Category Archives: South Africa

India, South Africa

Photo(s) of the day: Gandhi, Mandela bookend Embassy Row in Washington

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On either side of Washington DC’s ‘Embassy Row,’ the dense line of embassies that line either side of Massachusetts Avenue, you could find two very different tributes to perhaps the two most iconic peacemakers of the 20th century — India’s Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.India Flag Iconsouth africa flag

At the Indian embassy, dozens of protestors gathered in opposition to the Indian Supreme Court’s decision earlier today that effectively re-criminalizes same-sex conduct, leaving it up to India’s parliament to decriminalize homosexuality.  The decision reverses the 2009 ruling of the Delhi High Court, which interpreted much of Section 377 of India’s penal code unconstitutional.  Read more about the Supreme Court’s landmark decision here.

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Meanwhile, a mile down the way, flowers and tributes to the late former South African president to Nelson Mandela continue to pile up at the South African embassy.  The Mandela statue is relatively new — it was erected only a few months ago.  Read more about how Mandela’s death poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the future of South Africa here.

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Bonus: I saw (but didn’t snap a photograph) former prime minister Kevin Rudd walking out of the Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue. I’m not sure what he’s doing in Washington, but he’d certainly be a welcome addition in a policy role here.

South Africa

How Nelson Mandela’s death provides South Africa a challenge and an opportunity

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No one could have filled the shoes of Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa — not that either of his successors in recent years tried particularly hard to do so. south africa flag

Thabo Mbeki (pictured above, right, with Mandela), who served as Mandela’s competent executive during Mandela’s term as South African president between 1994 and 1999, became known during his own decade in office as the world leader who refused to admit the connection between HIV and AIDS long after the scientific community established that the human immunodeficiency virus is the proximate cause of AIDS.

Jacob Zuma (pictured above, left, with Mandela), who followed Mbeki into the presidency after the 2009 general election, came to power virtually synonymous with illegality after surviving criminal charges for rape and for corruption in the mid-2000s.  Mbeki himself was forced to resign in September 2008 as president because of allegations that he interfered in the judicial process on behalf of Zuma.

With a general election due in spring 2014, however, Mandela’s death presents both an opportunity and a challenge to South African politics.  Mandela’s absence means that the space is once again open for a South African leader to inspire the entire nation without facing the inevitable comparison to one of the world’s most beloved figures.  But it also marks the end of post-apartheid South Africa’s honeymoon, and so Mandela’s passing also represents a challenge to the new generation of political leadership — to dare to bring the same level of audacious change to South Africa that Mandela did.  Nothing less will be required of South Africa’s leaders to keep the country united and prosperous in the decades to come — to ensure that South Africa continues to be, as Mandela memorably stated in his 1994 inaugural address, ‘a rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world.’

South Africa today remains the jewel of sub-Saharan Africa, in both humanitarian and economic terms.  Mandela’s release from prison and the largely peaceful negotiation of the end of apartheid in Africa alongside F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s president from 1989 to 1994, rank among the most memorable events of the 20th century.  The constitution that Mandela helped to enact in 1996 is one of the world’s most progressive in terms of human rights — it purports to grant every South African the right to human dignity, to health care and water, to work, to a basic education, to housing.  Even if the rights promulgated in the South African constitution today remain more aspirational than functional, the constitution was pathbreaking in it breadth.  It’s notable that in 2006, South Africa became the fifth country in the world to allow same-sex marriage.

With an economy of $579 billion (on a PPP basis, as of 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund), South Africa has the largest economy on the entire African continent, despite the fact that its population of 53 million is dwarfed by the populations of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (67.5 million), Ethiopia (86.6 million) and Nigeria (a staggering 173.6 million).

Its GDP per capita of $11,281 (again on a PPP basis and as determined by the IMF as of 2012) is exceeded in sub-Saharan Africa only by oil-rich Gabon ($18,501) and tourism hotspot Botswana ($15,706), and it far outpaces the fourth-ranked Namibia ($7,500) and the fifth-ranked Angola ($6,092), another petrostrate.  Even that understates South Africa’s economic dominance, because both the Botswanan and Namibian economies have flourished in large part due to trade with the South African economy.

