Author Interview: Greg Mills Discusses African Poverty and Solutions

Why is Africa poor? What can Africans do about it?

These two questions are combined in the title of a new book by South African scholar Greg Mills, who discussed his work at a forum hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington on October 6.

Mills is director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, which “was established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family,” he told me in an interview after that book forum.  He is also the co-author, with David Williams, of Seven Battles that Shaped South Africa.

The foundation’s objective, Mills said, is to “try to strengthen African economic performance. Essentially we operate at a strategic level with African presidencies, at their request,” providing research and advice “based on primary fieldwork in African countries” and drawing “a lot of good and bad examples from around the world: things to avoid and things to try to replicate.”

Describing his new book, Why Africa Is Poor and What Africans Can Do About It (released in hardcover by Penguin Global on November 17), Mills explained it has three parts.

“It tries to understand, firstly, why Africa is poor, and it advances the idea that this is a choice of African leadership. It’s an option that they have taken; it’s a result of their poor decisions,” he said.

It also tries to explain, Mills added, “why those decisions have been made. It often relates to the fact that African electorates are apathetic. In many cases, they don’t hold their leaders to account.”

The book also relates how economic aid from developed countries – or lack of it, depending on how one looks at it – “provides an opportunity for Africans to externalize their problems and also their solutions.

The second part of the book, Mills said, “focuses on international experiences and the best examples that Africa can draw” upon, while “the third part of the book really focuses on some of the opportunities in Africa [and] how these ideas might be implemented.”

That third section, he explained, examines the coming “demographic dividend in Africa and what this means [as] a huge opportunity for Africa, and what we have to do to realize this.” It also focuses on issues like agriculture, mining, and tourism, “three areas of great comparative advantage for the continent.”


Huge Potential for Tourism
With regard to tourism, Mills noted, “Africa currently gets about 4 percent of the global one billion-person tourism market,” meaning that Africa is wildly underrepresented in that economic sector, even though “in terms of wildlife and other beach and safari-type options, we have tremendous potential.”

He gave the examples of “a country like Kenya has a million fly-in tourists a year. Tanzania has 500,000 fly-in tourists a year, [while] Mozambique just has 50,000,” despite being “right next door to South Africa. There’s clearly a lot of potential in terms of an increasing that market.”

To increase tourism, Mills said, “we need to make it easier to get to Africa, cheaper to get to Africa, [and provide] higher quality resorts when people get there,” as well as assure “safer conditions where people don’t have to be worried about what surprises they’re going to find en route.”

He said that “the way to do it is to try to make it cheaper for South African tourists, in particular, to fly” to other African countries, “and then to relax visa restrictions on other external tourists.” In his formal remarks, Mills had pointed out that the Republic of Georgia no longer requires tourist visas for visitors from countries that have a bigger GDP than Georgia has, because such people are unlikely to stay there looking for work.

“Unfortunately,” Mills lamented, “most African countries have a very onerous visa regime and the air flights are not only unreliable, but relatively sparse in terms of their coverage and penetration of African markets.”

Still, he concluded, there is “certainly a huge amount of unrealized potential in tourism with all the multiplier employment prospects that it offers.”


‘Ditto’ for Agriculture
“Ditto,” he said, “in terms of agriculture,” which is extremely underdeveloped in relation to its potential in Africa.

“Africa’s agricultural yields have been two-thirds below that of the rest of the world,” Mills explained, due to “a huge lack of investment in extension services and fertilizer and seed programs.”

African agricultural output, he said, has “more or less flat-lined since independence in terms of its yield increases. This means that 38 of 48 sub-Saharan African countries are net food importers. It’s a staggering statistic.”

With more and more Africans moving to urban areas, he warned, “if we are to develop in our cities and if we are able to reduce food costs, we need to up our game.”

That means “addressing questions about land title, it means improving extension services, it means getting the private sector involved. It means upping scale in terms of agriculture, because that obviously brings certain efficiencies, and it means introducing technologies.”

In essence, Mills said, Africa must move “from a subsistence, peasant-type farming environment to a large-scale commercial involvement, [with] all the steps in between, particularly in mid-level farming.”

Despite this current underutilization of agricultural resources, Mills continued, “there’s huge potential on the continent. We shouldn’t be stuck at 5 percent growth. We should be looking at 10 percent growth and find out and understand the reasons why we’re not doing 15 percent growth,” since Africa is starting “from such a low base.”

(This article originally appeared in two parts, and in somewhat different form, on Examiner.com, on October 7 and October 8, 2010.)

'Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique'

This book review was published in Volume 3, Number 2, of International Freedom Review (Winter 1990).

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS IN ANGOLA AND MOZAMBIQUE


Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique 
edited by Richard J. Bloomfield.
(Reference Publications, Inc.: Algonac, Mich., 1988. 261 pp., $24.95 hdcvr, $12.95 ppb)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Sometimes even well-informed Americans have trouble understanding the differences between Angola and Mozambique, despite their location on opposite sides of the southern African continent. The similarities are readily apparent: Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies from the late fifteenth century until 1975. Both are poor. Both are in Africa. Both have had troubled relations with neighboring South Africa. Moreover, both have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties since independence.

However, the similarities do not go much beyond these few points, especially since after independence Angola and Mozambique have followed different paths and have come upon unique problems and opportunities. Each will have a decidedly different future.

The World Peace Foundation, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit foundation based in Boston that conducts studies of international issues,” has collected a number of essays on Angola and Mozambique in Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique, edited by Richard J. Bloomfield, the World Peace Foundation’s executive director. Bloomfield served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1978 to 1982. Strangely enough, considering Portugal’s ongoing (if uneven) ties with its former African colonies, Ambassador Bloomfield confesses In the Introduction to being “a neophyte” in the region, an odd position for a former U.S. envoy to Lisbon to invoke.

The essay contributions to this book vary in quality and substance and there is also a certain imbalance in the collection. For instance, an excellent and comprehensive survey of Mozambican history by Gillian Gunn does not have any counterpart dealing with Angolan history, a lacuna that really should have been addressed by the editor.

Moreover, as a book, this anthology is poorly produced. There are numerous typographical and editing errors, there is inconsistency in the typefaces and type-styles used, the leading (space between lines) on some pages is tighter than on others, and the text on some pages is longer than on others for no apparent reason (such as the beginning of a new section or chapter). Overall, this book gives the impression of being someone’s first effort at desktop publishing.

The contributors, for the most part, represent the best of liberal and center-left thinking on African issues. Their names are recognizable to anyone who deals with these issues frequently:  Gerald Bender, Kurt Campbell, Carlos Gaspar, Kenneth Maxwell, Robert I. Rotberg, Wayne S. Smith, in addition to the previously mentioned Gillian Gunn and Richard J. Bloomfield.

