In spite of the debacle the regime -- supported by the West -- sensed an opening. Why not negotiate with a man who had been isolated from the outside world since 1962? No more waves and waves of Third World liberation struggles; Africa was now mired in war, and all sorts of socialist revolutions had been smashed, from Che Guevara killed in Bolivia in 1967 to Allende killed in the 1973 coup in Chile.
Mandela had to catch up with all this and also come to grips with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of what European intellectuals called "real socialism." And then he would need to try to prevent a civil war and the total economic collapse of South Africa.
The apartheid regime was wily enough to secure control of the Central Bank -- with crucial IMF help -- and South Africa's trade policy. Mandela secured only a (very significant) political victory. The ANC only found out it had been conned when it took power. Forget about its socialist idea of nationalizing the mining and banking industries -- owned by Western capital, and distribute the benefits to the indigenous population. The West would never allow it. And to make matters worse, the ANC was literally hijacked by a sorry, greedy bunch.
Follow the roadmapJohn Pilger is spot on, pointing to economic apartheid in South Africa now with a new face.
Patrick Bond has written arguably the best expose anywhere of the Mandela years -- and their legacy.
And Ronnie Kasrils does a courageous mea culpa dissecting how Mandela and the ANC accepted a devil's pact with the usual suspects.
The bottom line: Mandela defeated apartheid but was defeated by neoliberalism. And that's the dirty secret of him being allowed sainthood.
Now for the future. Cameroonian Achille Mbembe, historian and political science professor, is one of Africa's foremost intellectuals. In his book Critique of Black Reason, recently published in France (not yet in English), Mbembe praises Mandela and stresses that Africans must imperatively invent new forms of leadership, the essential precondition to lift themselves in the world. All-too-human "Madiba" has provided the roadmap. May Africa unleash one, two, a thousand Mandelas.
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