But that doesn’t mean all is perfectly well.  Nigeria seems likely to outpace South Africa to become the largest sub-Saharan African economy soon, if it hasn’t already.  Despite its status as Africa’s economic powerhouse, South Africa suffered its first post-apartheid recession in 2009, and the recovery hasn’t been particularly strong.  South African GDP grew just 2.2% last year and growth remained sluggish this year, too. Unemployment is creeping downward, but it’s still a whopping 24.7% as of the third quarter of 2013.  Different studies make it difficult to know whether poverty is rising or declining, but wealth among South African whites is massively higher than wealth among South African blacks, and income inequality is rising sharply in South Africa (as in much of the rest of the world).

Clashes between miners and South African police during last summer’s Marikana strike left 34 people dead, shocking both South Africa and the world with the kind of violent images that hadn’t been seen in South Africa since the apartheid era.

With an estimated HIV/AIDS rate of 17.5%, South Africa has the world’s fourth-highest HIV prevalence after neighboring Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana.  Though we now recognize Mandela as one of the world’s most prodigious activists in the campaign against HIV/AIDS, the issue wasn’t at the top of his agenda as president, a failing that Mandela acknowledged after leaving office.  In retirement, however, Mandela took up the cause with vigor (especially after his own son Makgatho died from AIDS complications in 2005).  His forceful push at the 2000 AIDS conference in Durban muted the criticisms of the Mbeki government and paved the way for greater treatment options for all Africans, including South Africans.  But the much-delayed fight against HIV/AIDS represents one of the starkest failures of post-apartheid South Africa. Continue reading How Nelson Mandela’s death provides South Africa a challenge and an opportunity →

South Africa

Remembering Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

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Guest post by Andrew J. Novak

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Nelson Mandela, who achieved nearly mythical status as the first post-apartheid president of South Africa, received the name ‘Nelson’ from his teacher Miss Mdingane on his first day of primary school in a small village in the Eastern Cape, as part of a custom at the time of providing African children with Christian names. south africa flag

Before that he was known by his birth name Rolihlahla, ‘troublemaker’ in colloquial isiXhosa, which appears now in retrospect both endearing and prescient. Formal isiXhosa uses clan name as an honorific, referring to a family’s ancestor; Mandela’s was Madiba, the name of a chief who ruled in Transkei in the 18th century.  When he completed his traditional initiation rites of manhood at age sixteen, Mandela was given the name Dalibhunga, ‘convener of the dialogue,’ another name that seems strangely appropriate decades later.  Later in life, he would be known as Tata (father) and Khulu (grandfather) by many South Africans regardless of their own age, as patriarch of a new multiracial democracy.  He was Papa to his third wife Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique, whose life, like his, bore the rugged scars of a nation struggling for independence.

Perhaps the name that most defined his life’s eventual course was a fake one: David Motsamayi, a name he assumed to secretly leave South Africa in 1962 to travel across the continent raising the international profile of the African National Congress (ANC).  He received military training in Morocco and Ethiopia and raised money from the political leaders of several North and West African countries before traveling to London where he met with anti-apartheid activists and reporters.  Upon his return to South Africa, he was arrested at a police roadblock and placed on trial for inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country illegally.  He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in Pretoria before the police uncovered evidence of his role in the founding of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation.

In the famous Rivonia trial, he was convicted of four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment.  For the next eighteen years of his life, he lived in a small cell on Robben Island until a journalist’s slogan ‘Free Mandela’ started an international campaign that culminated in a UN Security Council resolution and his eventual transfer to the relative comfort of two mainland prisons.  On the brink of a low-intensity civil war for the next ten years, the South Africa outside Mandela’s cell had changed, and, on February 11, 1990, he was released from prison on live television.