In his opening essay, “The Legacy of Decolonization,” Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World at Columbia University, makes a valid criticism that many analysts of African issues often overlook because they themselves are guilty of the sin he identifies. The literature on decolonization falls into two categories, he says: either it has been “classically Africanist” or it has been “overly concerned with grand strategy—with East-West Issues and foreign interventionism.”

Consequently, the Africanists tend to see all events through the prism of “Africa” (in the abstract), undiluted by other considerations, while the other group focuses “almost exclusively on the actions of the superpowers and their allies.” Since the twain seldom meet, there is little interaction or understanding between the two groups. Rarely, Maxwell asserts, “does either side listen to the other, let alone accept that in both positions there is much truth.”

Certainly, this condition has affected the way American analysts and policymakers have approached Angola and Mozambique. There are some people who refuse to believe, for instance, that the MPLA and Frelimo (the Marxist parties ruling Angola and Mozambique) are driven by anything other than their Marxist ideology and therefore there should be no accommodation with them even in the interests of regional stability. There are others who think that the Marxist nature of the governments of Angola and Mozambique should be no cause for concern at all and that Americans should continue “business as usual.” Still others, wearing the blinders of anti-apartheid activism, think that Washington should ally itself with Luanda and Maputo against the aggressive-imperialist-racist South African state: their feeling is, “Any enemy of Pretoria is a friend of ours.”

Long-Standing Communist Ties
It is nevertheless difficult to set aside superpower considerations when dealing with Mozambique and, especially, Angola. Leaders of the future Marxist governments in Portuguese Africa were active members of the Portuguese Communist party and its allies during Portugal’s fascist period. These included Marcelino dos Santos of Frelimo and the MPLA’s Agostino Neto, who, according to Maxwell, “knew the Portuguese Left from the inside,” a characteristic lacking in rivals Holden Roberto of the FNLA and Jonas Savlmbi of UNITA.

From the beginning, Moscow supported the anti-Portuguese liberation movements. Maxwell reports:

[T]heir support for the MPLA went back to 1958; and despite a cooling of the’ Soviet relationship with Neto during the 1970s, Soviet support went to one or the other of MPLA’s factions throughout the period of armed struggle against the Portuguese.

This Soviet connection was sufficient to stimulate U.S. concern. He cites Helmut Sonnenfeldt’s view that the United States had had “no intrinsic interest In Angola” but that even a remote and unimportant territory acquires American interest once it “becomes a focal point for Soviet, and in this Instance, Soviet-supported Cuban military action.” The derivative U.S. interest that results is something “which we simply cannot avoid.”

Maxwell’s account of Soviet interests in southern Africa differs in tone if not in fact from that of Kurt Campbell, whose essay in this volume has also been published, in slightly different form, as an Adelphi Paper by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Campbell notes from the outset, however, the significant difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the region:

Since its dramatic entrance into southern Africa in 1975 to bolster the MPLA during the fractious Angolan civil war, the Soviet Union has played a central role in the military affairs of the region. While the counsel and pressure of both the United States and Britain have been heeded in various southern African capitals and boardrooms, only the Soviet Union, with Its allies Cuba and East Germany, has made its influence felt and demonstrated its commitment on the battlefield.

Campbell adds that “Angola and Mozambique are the Soviet Union’s oldest surviving allies in black Africa, and have been the primary focus of Moscow’s energies to date.” Nonetheless, over the past three decades, Soviet moral, political, financial, and military support has benefited the African National Congress in South Africa, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, and the South West African People’s Organization. Angola and Mozambique merely represent the Kremlin’s first successes In installing revolutionary governments in southern Africa.

Mozambique, however, has not turned out to be quite the success the Soviets had hoped for. Frelimo came to power in 1975, essentially unopposed during its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and in 1977 signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Frelimo promised to become an orthodox “Marxist-Leninist vanguard party” (no small task in a country with no industrial proletariat to speak of) and by 1978 Soviet, East German, and Cuban advisors “were busy shaping Mozambique’s internal political system, assisting in party organization, ideological education, propaganda coordination, and the training of the internal security police.” The Soviets offered substantial military assistance, and Samora Machel, Frelimo’s chief, followed the Moscow line in international forums on all manner of issues unrelated to southern African politics.

Not ten years later, Campbell reports, despite this Soviet assistance:

Mozambique was in a shambles—the result of a concerted South African policy to destabilize the country, combined with a lethally incompetent Marxist economic system.... Currently, the Soviets stationed In Mozambique behave more as prisoners than as protectors of the faltering regime.

What had happened was that the Soviet Union was unable or unwilling to deliver on its promises, particularly in the area of economic assistance. Although Joaquim Chissano, Machel’s successor, has maintained good relations with the Soviets, he “himself appears to look more to the West rather than to the East for economic assistance.”

Indeed, it seems that the Soviets were the exploiters rather than the saviors of Angola and Mozambique. For instance, Campbell points out:

[I]n the late 1980s the Soviet Union was taking 75 percent of the fish catch from the territorial waters of Angola and Mozambique, even while both countries were suffering from serious food shortages.

The Cuban Connection
Wayne S. Smith made a name for himself in 1982 when, as head of the U.S. interests section in Havana, he publicly dissented from Reagan administration policy toward Central America. His essay in this book, “The Cuban Role in Angola,” argues the case that the Cubans are not Soviet puppets but are conscientiously pursuing their own interests in Angola. He blames the United States for “shattering the Alvor agreement” (which was supposed to provide for free and open elections among the three competing liberation movements in Angola upon independence) despite the admissions of Admiral Rosa Coutinho, Portugal’s last colonial governor, that he had himself gone to Havana to get the go-ahead to install the MPLA as the post-independence government in Luanda in direct violation of the Alvor agreement.

The crux of Smith’s argument is this: Fidel Castro wanted to revivify his revolution and strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Smith says:

Castro was -- had always been -- interested in winning political influence, and In that sense Cuba’s intervention was perfectly consistent with the policies and objectives it had pursued in Africa since the early years of the Revolution.. . . Cuba was suddenly—if briefly—seen as a major Third World power to which other progressive but weaker governments could turn in times of trouble…. Thus, Castro doubtless calculated, if Cuba could save the day in Angola, that would strengthen its bargaining power with Moscow. Cuba would have advanced the cause of socialism and thus would be in a strong position to ask for better terms of trade and increased assistance from Moscow.

Smith concludes from this that Castro acted on his own, without Soviet prodding. In a sense, that is probably true. Yet the reason for his action — sending 30,000 troops to Angola between November 8, 1975, and March 1976— was part of his traditional and necessary kowtow to the Kremlin. Interfering in Angola’s internal affairs was Fidel Castro’s way of toadying up to Leonid Brezhnev, so that Cuba could get a better deal on its sugar and gasoline to run its 1955 Buicks.

