The Warning: South Africa Is An Angry And Frustrated Nation And On The Brink
Durban, South Africa: These are not the best of times in South Africa. It seems clear that there is fear and loathing everywhere as the press is packed with fresh allegations of corruption, and a restive mood spreads even as the country prepares to host the economic Summit of the BRICS countries it is part of---Brazil, Russia, India, and China which is facing a growth in joblessness and economic/political malaise.
Nelson Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, the brilliant Mozambican leader who married the man everyone here calls by his clan name Madiba, is speaking out even as her husband Nelson Mandela no longer can because of age and infirmity.
She calls South Africa an “angry nation... on the brink of 'something very dangerous'. She was speaking at a memorial for a Mozambican cab driver whose killing by the police was caught on a cellphone camera and went viral. The police deny they were brutal, despite the video, which further outrages a country that seems to be increasingly turning on the politicians they see as plundering its resources.
Machel minced no words, saying South Africa is a society 'bleeding and breathing pain' and warned against 'deeper trouble from the past that has not been addressed."
That "deeper trouble" evoked the compromise negotiated settlement that won political power for the ANC through elections in the early 90's, but kept economic power in the hands of a mostly white elite dominated by big business, the "mining energy complex." Economist Sampie Terrablanche tells that story of an imposed neoliberalism lobbied for by multinationals, international financial institutions and foreign governments like the U.S. and U.K. in his book, "Lost in Transformation."
There are many critical voices. Steve Biko’s one-time close comrade, Mamphela Ramphele, a doctor turned banker, poverty expert and businesswoman, has launched a new political party Agagng (Sesotho for "build") to challenge the ANC. While her base lacks the ANC’s deep roots in the black community, her analysis resonates with many.
Her statement aimed to “rekindle The South African Dream” writing “the country of our dreams has unfortunately faded...The dream has faded for many living in poverty and destitution.”
It was a lyrical all to memory and militancy asking, “Do you remember our patience and quiet dignity as we waited in long queues to cast our very first votes as citizens of a free South Africa? Do you remember how you choked with emotion and had goose bumps as you made your very first cross on the ballot? Do you remember the tears of joy and relief when we watched our first President, Rolihlahla Mandela, being honoured with a fly-past by the air-force that was to have its first democratically elected commander in chief? …..
Do you remember the dream we embraced to build ours into a great society – a prosperous constitutional democracy united in its diversity?”
She lashed out a corruption but the media gave her new initiative little chance of succeeding. Other parties, upset that she didn’t embrace them remained distant, even as it prompted other leaders like Mangosuthu Buthelezi to launch yet another broadside at the ANC.
“Last week's State of the Nation address (by President Jacob Zuma) has left us in no doubt that the time has come to remove from power a leadership not fit to govern. The time has come to close the door on this first Republic under the ANC, and to close it firmly on all the inefficiencies, deficiencies and problems the ANC has brought with it. This is no longer the party of the 1912 visionaries; the party of Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Inkosi Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela. This ANC is corrupt. It is failing South Africa.”
What Buthelezi and the ANC’s other critics seem to forget is that the former government, the all white apartheid regime, was as corrupt, even if they were perhaps more discreet about it and controlled the media so there could be no exposes.
Also, whenever you have someone taking money, someone else is giving it, like the foreign arms companies that used payoffs to win business in South Africa.
This doesn’t make any of it right but shows there is a deeper context implicating more than ANC officials.
It is not just the black community that is hurt by or involved in these practices. Indians and whites are also compromised.
In a country shocked by a current domestic rape and child abuse crisis, the one story that made all the headlines was the case of disabled celebrity Runner/Olympian, Oscar Pistoroius, shooting and killing his model girlfriend. Both were white.
As Eurasia Review noted, “The Pistorius case cannot … be treated in isolation of a complex culture, which makes its eventual outcome a defining moment for South Africa. Whether that moment shifts the socio-political terrain is another matter altogether.