Despite his early legal training and the 1952 establishment of Mandela & Tambo, the country’s first black-African owned law firm, Mandela did not receive his law degree until he completed his correspondence courses in his last months in prison.  Nonetheless, Mandela the lawyer contributed more to development of the rule of law in South Africa than any other person in modern times.  In negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa from 1991 to 1992, he and South African President F.W. de Klerk succeeded in drafting an interim constitution with the strong separation of powers and a bill of rights.  They also established a timetable for multiracial elections and agreed on the structure of a government of national unity, a process that jointly won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.  The new constitution of South Africa, one of the most progressive in the world, entered into force in May 1996.

Though his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was a more experienced administrator, Mandela provided the moral leadership that South Africa needed in its democratic transition during his five-year term as president.  Mandela the reconciler oversaw the establishment of a truth commission with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chair to investigate crimes committed under apartheid by both sides.  He tackled the huge disparity in wealth, ending discrimination in social services and helping build national infrastructure: by 1999, housing for three million people had been constructed; three million people were connected to telephone lines and clean water, and two million to the electricity grid; 1.5 million children were enrolled in the education system for the first time; and 500 health clinics were upgraded.

In retirement, Mandela devoted himself to HIV/AIDS activism through his foundation, supporting the protests to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to poor South Africans and allow the government to purchase generics produced in Brazil, India, and Thailand.  In the years that followed, he spoke out against the war in Iraq and Mugabe’s continued rule in Zimbabwe, and in favor of South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid.  He had largely retreated from public life by 2004, but his international statute did not diminish.

He died as he had lived, a fateful mix of youthful troublemaker and eminent patriarch.

Andrew Novak is the adjunct professor of African law at American University, Washington College of Law

CAR (Centrafrique), South Africa

CAR debacle a military, diplomatic and political blow to South African leadership

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For the past two weeks, while Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s legendary first post-apartheid president battled pneumonia, at age 94, in a Pretoria hospital, the successors of his political inheritance have squandered yet a bit more of the moral power Mandela bequeathed to them.centrafrique flagsouth africa flag

It’s not the first time that South African president Jacob Zuma and the current iteration of the governing African National Congress (ANC) have failed to live up to the larger-than-life image of Mandela, but the death of 13 South Africans troops (or quite possibly more) in the Central African Republic, along with 27 additional injured soldiers, out of a contingent of around 200 that came to Bangui in January, has come to a shock to South Africans — the action was South Africa’s deadliest since clashes resulting from the end of minority rule in 1994.  The deaths occurred in late March when the Séléka rebel coalition ousted current president François Bozizé (pictured below, left, in happier times with Zuma) from office, bringing to an abrupt end a short-lived January ceasefire between the Bozizé government and rebels.

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South Africans, moreover, aren’t used to seeing dead South African soldiers in bodybags, not least of which resulted from the defense of an autocratic president — who took power himself in a 2003 coup — against another group of rebels in a small, landlocked central African nation half a continent away.

So Zuma’s announcement this week that South African troops would withdraw from the Central African Republic entirely has been welcome news, but South Africans are still asking asking pointed questions about why South African troops were defending François Bozizé’s regime by fighting against a rebel force that included, in part, child soldiers.  Defense minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula last weekend rejected critics by mockingly asking if the troops should give sweets and blow kisses to the child rebels.

The truth seems to be that the troops were defending cozy contracts between the Bozizé administration and South African businesses, including top ANC leaders.  Zuma’s story has already changed since January: first, the troops were part of a training mission, then they were part of a security contingent to protect the trainers.

At a memorial earlier this week for the fallen troops, Zuma struck out at his critics in some fairly unsettling terms that indicated he didn’t want any further public discussion of the matter:

“The problem in South Africa is that everybody wants to run the country,” [Zuma] told a memorial service for the 13 soldiers killed in the Central African Republic (CAR) last week.

“There must also be an appreciation that military matters and decisions are not matters that are discussed in public, other than to share broader policy.”

The resulting furor has been an incredible embarrassment for South Africa — in diplomatic, political and military terms alike — drawing considerable international criticism: Continue reading CAR debacle a military, diplomatic and political blow to South African leadership →