In defending Cuba’s continued military presence in Angola, Smith castigates the United States and South Africa for prolonging the war by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. “One can hardly imagine greater folly,” Smith writes. “Such an undertaking serves to help South Africa perpetuate the fighting In Angola. It Is a prescription for continuing the turmoil and bloodshed, not for ending them.” He does not seem willing to accept the suggestion that Savimbi and his Angolan supporters have legitimate grievances and a right to participate in a unified Angolan government, free of outside interference. Like other contributors to this volume, Smith believes that the United States should recognize the MPLA regime in Luanda and abandon the UNITA Freedom Fighters, in deference to Cuba’s wish for “a secure Angola. . . at peace with its neighbors, with its civil conflict resolved, and with its doors open to Western economic influence.."


Focus on Mozambique
Easily the best contribution to this collection is Gillian Gunn’s tightly-packed essay on the history of Mozambique, “Learning from Adversity: The Mozambican Experience.” Tracing developments In Mozambique from the early fifteenth century to the present, Gunn demonstrates how a confluence of regional and East-West interests affect Mozambique today.

One important difference between Angola and Mozambique is that in Angola there were three major liberation movements struggling against Portuguese rule (FNLA, MPLA, UNITA), while in Mozambique there was only one, Frelimo. As a result, the transition from colonial rule to independence was much smoother. At the time of independence, there was no organized resistance to Frelimo’s control of the government. It did not take long, however, for a resistance movement to come about, thanks in part to the connivance of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (then fighting its own guerrilla war and fearful of Marxist neighbors). However, Gunn points out, there were internal considerations as well:

Three developments had created the conditions for the growth of an armed dissident movement should Frelimo gain power. First, factional fighting had led a number of middle and low level ex-Frelimo members to feel they had been badly treated. Second, the leaders of the defeated conservative movement stood ready to mobilize this anti-Frelimo sentiment. And third, Rhodesian intelligence had started to formulate the mechanism to organize and arm these elements.

Renamo, as the resistance group came to be known, had fertile ground on which to operate. Frelimo became ideology-ridden and, as a result, Mozambique’s economy and political stability suffered. As Gunn writes:

By the end of 1977 Frelimo was drifting away from the traditions it had developed in the guerrilla war [against Portugal]. Instead of developing ideology from experience, a process which at least ensured some link between policy and reality, it began to impose ideology upon reality.

The consequence? “The balance of payments fell from its 1976 surplus of $41 million down to a 1978 deficit of $244 million, and an even more serious $360 million deficit in 1980.” The story observed in nearly every Communist country repeated itself in Mozambique. For example, Gunn writes,

[T]he ideologically motivated emphasis on mechanized state farms. . . was disastrous.... It came to cost more foreign exchange for a state farm to produce a ton of grain than it would have cost simply to import the crop.

In any case, a good many fanners were intelligent enough to by-pass the official, ideology-driven market, for “by 1982 one half of all peasant production was being sold on the black market.”

So the resistance movement had plenty of reasons to gain support in the countryside. Unfortunately, several self-generated factors worked against Renamo’s interests. One was its brutality. Gunn asserts that Renamo’s “behavior hampered the development of true popular support. Rape and severing of breasts, ears, and lips in retaliation for non-cooperation became common.” Perhaps more important, “Renamo’s inability to articulate a coherent political platform, beyond anti-communist rhetoric, also lessened its chances of developing firm grassroots support.” (And, I might add, its chances of acquiring support from democratic countries abroad. The same people who unstintingly support UNITA or the mujahideen in Afghanistan hesitate to do the same for Renamo.)

Gunn concludes that “Mozarnbique is not a classic Marxist state serving Soviet interests” because Frelimo has gradually returned to “its pragmatic habits.” The belief of many (on the American right, for instance) “that continuation of Frelimo in power means expansion of Soviet influence in the region is not supported by the recent factual record.” The character of Renamo—its lack of credentials as an indigenous movement, its brutality—lead to severe questions about its ability to lead. A Renamo-run Mozambique, says Gunn. “has little chance of being more stable than a Frelimo-run Mozambique.”

Gunn makes the case for increasing U.S. economic aid to Mozambique, because without such aid, “Mozambique is more likely to remain chronically unstable, and therefore unable to control ANC guerrilla infiltration into South Africa.” She asserts that “on several issues that really matter to the West,” such as excluding Cuban troops from Africa, “Frelimo has already shown that its definition of national Interest can overlap with the definition by the United States of Western interests.”

The Trouble with Ideology
The title of UCLA Professor Gerald J. Bender’s essay sums up his thesis: “Washington’s Quest for Enemies in Angola.” He argues, for instance, that Angola under the MPLA is more pluralist and freer than pro-Western neighbors.

It would appeal that In Angola under dos Santos there is greater freedom to criticize the party and government without suffering arbitrary arrest, torture, or death than Is the case in the six non-Marxist states [of Gabon, Zaire, Togo, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kenya].

In his conclusion, Bender criticizes U.S. policy toward Angola as confused. “What is clear,” he argues, “is that not only has there been a great divergence of perceptions about whether the Angolan government represents a danger to the United States but there have also been diametrically opposed policies proposed to address the situation.” Various parts of the Executive Branch and Congress have pursued policies “that reflect little, If any, consideration” of the policies pursued by other offices and agencies. He continues,

The result has been a series of confusing, contradictory, and futile policies that have displeased Americans from left to right and that have had almost no impact on engendering change in Angola. Clearly, this state of affairs is good neither for the United States nor for Angola.

Editor Richard Bloomfield takes as his task the distillation of the wisdom imparted by his fellow contributors In a concluding essay, “U. S. Policy: Doctrine Versus Interests.” His views become clear early on when he asks, “Why should normal relations with Angola depend on a Namibia settlement? South Africa is the outlaw in Namibia, not Angola. Why should normal relations with Angola depend on the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola? These forces play a defensive role.”

Bloomfield seems to believe that ideology and political doctrine are opposed to U.S. national interests, rather than elements that inform interests and strategy. If that is the case, then the whole Carterite structure of human rights and democracy opposed to “an inordinate fear of Communism” that informed U.S. strategic interests from 1977 to 1981 comes tumbling down. From the very beginning, American values—political, moral, and economic— have helped to shape the national interest and national strategy.

Bloomfield turns the whole issue of U.S. relations with Angola and Mozambique into a stalking horse for U.S. attitudes toward apartheid in South Africa. He writes:

Let us imagine that the regime in Pretoria were one that accorded political rights to the black majority. If that were the case, it is likely that the guerrilla movements in Angola and Mozambique would be weak, if they existed at all. There would be no Cuban troops in Angola and the Soviet bloc presence in both countries would in all likelihood be minimal and largely civilian.