Between 2011 to 2012, two important centres in Cape Town, which have historically responded to diverse forms of gender based violence were all struggling for survival.”
The Pistorius family has now defended the arsenal of guns found in his home and no doubt in other homes. Violence is endemic in a culture of poverty and personal insecurity as crime becomes a crude and uneven redistribution system.
Eurasia Review adds, “Alongside this struggle for survival, two other important political events occurred on South Africa’s landscape. The first was the public murder of miners in Marikana who dared protest in order to demand for an acceptable living wage and the second was the constant revival and disappearance of the Traditional Courts Bill…”The bill is considered a reversal of the rights of women by making traditional chiefs powerful overlords who are not subject to democratic checks or balances.”
And so if you scratch the surface of almost any issue, you find currents of dissent and disagreement, as well as angry denunciations of whoever is thought responsible. The depth of this estrangement from government and disgust with the direction the country has taken is not fully reported in the media.
The sense of comradeship, unity and feelings of social cohesion—the "we," not the "I"—that unified South Africans in the struggle for years seems to be disappearing as inequality deepens, and people scramble to survive economically as individuals in an economy that is not growing fast enough to promote economic growth, and is still largely controlled by white-owned multi-nationals and banks.
The sense of traditional solidarity, class cohesion and community is under strain by a blatant Darwinism with even the poor embracing that core Capitalist value: “look out for number one” as government services —what they call “delivery” promises -- falter and fail.
The other day I sat with two South African women, one named Confidence, the other the widow of a deceased commander of the Underground MK army that fought for the country’s liberation.
Both were frustrated by the slow pace of change, and are in need of medical care they can’t afford. Both were working but their salaries did not really cover their costs. Once more political, both seem to be spending more time in Church these days praying for divine intervention.
In his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, now on its way into becoming a major motion picture, Nelson Mandela warned that after you have climbed your final mountains, there will be others to climb.
South Africans still have much climbing to do.
News Dissector Danny Schechter has made many films and TV programs about South Africa. He is currently working on the Making and Meaning of Long Walk To Freedom, Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
ZNet Articles
ZMag Articles
ZCommentaries
ZVideos
Blog Posts
Books
FEAR AND LOATHING IN SOUTH AFRICA: SOME NOTES TOWARDS A FURTHER CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE CRISIS IN SOUTH AFRICA
By Gool, Selim at Mar 12, 2013 01:19 AM
This comment can seen as an attempt to fill in the gaps or lacunae and spaces open up by the publication of the two articles that have appeared in ZNet this past month: the first South Africa’s New Apartheid by Sabine Cessou (http://www.zcommunications.org/south-africa-s-new-apartheid-by-sabine-cessou) appeared on the 8th March, and the one by Danny Schechter (DS): The Warning: South Africa Is An Angry And Frustrated Nation And On The Brink, appearing on March 11th (above).
The Fear: Contextualizing the death of Mido Macia
Mido Macia, who was 27, was finally laid to rest in his native Mozambique. Thousands gathered for the funeral in Matola, near the capital Maputo.
In the sweltering heat of Matola Rio, Mozambique a crowd of about 1 000 people, including a delegation of compassionate South Africans, came with groceries as gifts, as if to atone the unatonable.
Around 2,000 people attended the funeral, among them several government officials and Mozambican liberation hero and elder statesman Marcelino dos Santos.
South Africa is an “angry nation” teetering “on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall,” warned Graca Machel, among the high-profile South African delegation present to pay their last respects to the murdered Mozambican Mido Macia, She is former president Nelson Mandela's wife and originally from Mozambique.
“We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”
From where does this enormous anger, this pain and bleeding originate?
As a representative of South Africa’s political and social elite, Machel has much to fear. She claimed that widespread anger springs from “unaddressed” issues from the country’s apartheid past but that is only part of the story.
The truth is that it springs from South Africa’s post-apartheid present and the backlog of accumulated problems tied to the apartheid past which after 20 years have only increased and not lessened.
