilians in order to sustain white racist dominion in South Africa and he knew that perfectly well. Jan Breytenbach is not an idiot. But it certainly seems that you think your readers are, not so, Professor?

Just one more special quote on this little subject. Slabbert is quite proud of having helped the apartheid state keep it a secret that their army had invaded Angola in 1975. “I have not met one senior SADF officer of that period who was not convinced that the SADF could cope with the military side of the conflict, including the ‘famous battle of Cuito Cuanavale’” (p.21). Yeah, right, they were stabbed in the back by the Jews and the Catholics and the Freemasons, weren’t they? Or why is it that the SADF fled Angola with its tail between its legs in 1977 and again in 1988? Is Slabbert saying, as he ought to be, that this proves that SADF officers of that period are deluded fruitcakes? Sadly, no.

But, boy, does he admire them! Sperm flies all over the place when he talks about the Reconnaissance Commandoes: “These recces were soldier’s soldiers, but were thoroughly led up the garden path and betrayed by their political masters” (p. 25). Dolchstoss! Dolchstoss!! At least, he says approvingly, some of them are earning lots of money as gunmen for the American occupiers in Iraq . . .

It isn’t only soldiers that Slabbert worships. He also copies, almost word for word, an apartheid policeman’s line on Operation Vula, as follows: “Vula . . . was created in 1980 in exile [no, it wasn’t, you ignorant twit] . . . . during early July 1990, and as a direct result of information at its disposal, the security branch of the South African police conducted certain follow-up, search-and-seizure operations . . . to reveal the existence of an SACP/ANC plot aimed at utilising the space and freedom of movement created by the negotiation process in order to bring about a revolutionary and violent overthrow of the government” (pp.32-3). This pompous jargon might as well be printed on paper with a Security Branch letterhead.

Actually, as is well known by now, Vula was an attempt to set up an internal command structure for uMkhonto we Sizwe established in 1988. It was reasonably successful, but with the unbanning, security got sloppy, especially because it was known that the ANC leadership was about to suspend the armed struggle (which had been on ice anyway for six months). Technically, since MK was no longer illegal, there was nothing wrong with Vula, yet Slabbert makes a tremendous fuss about it, precisely the same fuss that apartheid’s secret police made –

With an exception. Nobody involved with Vula did anybody any harm. Yet in the clampdown on Vula, dozens of people were detained without trial (a practice which Slabbert once pretended to oppose). Most of them were tortured. Several of them were taken to the countryside and murdered. Slabbert doesn’t say a word about this. It’s bad, it’s very bad, to attempt to overthrow an evil government. Meanwhile, if that government wants to torture and murder people, you got a problem with that? Not if your name is Slabbert, obviously!

This is especially because Slabbert proudly declares, on the word of General Meiring, that “there was not the slightest prospect of a successful war of liberation being waged by the armed movement of the ANC” (p.34). In other words, Slabbert believes that Operation Vula had no prospect of success. But better detain, torture and murder people anyway. Why not, if you can get away with it?

Indeed, Slabbert’s whole line on the end of apartheid is a bit mysterious. He says that the ANC were useless and MK helpless and the South African government, army and police were always in full control. Mbeki (whom Slabbert generously promotes to total dictatorship of the ANC, brushing aside trivia like Tambo and Mandela and Sisulu) played no role in anything. No, the only man who did anything was Cyril Ramaphosa, whose negotiation skills destroyed apartheid all by themselves and who should have been made dictator for life, or something, instead of being democratically voted into a junior position to Mbeki’s (he then dumped politics for money). This is an interesting take on South African history. It is pretty obviously wrong; political struggles just don’t work like that. However, Slabbert hates the ANC and the post-apartheid settlement so deeply that he cannot admit that they ever had anything going for them at all.

One’s gob gets really smacked when he says that after the fall of the Berlin Wall “’the West’ was no longer available to help the apartheid government to fight against communism . . . . support for the ANC to combat racism and oppression became universalized and – especially – the USA embraced it” (p. 36). Jehoshaphat, gag me with a jukskei set! Slabbert is actually unaware of the long anti-apartheid campaign of the 1970s and 1980s! Apparently he never watched SATV in those years. He thinks the USA suddenly began supporting the ANC in 1989! He thinks support for apartheid was all about Communism – in fact, he is perhaps the last person who still believes all that bull coming out of the Bureau of Information in Pretoria in the 1980s!

Now, you may say that this is trivial and innocuous. The Creator is not so sure. Just because a former white liberal has gone over, lock, stock and two concrete-filled barrels, to the kind of apartheid propaganda that would have embarrassed Connie Mulder, is not cause for concern. But it may be a straw in the wind, like the recent canonisation of Eugene Terre’Blanche and the Afrikanerweerstandsbeweging in the press. (Slabbert is also a big fan of the white enclave of Orania, by the way.) It is not just about racism, it is also about endorsing terrorism.

Note this carefully: “Mandela milked every ounce of sympathy for the ANC being the victims of a dirty-tricks campaign . . . . The violence of Boiphatong in June 1992 provided fertile propaganda” (p.40). Jesus! Anyone remember what happened at Boiphatong? No? Well, a bunch of people supporting the Inkatha movement went on the rampage through the town. Inkatha was known to be financially supported by the Security Police whom Slabbert so admires, and it was also known that Inkatha’s chief killers had received military training from the apartheid state in the Caprivi Strip five years earlier. Inkatha was murdering people all across the country, and in Boiphatong they murdered a couple of dozen – shooting some, hacking and stabbing others – for no reason other than to terrorise them not to support the ANC.

The story was that the South African Police escorted them in and out of Boiphatong from the hostel where the murderers were staying. Maybe that isn’t true, but everyone in Boiphatong believed it. This was the “violence” which Mandela “milked”, according to Slabbert. Three days later F W De Klerk tried to visit Boiphatong and the people of the settlement stoned him until his bodyguard drew their guns and fired randomly into the crowd, murdering three more people.

This is the kind of behaviour endorsed by Slabbert. At least he is consistent about it. The Creator will not waste time quoting more; it is repetitive and pretty dull. But this is what white liberalism leads to in South Africa, folks. This is where the state of play now is.