This is, if nothing else, a non-sequitor. The existence or nonexistence of apartheid in South Africa is irrelevant as far as the political rights of Angolans and Mozambicns go. The dos Santos regime in Luanda does not exclude Jonas Savimbi and his supporters from political participation because whites control the government in South Africa. He excludes Savimbi because he and the MPLA covet their currently held political power and fear losing It. Joaquim Chissano has adjusted his economy and relations with the West not because of apartheid in South Africa, but because his reliance on Soviet assistance and Marxist ideology proved disastrous.

For Bloomfield, U.S. policy toward Angola and Mozambique should be motivated as much by how it will affect American goals for the elimination of apartheid as it is by U.S. relations with the Soviet Union or U.S. disdain for Cuban imperialism in Africa. He argues:

U.S. objectives in each country must be consistent with U.S. interests. This seems obvious, but in the policy debate it is often as not disregarded. Thus, the objective of replacing governments that are ‘Marxist’ and friendly to the Soviet Union with their enemies in these two instances would only lead to governments that would be even less likely to cooperate with U.S. policy vis-à-vis South Africa.

This may be true with Renamo, but it certainly is not true with UNITA. Jonas Savimbi has long been on record in opposition to apartheid and even, at one time, supported the African National Congress. His acceptance of military and financial assistance from South Africa was a prudential move designed to advance his interests in Angola. Similarly, the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to defeat Hitler; that alliance did not imply approval for Stalin’s purges or any Marxist policy. A truly democratic government in Angola featuring Savimbi’s participation would probably support U.S. goals in South Africa without the baggage of ties with the Kremlin and an ideological need to undermine liberal democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.


The Quickening Pace of Events
Events in southern Africa have caught up with, and, in some cases, passed by the analysis presented in this book. The independence of Namibia is just around the corner. Election results announced in November 1989 indicated that SWAPO garnered just 57 per cent of the vote in elections for a constituent assembly; 67 per cent was needed to bulldoze through its own constitution. The peaceful transition to independence in Namibia is supposed to be accompanied by the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. There may be good reason to adopt a policy of “watchful waiting” as far as that goes. Castro does not especially want to take back these troops, some of whom have contracted the AIDS virus, and may send them on some other mischievous adventure In Africa or elsewhere before he throws them a ticker-tape parade in Havana. American policymakers should beware of any Cuban adventurism in the future.

There is some hope for a negotiated settlement in Angola, too. Savimbi and dos Santos shook hands at a meeting of African heads of state and government in Gbadolite, Zaire, in mid-1989. Though a disagreement arose over just what transpired at Gbadolite*, pressure from the United States and its friends in Africa may just force dos Santos to agree to meet Savimbi at the bargaining table.

In Mozambique, the Chissano government continues to seek and receive Western economic, and even military, aid. Despite Renamo’s lack of ideological bearings, it has had some military successes that are worrisome for the Frelimo regime. David Hoile reports (in The World & I, December 1989) that Renamo “now probably controls more than 50 per cent of Mozambique and operates in some 80 per cent of the country,” adding that “factions within Frelimo itself have conceded the legitimacy of negotiating with Renamo.” So there is plenty to watch in Mozambique as well.

Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique is not the best book on the region. Neither is it the worst. The essays by Kurt Campbell and Gillian Gunn may be, as they say, worth the price of the volume But except for those with a die-hard interest in southern African affairs this is probably a book that can be passed up.

* See 1FF publication Angola Peace Monitor, Volume 1, Number 2—Ed.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).

'The Mind of South Africa'

This book review appeared first in the New York City Tribune on Thursday, August 2, 1990.

BOOKS / RICHARD SINCERE
Author’s Sweeping Work Opens Gate To Understanding South Africa

The Mind of South Africa, by Allister Sparks, Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95, 424 pp.


The fallout from Nelson Mandela’s triumphal tour of nine North American cities will be with us for some time to come. For better or for worse, Mandela has raised American consciousness about South Africa in a way no South African politician, black or white, has ever been able to do before and it is unlikely anyone will be able to match him in years to come.

The adulation heaped upon Mandela a tickertape parade in New York City, an address before a joint meeting of Congress, stadium rallies that were strange hybrids of rock concerts and papal liturgies overshadowed the message Mandela brought to the United States by several orders of magnitude. The evocations of saintliness one hawker of Mandela mugs and T-shirts said that Mandela “is the closest thing we have to a living saint, except for Mother Teresa” are belied by the man’s friendships with butchers like Castro and Qaddafi.

Nonetheless, Mandela’s supporters tried to immunize him from criticism in two ways: first, by limiting the number of encounters with the press in which difficult questions might be asked and second, by continually focusing attention on Mandela’s 27 years of imprisonment in South African jails, always attributing it to his “beliefs” and “anti- apartheid activism,” rather than to the charges of sabotage on which he was actually convicted.

There is no doubt that, if his health holds up, Mandela will be the principal personality in South African politics during the 1990s, a period journalist Allister Sparks characterizes as a “decade of transition,” following up on the 1970s, a decade that “witnessed the death of apartheid ideology” and the 1980s, a decade of “massive black revolt.”

Even though Sparks wrote The Mind of South Africa before South African President F.W. De Klerk had unbanned the African National Congress and freed Mandela and other ANC leaders from prison, he emphasizes Mandela’s importance to the transition.

Sparks asks whether De Klerk has “the will and capacity to lead South Africa through this difficult transition,” answering that De Klerk “is an able man but not a great one.” The great leader, he suggests, is “Mandela, whose public image, and thus his power to act boldly, has grown during his long incarceration to messianic proportions.”

This assessment has surely been proven true, if not in South Africa, then in the United States, where Mandela has been hailed as a statesman without equal in the contemporary world.

Sparks warns that the ANC may be limited in its ability to play the leading role as the government’s interlocutor in the transition to fuller, non-racial democracy. He writes that the government might offer deals that amount to co-optation — that is, constitutional structures that mask the absence of genuine change and that “the ANC may then come under heavy international pressure to accept them and continue its struggle within the political framework established by the government, thereby suffering a serious loss of credibility and the likelihood of being replaced by more radical elements.” Of course, if the ANC does not accept offers that seem conciliatory, “it would look like the unreasonable party and be in danger of losing international support.”