And the anger is increasingly being directed against the African National Congress (ANC) government and its trade union allies (COSATU).
Garca Marcel-Mandela belongs to the new Black elite, educated, globally networked and influential, sitting on the board of many trusts and funding bodies. She, like the wife and children of Angolan President dos Santos, is also extremely wealthy in her own right.
Just a few months, since 16th August last year, have passed since the protest at Marikana where more than 35 striking platinum miners were killed by the police. Now, in an instance that is all too reminiscent of apartheid-style police brutality, cell-phone footage that has shown a man being handcuffed and dragged behind a police van has sparked local and international outrage.
The Independent Police Investigative Directorate would only confirm that Macia, who has lived in South Africa for 17 years, died from severe head and internal injuries. A preliminary postmortem, according to police sources, found that Macia bled to death. Several organs had been ruptured in the assault.
The injuries could be from the dragging and he could also have been beaten later in police custody. It was so bad his organs burst ... some were in pieces ... there was basically nothing left of his insides. "His head injuries were as bad ... his skull was crushed ... his brain badly damaged. It is clear that those who did this wanted to kill him," said a police source.
The only difference between the latest incident and those of the apartheid era is that all the police officers involved are black. The You-Tube video can be seen at: http://bit.ly/ZDOj0A. A murder probe is underway on the evidence that Macia suffered head and upper abdomen injuries, including internal bleeding, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police watchdog agency, said. 9 policemen who were involved in this atrocity have been arrested.
The killing of Mido Macia in Daveyton was filmed by a community member on a cellphone. There is no such evidence of what happened later at the police station. If the South African policemen shown in that video felt comfortable enough to brutalize a man for a minor traffic infringement, and (just possibly) for him attempting to grab a police weapon, what punishment did they inflict on him inside their station?
We might never know exactly. But there are other videos, of other incidents. As journalists have started to look at police brutality more seriously in the wake of Macia's death, the New York Times reported on another instance of police brutality that was caught on camera. See also:
http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2013-03-04-a-new-week-a-new-town-a-new-police-brutality-video/
After Macia’s death, Amnesty International said that it had received 720 new cases for investigation of suspicious deaths in custody between April 2012 and March 2012.
“Amnesty International urges the South African government to make a public commitment to ensure that the police stop the use of excessive force and deliberate targeted killings,” said the organisation’s southern Africa director, Noel Kututwa.
Cops are being charged with rape and murder, not to mention a list of other crimes, and Commissioner Riah Phiyega still needs to show South Africans she can institute changes to make police accountable to the country’s laws, rather than empowered to enforce their own arbitrary forms of “justice” and punishment.
The crowd chanted 'Down with xenophobia' and brandished banners with the words 'Stop Humiliating Mozambicans' and 'Mido Macia forever' at the funeral. Mozambicans have been going to the Witwatersrand mines since the early 1890s, accounting for circa 90 percent of the workforce in closed segregated compounds due to the collusion between the mine owners, called Randlords, and the colonial Mozambican government. This lasted till the late 1920s when internal migrants began to be utilized - but there was always a strong Mozambican presence in the Transvaal.
An outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008 in the area Davyton, where Mido Macia was arrested, revealed dangerous anti-immigrant sentiments towards Mozambicans and other foreigners, who were accused of stealing the jobs of South Africans.
The violence meted out by the police in this case, however, has led to a wave of sympathy and solidarity that has again focused attention on rising public hostility to the African National Congress (ANC).
Since the collapse of apartheid, the ?gure of "makwerekwere" ("black birds") has been constructed and deployed in South Africa to render Africans from outside the borders orderable or scapegoated as the nation’s bogeyman.
Waves of violence against "makwerekwere" have characterised South Africa since then, the largest of which broke out in May 2008 in the Johannesburg shantytown of Alexander. It quickly spread throughout the country.
