11 June 2006
column
Johannesburg — IS SOUTH Africa at a crossroads today, as Achille Mbembe suggested last week in "Stirring a dark brew that echoes Nongqawuse's fatal prophecy"? It is certainly true that the ANC faces increasingly bitter struggles, alliance politics is repeatedly tested, and large numbers of South African citizens desperately attempt to eke out a living on the margins of what was meant to be a "new" South Africa.
But can all dissatisfaction with the current politics be reduced to that of a "prophet" who "justifies himself in the name of his 'ancestors', his 'traditions' or his 'culture'"? (Mbembe never explicitly identifies the prophet, but any close observer of South Africa can discern that this is a thinly veiled reference to ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma).
Not really. South Africa's current challenges and the debates spurred by Zuma's actions and words are both more modern and more banal than Mbembe suggests.
Mbembe makes a number of important points. He points to the false promises of populist rhetoric and suggests the dangers of such rhetoric when addressing the great discontent and frustration of many South Africans.
But his comparisons to African calamities in both the distant and not-so-distant past may inadvertently hide far more than they reveal. In fact, Africa suffers not only from exploitation, underdevelopment, poverty and disease but also from broad generalisations and the misperceptions these encourage. The roots of the crises in countries beset by brutal civil wars such as those in Sierra Leone and the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo, let alone the genocide in Rwanda, and the challenges that South Africa face today are very different.
It would take too long to list the many points of difference, but these should be quite obvious. The brutal destruction of the state in Liberia and the rise of warlord politics, for example, is hardly comparable to the complex positioning of competing actors working largely through formal institutions such as party structures, alliance structures and the media to place their candidate at the helm of the ANC and in the national presidency.
The popular discontent that Mbembe describes in South Africa is in good part a product not only of the daily challenges that so many citizens face, but also of the harsh gulf of experiences between South Africans. This points to the central problems: material inequality and the impotence of official politics in dealing with that inequality. This inequality is leading to increases in local protests, orchestrated in the main not by the national organisations Mbembe lists but by the communities themselves in many impoverished townships across the country.
Because only a small percentage of blacks have benefited from policies meant to redress this inequality, further discontent arises. However, the indisputable existence of discontent, frustration, even hopelessness at times, does not suggest the huge leap to millenarianism.
How do we avoid the language of Afro-pessimism that plays into many Western misperceptions of Africa from the time of colonial rule and slavery? We need to be explicit in addressing the politics that creates the challenges we face, as well as the local responses to them. This politics does not have to do with putative wellsprings of nihilism in the African soul. It revolves around the incredible challenges of addressing the gross human-rights violations of apartheid, of offering economic upliftment to a poor majority, of addressing pressing material needs, of providing healthcare, including access to life-saving antiretrovirals, and establishing the institutional foundations for a democratic state and ruling party.
Party politics is never simple. Zuma effectively sought out the ANC and the current government's weaknesses in making his arguments. He engaged in the politics of tradition to counter the perception of the ANC as a wholly urban, modern and also elite party. He played the politics of gender stereotyping.
He made a play for popular support, offering himself as a hero to the poor masses. More than anything else, he played the politics of opposition, seeking to present himself as an alternative to a leader who is often perceived as elite, distant and controlling. While these strategies of presenting -- or claiming to present -- an alternative to power may be as old as the hills, the debates they play into are very much the product of today's divided society.
Mbembe is disappointed that South Africa no longer "has the moral and intellectual capacity to generate an alternative meaning of what our world might be". There are grounds for disappointment in South Africa, but its capacity for generating moral vision is not lacking. Mbembe is just looking in the wrong places.
In fact, outside elite politics, political participation is flourishing and people are redefining citizenship. For example, just last week a representative of the Treatment Action Campaign was invited to present global civil society's opening statement to the United Nations Special Session on HIV/Aids in New York.
Mbembe offers a few technicist solutions, but in the main seems to wish people would just get behind the "worldly, cosmopolitan and urbane" President Thabo Mbeki.
However, while it is true that Mbeki has emerged as the face of the "African renaissance", within South Africa he has failed dismally to provide leadership in the face of the Aids pandemic. When, according to the UN, one in seven South Africans has HIV, it looks to us as if Mbeki is the one advocating "national suicide", in the most literal sense.
Jacobs is assistant professor of African studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Zuern is assistant professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College in New York
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