This dilemma is more apparent than real, If the ANC is genuinely committed to a democratic transition through talks rather than armed struggle, it — and the government and other parties as well — should be prepared to sacrifice some prestige and some international support and some credibility among marginal constituents. South Africans alone possess the power to achieve their new society and political system, regardless of the views of outsiders. While fringe elements on both left, and right will doubtless clamor to have some input in the process, it is the broad middle (which now includes, to the surprise of many South Africa watchers, both the ANC and the Nationalists) that must hammer out the details in the long negotiations.

In The Mind of South Africa, Sparks traces the current political turmoil to the very beginnings of European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, using as a thematic symbol a hedge of bitter almond, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in the 1650s to separate the settlers (civilized white society) from the indigenous San and Khoi peoples (dark-skinned barbarians). Portions of it still exist in Cape Town, a physical reminder of 350 years of racism, discrimination, and intolerance.

Whether De Klerk and Mandela and other South African leaders can succeed in steering the transition from limited to full democracy, without also sparking the Lebanonization of South Africa, remains to be seen. Turmoil in Natal has taken more than 3,500 black lives in the past few years, and the prospect of white-on-white violence looms larger every day, as radical whites opposed to reform threaten to overthrow de Klerk’s government. In that atmosphere, it may not be possible to create a truly democratic form of government that will also promote prosperity, protect individual rights and liberties, and normalize South Africa’s relations with the outside world.

For those seeking a better understanding of South Africa’s vast cultural and political complexities, Allister Sparks’ The Mind of South Africa is a good place to start.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa.

'Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story'

This book review was originally published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, August 2, 1989.



RICHARD SINCERE
An Outstanding Work Condemned to Obsolescence by Pace of Events

Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story, The Reader’s Digest Association, $26.95, 512 pp.

The recent tea-time meetings of South African [President] P.W. Botha and imprisoned black activist Nelson Mandela has been called ‘historic” by those who were pleased by news of the meeting and “unimportant” by those who were disturbed by it. The true assessment lies somewhere in the middle. In the wide sweep of South African history, this meeting of two political leaders is neither earth-shattering nor ignorable. It is, however, notable when one considers what came before and what will come after.

Written South African history really begins in 1652, when the Dutch East India Co. established a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope, along the sea route to what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. That supply station became the first permanent European settlement in Southern Africa, and resulted in the only society of white people that consider themselves Africans: today’s Afrikaners.

Elsewhere in Africa, white settlers always felt alien and considered the metropole (England, France, Portugal) to be their true home. For the Afrikaners, there is no other home, only South Africa.

From the beginning, this was a recipe for conflict. The Dutch sailors and tradesmen who made their homes in the cape were met by indigenous people, herdsmen called the San and Khoikhoi. To the east, black tribes of Itantu origin (from central and east Africa), had already begun to displace the natives. The Dutch brought with them Malaysian slaves, as the Dutch East India Co. prohibited the enslavement of local populations.

Under some circumstances, for example in Brazil, such a mix of races and ethnic groups need not develop conflict. However the Europeans asserted their superiority and established republican governments excluding all others.

It has now been nearly 340 years since Jan van Riebeeck first settled South Africa. In that time the country as a colony was passed from Dutch to British hands, back to Dutch and back to the British; two independent republics were established by descendants the Dutch (the Boers) only to be conquered by the British again in the Second Anglo.Boer War (1899-1903). In 1910, autonomy was granted to the four colonies that now make up South Africa: the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. In a remarkable bit of diplomacy, the Boers, who lost the war, won the peace. Under the leadership of people like Jan Smuts, the then Union of South Africa took its place among the family of democratic nations, fighting with the Allies in both World War I and World War II, and becoming a charter member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

That worldwide fraternal acceptance had a break put on it in 1948, when the National Party of Daniel Malan won a narrow victory in parliamentary elections on a platform of apartheid, or separate development. Although under British rule racial restrictions had their place in the law, there had been no systematic effort to exclude black people from society. Under certain conditions, in fact, blacks had the right to vote in the Cape Province and were allowed with limitations to own property. In this, British rule was much like French rule in West Africa and was far more enlightened than Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique.

Apartheid, however, was of a different breed. It was a logical, systematized program of racial discrimination designed by Afrikaner intellectuals, philosophers and sociologists, who believed that mixing of the races was wrong. In the grand scheme of apartheid, each ethnic group would have its own land, government and economy and relations between the races would be treated as international relations through diplomacy. What this meant, in theory, was “separate but equal.” In practice, it engendered inequality and poverty.

Under the dynamic leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd, a Dutch-born sociologist who was minister of Bantu (black) affairs under Malan and later prime minister, blacks were relegated to second- and third-class citizenship. Verwoerd decided that for blacks, basic reading and writing would be sufficient and they would perform only menial tasks and manual labor.

As a result, government-run schools for blacks were routinely denied the funding necessary to produce literate and numerate graduates. Later, private and church-run schools were forbidden to teach blacks and whites together in integrated classrooms.

Verwoerd also designed grand apartheid, which established 10 Bantustans (now called “homelands”) for each of 10 ethnic groups. The land in these Bantustans amounted to about 13 percent of South Africa. Most of that land is quite barren, although the Transkei and the Ciskei (“homelands” for the Xhosa people) contain some of the richest and most fertile farmand in the country. It mattered little, though, because South Africa was urbanizing rapidly. Blacks, like rural people everywhere during a time of economic development, migrated to the cities.

Around Johannesburg vast black townships grew up: Soweto, Alexandra, Sophiatown. The mines of South Africa needed workers, an there were not enough whites to do the job. So did the industries.

Black people over the age of 16 were required to carry a passbook that indicated their legal residence and job status. Demeaning as it was, that practice continued until 1986, when the pass laws were repealed.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, economic growth in South Africa provided jobs for many. The whites were comfortable, the blacks were unorganized politically. (Black labor unions were illegal until 1979.) By the end of the 1970s, however, the inequitites of the system began bursting above the surface. Student demonstrations in Soweto in June 1976 led to nationwide unrest. Efforts to combat unrest through propaganda led to the fall of the government of Prime Minister John Vorster in 1978 (the so-called “Muldergate” scandal); Defense Minister P.W. Botha took his place.

[In the 11 years since then, far-reaching] changes have been wrought. A new constitution in 1984 allows non-white people (people of mixed racial heritage, called “coloureds,” and people of Asian background) to vote for parliamentary representatives. Laws forbidding mixed marriages were repealed. The pass laws were ended. Blacks were allowed to collectively bargain with their employers. Black townships were provided with electricity and running water. Blacks were allowed to own land again, and their homes in the townships.

At the same time, since l985, a state of emergency has been in effect. Severe restrictions on the press, on public gatherings, and on speech have curtailed public debate. A war fought by South Africa in Angola and Namibia has wound to a close with great human and material costs. As political ferment has increased, so too has worldwide ostracism of South Africa. The United States imposed major economic sanctions in 1986.