It was a salient manifestation of a broadly and deeply entrenched disdain of black foreign nationals. Within this broader national trend there have been numerous outbreaks of violence since 1994.
South Africans have become used to media images of marauding protestors burning property and looting shops; in fact, so pervasive have these images become that many could be forgiven for assuming that peaceful protests are a thing of the past.
But why do some protestors resort to what the authorities term ‘illegal gatherings’ (some of which are not illegal at all) and violence to communicate their grievances? It is the "gatvol factor" …. finally being "fed-up" with the lies of the politicians.
But at times, journalists caricature protests as 'violent service delivery protests', in spite of the fact that violence is often not initiated by protestors, but is rather a response to state repression or even violence.
This caricature fails to register the chain of cause and effect in protest cycles, criminalises the protestors in the eyes of the public and the police and inadvertently legitimises state repression. Furthermore, protests are often about a diversity of grievances, not just service delivery. It could also be about police brutality and state repression.
THE LOATHING: THE POVO VERSUS THE ELITE
The media and the political elite worry about the threat posed to South Africa’s social cohesion, even its continued survival.
Nineteen years after the fall of apartheid, workers are still targeted for police killings—but now by black police officers under a majority-black government.
Moreover, the brutality meted out is hardly a unique event: last year, 720 people died in police custody or because of police action.
Most important of all has been the turn to brutal police repression against strikes and social protests.
A fundamental political reality is reasserting itself in South Africa. The basic division in society is not race, but class. But this can play itself out in a variety of ways, depending on the circumstance.
DS writes: "The sense of comradeship, unity and feelings of social cohesion—the "we," not the "I"—that unified South Africans in the struggle for years seems to be disappearing as inequality deepens, and people scramble to survive economically as individuals in an economy ….
The sense of traditional solidarity, class cohesion and community is under strain by a blatant Darwinism with even the poor embracing that core Capitalist value: “look out for number one” as government services —what they call “delivery” promises -- falter and fail."
And that "the struggle" is over the social surplus produced in society: the share of dividends going to the workers and the share going to the employers (capitalists). In the neo-liberal dispensation, the share of profits and other "earnings" from shares and speculation has been increasing, while the share going to the workers is stagnant or falling.
In the past few years there are signs of an amazing upsurge of class struggle - mostly uncoordinated and uneven struggle, with "wildcat strikes" and the attempts at the independent organisation of worker collectivities outside of the "recognized unions".
But the fear of worekers is that of police repression and reprisals, dismissals and blacklisting. This means loss of a valued job, loss of income for the family and starvation.
The end of apartheid did not end the oppression of the masses, but revealed its true character. It instituted formal legal equality but preserved real and growing social inequality.
The apartheid regime proved to be only one form of the dictatorship of capital. Since the end of apartheid and the transition to majority rule in 1994, crime has risen steadily, fuelled by the appalling levels of poverty and deprivation for the majority, amid fabulous wealth for the few.
The ANC’s response has been to turn to more and more repressive measures, recruiting an additional 70,000 police officers.
In 2008, Deputy Police Minister Susan Shabangu urged a shoot-to-kill policy, insisting, “I want no warning shots… You have one shot and it must be a kill shot.”
“You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect,” Shabangu told police in Pretoria. That year there were 790 deaths at the hands of the police.
Top ANC figures, such as President Jacob Zuma’s newly appointed deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, the multimillionaire director of Marikana’s owner, Lonmin, typifies the social layer represented by the ANC. It has enriched itself through the policies of “Black Economic Empowerment,” while the bulk of the black working class and semi-urban poor languished in poverty.
Today, South Africa still ranks among the most unequal nations in the world. The richest 10 percent of the population earn just over 51 percent of the country’s total income, while the poorest 20 percent receive less than 1.5 percent. Business Report notes that these figures exclude earnings on capital gains, which would increase the gap.
It warns that income inequality “has the potential to unravel society at the seams.”
Reply this comment