Striving for democratic futures
Former African liberation movements are in trouble. Now in power, they feel they have a permanent right to represent the nation and rule
TODAY, I’m talking to student activists from governing parties on the continent at a workshop about youth and social justice, convened by the German social democratic foundation, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, in Windhoek, Namibia. It reminds me of the links between South Africa and Namibia.
Namibia is a small country in terms of the size of its population. Much of the country is a vast and beautiful desert. But world history has turned on this pivot. The genocides of the Herero and Nama people at the hands of the German Empire between 1904 and 1907 paved the way for the genocide of the Jewish and Roma people in Europe during World War II. What the German Empire had learnt in Africa was returned to Europe.
In the 1980s, the armed struggle against white domination in South Africa became hot in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia. The ANC’s military wing never engaged in open battle with the apartheid military, but in these parts there was open war. The turning point of that war was the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-88, in which the SANDF was repelled by the Cuban forces.
The national liberation movements are still in power across southern Africa – Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. They are all in serious trouble. None of them has been able to sustain an emancipatory vision or build just and prosperous societies. The MPLA in Angola and Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe have fallen hardest. We all know the slow disaster that has unfolded in Zimbabwe, and how it began with a massacre of up to 20 000 people in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.
But the situation in Angola is less well-known in South Africa. In May 1977, tens of thousands of protesters were massacred by the MPLA. Today, the economy is radically unequal and exclusionary; and essentially run in the interests of a single family.
Angola is a profound warning about just how wrong things can go. Namibia, like South Africa, has serious problems but it has not descended into the kind of deep crisis that we see in countries like Angola or Zimbabwe.
The extraordinary success of Redi Tlhabi’s new book, Khwezi, has brought home just how deeply the younger generation are questioning the myths that once surrounded our own liberation movement so strongly. Tlhabi shows the liberation movement to have been, along with a heroic force committed to fighting oppression, a place in which sexual abuse was rife.
A similar questioning in Zimbabwe in the 1990s also began to focus on that issue, when a group of revisionist historians began to speak about the sexual violence in the guerrilla camps.
These are hard conversations. Just like the conversation about the mutiny among the ANC’s armed forces at Quatro, and how senior leaders were imprisoned by the ANC, is a hard conversation. But they are conversations that we simply have to have. Nothing, it is said, can be confronted until it is faced.
South Africa and Namibia have not collapsed into the abyss like Zimbabwe and Angola. But both countries confront very serious problems. In South Africa, there is a toxic cocktail of out of control corruption, political violence and a general culture of impunity. Figures like Herman Mashaba and Fikile Mbalula increasingly sound like Donald Trump when they discuss matters such as migration and crime. Neither the DA nor the ANC has any interest in calling these mini-Trumps to account. We are in a dangerous place.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was real solidarity, not uncomplicated but still real, among the liberation forces across southern Africa. This comes through very clearly in Sisonke Msimang’s beautifully written new memoir, Always Another Country.
Today, the new forces and voices questioning the limits of liberation across the region are often isolated. Students or shack-dwellers or workers or intellectuals do not have strong regional connections. This is a pity and something that must be remedied as a matter of urgency.
There are many differences between our countries but we all share a colonial past, a tremendous struggle against racism, and a decidedly imperfect present. And in each of these countries a part of the imperfections of the present is that the former liberation movements, now in power, feel they have a permanent right to represent the nation and rule.
Democracy, the great French philosopher Jacques Rancière writes, is “the rule of anybody”.
It seems to many young people across the region that while colonialism has been defeated; vibrant open democracies, in which power regularly changes hands, have yet to be built. Perhaps West Indian psychoanalyst and social philosopher Frantz Fanon was right when he argued that the people who liberated a society from colonialism were not always best placed to rule it after colonialism.
Facilitating encounters between democrats and activists across all sectors and from all countries in the region is important work. In South Africa there is a worrying tendency on the part of some young people to always look to the culture of online activists in the US as a way forward. No doubt lessons can be learnt there. But a student in a city like Johannesburg also has vital lessons to learn from a student in a city like Windhoek, Harare, Luanda or Maputo.
Some of what we face – the political hegemony of often corrupt and authoritarian former national liberation movements – is very different from the political situation in the US. We have a lot to learn from each other, and conversations across the region will be vital as we strive to build democratic futures.
Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation. He promotes #Reading Revolution via Books@Antique at Antique Café in Morningside, Durban