South Africa is changing rapidly. It is enough to make the Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa obsolete even as it is published. What a pity, too, because this lavishly illustrated book has much to teach. Despite its subtitle (“The Real Story”), which makes it sound like cheap propaganda, this volume from the Reader’s Digest makes worthwhile reading. It is balanced, fair, and debunks much mythology used by the Afrikaners to justify their exclusive rule.

Although written for South Africans, it is clear that South African and U.S. histories have many parallels: a shared history of a frontier, settlement and hardship, a fight for independence from the British and racial strife. We have much to learn from their experience; South Africans can learn much from us. Now is not the time to turn our backs on them, when exchange of cultural and political ideas can help set South Africa on a course toward true democracy and peaceful progress.

When P.W. Botha and Nelson Mandela next take tea together, it may indeed be an historic occasion. The meeting might be the beginning of negotiations for an end to apartheid, for power-sharing without domination, and for the extension of democracy. To Mandela’s friends in the South African Communist Party, that may be a frightening possibility, but to us in the free world, it is the only possibility worth hoping for.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

Alan Paton Shed Light on the Darkness of South Africa

This article is not properly characterized as a “book review.” It is, rather, a tribute to an internationally renowned African author in the days after his death. The article appeared in the New York City Tribune on April 26, 1988.



RICHARD SINCERE
A Soldier for Freedom, Alan Paton Shed Light on the Darkness of South Africa

Alan Paton, whose first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, thrust him onto the world stage as a literary and social leader, died on April 12 at the age of 85. In his lifetime -- which spanned the history of South Africa from just after the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War through two world wars to the present day -- Paton was a teacher, an advocate for prison reform, a liberal political leader, a world-renowned novelist and a humanitarian. His death diminishes the world.

Cry, the Beloved Country brought worldwide attention to South Africa’s racial strife. It was transformed into a movie and later into a musical play by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill, Lost in the Stars.

Paton’s penetrating look into the dehumanizing aspects of South Africa’s society on the brink of change from a (for that era) liberal regime to the racist regime of Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd’s National Party gave Westerners their first (and, perhaps, most lasting) impression of apartheid.

Paton proved a puzzle to many in the United States who oppose apartheid, the system of racial classification and segregation that has characterized South Africa for most of the past 40 years. In the United States, opposition to the South African system seems inevitably to go hand in glove with support for sanctions against that country. Paton challenged this notion from the start.

In 1984, Paton wrote an open letter to Bishop Desmond Tutu, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Responding to calls for sanctions, Paton said:

“I do not understand how your Christian conscience allows you to advocate disinvestment. I do not understand how you can put a man out of work for a high moral principle.

“It would go against my own deepest principles to advocate anything that would put a man — and especially a black man -- out of a job.

“I think your morality is confused just as was the morality of the church in the Inquisition, or the morality of Dr. Verwoerd in his utopian dreams. You come near to saying that the end justifies the means, which is a thing no Christian can do” (Johannesburg Sunday Times, Oct. 21, 1984).

Paton was nothing if not consistent in his disapproval of sanctions. Like his liberal colleague, Helen Suzman, who for many years was the sole voice in parliament representing the anti-apartheid, pro-free enterprise Progressive Federal Party, Paton argued that it was the expansion of the economy and the growth of a substantial black middle class that would be the engine of change.

Experience has proved him correct. As blacks gained in economic power in the 1970s, the government was forced to grant them more political and civil rights. Black trade unions were legalized, job restrictions were ended, the infamous pass laws were repealed.

In the second and final volume of his autobiography, Journey Continued, scheduled to be published in South Africa on April 29 and later this year in the United States, Paton wrote passionately of his hope for positive social change. He argued for the release of Nelson Mandela and the need to include Mandela and his associates in the negotiations for post-apartheid South Africa. But he also reiterated his belief that sanctions are counterproductive, that they will achieve little in the way of reform or broader political participation.

In the final chapter of Journey Continued, Paton noted that “our future has become the concern of many of the governments and the ordinary people of the world. They have every right to concern themselves and to bring pressure to bear upon us. I believe they are utterly mistaken to think that sanctions and disinvestment will bring beneficial change. You cannot change a society for the better by damaging or destroying its economy. Sanctions are intended to be punitive, and punishment is not the way to make people behave better.”

It has been a cruel mistake for the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions against South Africa. American sanctions have created more than 100 white millionaires in South Africa while creating substantial black unemployment. The inflation caused by sanctions affects the poor most harshly, while rich whites -- the intended targets of sanctions -- are insulated by affluence. White families may have to give up their Mercedes or their beach bungalows; black families may have to go without food or clothing. Alan Paton, compassionate observer of political realities, knew this would happen. His words, informed by 85 years of living in South Africa, go unheeded by the U.S. Congress. Why?

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy center in Washington D.C. He writes frequently on U.S.-South African relations.

'South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?'

This book review first appeared in the New York City Tribune on August 10, 1988.  Historical note:  Walter Kansteiner later became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the administration of George W. Bush (2001-05).


RICHARD SINCERE
Reconciliation the Key Word In Hopeful Book On Troubled South Africa

South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, by Walter H. Kansteiner, Washington: Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1988, 175 pp., $8 paperback (foreword by Richard John Neuhaus).

Contrary to popular perceptions, the troubles in South Africa will continue to haunt us beyond the turn of the century. This is despite the dire warnings (or hopeful announcements) that “revolution is just around the corner.” There is little possibility that satisfaction for all will come to South Africa within this generation.

Leon Louw, a South African lawyer and advocate for a free market economy, told me recently that when he was a boy, he persistently heard the news that “the revolution is less than five years away.” That was more than 30 years ago, and the revolution has not yet come. Yet each succeeding political generation — both here and in South Africa — has viewed revolution there as both inevitable and imminent. On both counts, the would-be prophets and seers are wrong.

Walter Kansteiner, trained in economics and theology, has written a useful overview of the “revolutionary” situation in South Africa. Beginning with a thorough review of the traditional just war/just revolution doctrine that was formulated through the ages by such thinkers as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, he continues with a particular examination of current conditions in South Africa and asks whether the criteria for just revolution are met there.

The answer is no, primarily for two reasons. One of the major just revolution standards is that violent revolution must be initiated as a last resort. In the South African case, where the ferment of reform and nonviolent political change characterizes the present moment, violent revolution is clearly not the last resort. Advocates of change can still participate in party politics. The press, though circumscribed by emergency regulations, can freely criticize apartheid policies and call for reform. Even the most strident opponents of the government, such as Desmond Tutu, are free to leave South Africa and return without fear of arrest.

Let me give an example of this ferment, if a minor one. During a visit to Johannesburg in July, I observed the debate in the newspapers about the recent desegregation of railroad cars. Conservative Party members decried the reform as a further step away from rigid apartheid, liberals praised it as a step forward, and pragmatic black leaders complained that most of their constituents still cannot afford the price of anything better than a third- class ticket. Political cartoonists portrayed opponents of the reform as buffoons; the government’s response to white complaints was, basically, “either accept the change or stop riding the trains.”

A second reason Kansteiner says no to just revolution is that, according to just war doctrine, those who initiate revolution must have a reasonable chance of success. Given the size and degree of training of the South African Defense Forces, no revolutionary movement can hope to meet that criterion. Since the state of emergency was first declared by the South African government in 1985, the level of violence in the townships violence that was primarily black-on-black and not directed at either the white-controlled government or white citizens — has been reduced to near nothing. The South African police and military have a firm grip that will be nearly impossible to dislodge. Combined with an extensive, regionwide intelligence operation that allows them to stop terrorist incidents before they can occur and with the perception that the South African military possesses “last resort” nuclear weapons, there is little possibility that revolutionaries can succeed in the near term or ultimately.

In South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, Kansteiner concludes that just revolution is not currently an option in South Africa; that peaceful progress toward the end of apartheid is both necessary and possible. He thus focuses on the last word in his title — reconciliation — and urges Americans to aid South Africans in their process of reconciliation and nation-building.

As part of this process, release of this book by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) coincided with the initiation of a new IRD program called BANSA — Building a New South Africa. The program enables Americans to support financially South African organizations helping to strengthen economic opportunities for blacks, improving education and health care, and building democratic institutions. (For more information on this innovative program, readers of the New York City Tribune may write to IRD (BANSA), 725 Fifteenth Street, N.W. Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20005, or telephone 202-393-3200.)

South Africa’s problems are often too complex for Americans to grasp. Our American culture believes that problems always have solutions. This is not the case elsewhere in the world, where “quick fixes” are disdained. To those who hope for revolution, and to those who encourage it through economic sanctions, Kansteiner warns:

“Disaster for South Africa is the easy way out. Joining or encouraging an armed revolution is deceptively simple. So too is acquiescing in apartheid. The hard challenges, the tough tasks, are for those who have enough faith and hope and patience and optimism that South Africa’s future is not the future of a tragedy, but rather the future of a bright, prosperous, and free nation.”

These are not the words of an unguarded optimist, but the judgments of one who has studied the South African situation in detail. Kansteiner mixes his hard-headed reflections on South Africa with compassion. The prescriptions in his book deserve further examination by policymakers in Washington and the constituents they serve throughout the United States.

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a frequent commentator on African affairs.

Book Notes 2

These “book notes” (see Book Notes 1 for background information) appeared originally in terra nova, Volume 2, Number 1 (Autumn [North] Spring [South] 1992).

The Russian Heart: Days of Crisis and Hope. Photographs and Journal by David C. Turnley. (New York: Aperture, 1992), 144 pp., $40.00 cloth.

Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist David Tumley spent two months in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1991, arriving in Moscow in the midst of the hardliners’ coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The 100 color photographs in this collection show all the grit and grind of Soviet life: queues for food, the blackened faces of coal miners, the drabness of a political prison. They also provide glimpses of a more open future: naval cadets attending a service at St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Lithuanian President Landsbergis and his 98-year-old father, synagogues and mosques vibrating with prayer after years of repression. The photographs from Moscow during the coup are the most dramatic: a young soldier sitting atop a tank in the rain, Gorbachev thanking Yeltsin, crowds cheering the end of the putsch and waving the Russian national flag. This is a coffee-table book with a difference.


A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, compiled by Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 335 pp., $35.00 cloth.

One expects that a book from Simon and Schuster’s prestigious Academic Reference Division would make some pretense to comprehensiveness and balance. Not so with this “dictionary,” really a book of quotations that make the case for increased environmental regulation and governmental intrusiveness and make fun of those who cast doubt on that program. The omissions are telling: not a single major proponent of the free-market environmental movement is quoted— not Walter Block, Terry Anderson, Fred Smith, nor Michael Greve, to name a few. The late Warren Brookes merits one mention. S. Fred Singer comments on the ozone layer, but Patrick Michaels, debunker of global warming, is missing, as is Edward Krug, who has proven that acid rain is not a problem. Rodes and Odell have performed a disservice to their readers.

Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, by George F. Will. (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 260 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The 1992 campaign season has been uniquely plagued or blessed (depending on one’s perspective) by the voluntary retirement of some 100 Members of Congress, and the involuntary retirement (through electoral defeat) of several others, including Senator Alan Dixon (D-Ill.) and GOP Congressional Campaign Chairman Guy van der Jagt (R-Mich.). Framing these “defections” is a widespread national debate about the merits of placing limits on the terms legislators can serve. Several states have adopted term limits for both their own legislatures and for their representatives in Washington, usually through hard- fought referenda set before the general electorate. Here political pundit George Will weighs in on the issue: formerly opposed to term limits in principle, he now feels they are necessary to resuscitate a moribund democracy. Term limits, he says, will return the United States to the tradition of citizen-legislators envisioned by the Founders and destroy the “incumbency machine” that the modern Congress has become.


1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, by Robert Royal. (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 203 pp., $18.95 cloth.

The quincentenary celebration of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to America has brought out of the woodwork all sorts of countercultural protests, all decrying the effect of Western (read: European) culture on the rest of the world. Royal quotes activist Hans Koning as saying the Columbus anniversary “presents the best opportunity for progressives ‘since the Vietnam War,” adding that “the linkage here is not accidental. A large portion of the most rabid anti-Columbus material in 1992 comes out of the same cultural and political quarters as the antiwar protests of the 1960s.” 1492 is a scholarly examination of history and historiography; it also provides intellectual ammunition for the 500th anniversary’s cultural battles.


Preferential Option: A Christian and Neoliberal Strategy for Latin America’s Poor, by Amy L. Sherman (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 230 pp., $17.95 paper.

Amy Sherman, a frequent contributor to the pages of terra nova, provides a clear and articulate free-market agenda for Latin American economic development. Her intended audience is committed Christians, who are taught by the Gospels that “opting for the poor is not optional.” She adds that “how Christians opt—what development strategies they pursue—makes all the difference if the poor are to be served effectively.” Drawing on Catholic and Protestant social teaching, critiquing conventional macroeconomic development models, and creating a moral defense for free enterprise, Sherman makes a strong case for economic liberty as “the preferential option for the poor.”


Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography, by Marvin Liebman (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), 272 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The triumph of conservative politics in the United States and classical liberalism worldwide was not due entirely to academic treatises. It required ward- heeling, electioneering, money, and propaganda. This memoir tells the tale of a behind-the-scenes activist helping others gain the limelight. Liebman was a committed Communist whose mind was when Stalin’s atrocities came to light in the 1950s. He brought to the nascent conservative movement a talent for the agitprop developed by the Left and instituted grassroots organizing and fundraising methods still in use today. A longtime associate of William F. Buckley, Jr., he cofounded Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. He is probably the only person to work both on Henry Wallace’s Communist-front presidential campaign in 1948 and those of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan two decades later. His book helps put the conservative movement in both a personal and a historical context.


No More Martyrs Now: Capitalism, Democracy, and Ordinary People, by Don Caldwell (Johannesburg: Conrad Business Books, 1992), 272 pp., R40 paper.

One of the more stimulating and frustrating challenges in post-apartheid South Africa is spreading the truth about free enterprise in the face of hostility, mythology, and simple misunderstanding. Caldwell, a writer and lecturer on business and economic topics, states that his new book “is written from an unashamedly liberal-democratic perspective. It’s in favor of capitalism and skeptical of politicians from beginning to end.” In a breezy but not unserious style, he describes the importance of civil society, decries the imposition of social engineering, and takes aim at the African National Congress’s authoritarian tendencies. The book also contains some useful appendices: the 1955 Freedom Charter, draft bills of rights from the ANC and the South African Law Commission, and the constitutional principles of the ANC and the National Party.

'A History of South Africa' by Leonard Thompson

This review appeared in Volume 1, Number 1, of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Is Past Really Prologue? South Africa’s New Era
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
A History of South Africaby Leonard Thompson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 288 pp., illustrated, $29.95 cloth.

The apartheid era of South African history has ended and the post-apartheid era has begun. It remains for future historians, however, to assign a date to the point of demarcation.

Was it June 16, 1976, when black students in Soweto rioted over Afrikaans-language instruction in their schools, leaving dozens dead and forcing hundreds of others into exile, many linking up with external anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress (ANC)?

Was it September 1983, when white voters approved a new constitution calling for a multiracial parliament, simultaneously unleashing unprecedented reform and revitalized unrest and activism among blacks, who remained excluded from the political structures?

Was it August 1989, when F. W. De Klerk replaced an ailing P. W. Botha as president, visibly signifying the start of a new era in white politics?

Was it February 2, 1990, when De Klerk announced the legalization of the long-banned ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, revivifying moribund political discussions? Or was it ten days later, February 12, 1990, when Nelson Mandela, more myth than man, was released from prison after serving twenty-seven years of a life sentence for conspiracy to commit sabotage?

Was it June 17, 1991, when the Population Registration Act, the last pillar of apartheid, was repealed by South Africa’s parliament, ending generations of classifying people by their skin color and ethnicity?

As the accelerating pace of the foregoing dates indicates, South African history is moving at a rate undreamed of fifteen years ago. After years— decades—of laconic acceptance of the doomed apartheid system, a groundswell of energy from both the rulers and the ruled has stimulated movement toward fuller democracy. This energy brings in its wake both breathtaking political debate (of a peaceful and intellectual sort) and bloody black-on-black violence, with threats of white-on-white violence looming ever closer.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his much-discussed article “The End of History” in The National Interest two summers ago, he had in mind mostly the historical struggle between East and West, between Marxist totalitarians and liberal democrats. However, his thesis can also be applied, with modifications, to South African history. There, too, an ultimately unworkable ideology—apartheid—is being discarded. It is unclear, and unfortunately so, whether this ideology will be replaced by liberal democracy or by the discredited Marxist communism now rejected by the people of Eastern Europe. Thus Leonard Thompson’s most recent book, A History of South Africa, could hardly come at a more appropriate time.

Seldom in the history of any country can one observe what has come before and say that it points inexorably to a specific event or set of events that will come. Yet in South Africa’s case, despite backsliding and suffering, despite incompetent and intransigent leaders (both black and white), it has seemed for a long time that apartheid must end and that it must be replaced by a better system. This has not been simply a normative question; the injustices of apartheid were clear from the outset. It has been a pragmatic, practical question as well: the internal contradictions of apartheid, its uncompromising worldview, its non-adaptable interface with demographic and economic realities—all these ensured its demise.

In this book, his second comprehensive history of his native land (the first was the Oxford History of South Africa, published in 1976), Thompson, director of the Yale University Southern African Research Program, traces historical developments from pre-history through the earliest European explorations of the long-isolated subcontinent of southern Africa, and further through the 17th century Dutch settlement and subsequent conquests and colonizations by the British. This colonial era ended in 1910 when the Union of South Africa was formed by an act of the British Parliament.

The next eighty years make up the history of South Africa most familiar to Americans. This is the history that resonates with the American civil rights movement. It is the history that led to intense American involvement in South African affairs, culminating in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour of the United States during the summer of 1990. in which they raised more than $7 million for the ANC.

The Mandela tour and subsequent events would no doubt have surprised Thompson even as he completed his book, which ends on a warily optimistic note. He reports De Kierk’s accession to the presidency, his freeing of ANC leaders who had been imprisoned at the same time as Mandela, and his diplomatic efforts that included trips to Britain, West Germany, Portugal, and Zambia. He casts doubt, however, on De Klerk’s intentions to negotiate a democratic system with his ANC interlocutors. De Klerk, Thompson writes, “intended to maintain white ascendancy in South Africa by using fixed racial categories and group rights.” He ends this sweeping look at the past by asking two questions about the future:

“Was a process starting that would lead to negotiations and the relatively peaceful elimination of racism? Or would the deadlock continue until, some day, revolutionary forces would overwhelm the apartheid state?” Despite continued threats of violence, it appears to most observers that the answer to the second question is, fortunately, no, while the answer to the first is a qualified yes. A process of negotiation has begun, even as it is tainted by unrest and violence. The basic laws that have undergirded the apartheid system—the Land Acts, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act—have been repealed. Urban areas are in the process of establishing multiracial, regional governments that will end generations of separation, acknowledging the fundamental unity of places like Johannesburg and Soweto.

On the international scene, economic sanctions have begun to be lifted— first the European Community, then even some African nations. De Klerk has started a diplomatic initiative to reinvigorate the African continent through South African involvement with its neighbors. His initiative features four countries as keystones: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. These four, he believes, representing the four points of the compass and the strongest economic powers on the continent, can together bring Africa into the 21st century.

It seems clear—despite the pessimism of so many in the past and the cautious optimism of Leonard Thompson—that a long period of deadlock and isolation has ended; the post-apartheid era has haltingly but manifestly begun.

Mr. Sincere, author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa,is Director of African Affairs at IFF and Books Editor of terra nova.