Empire of the ANC
At the weekend, another member of my left-wing circle of friends announced that he had “turned”; he was no longer an ANC supporter. I think he stopped short of declaring the ANC the enemy, but looked ready to raise arms against it, even if it’s only an angry beer as yet.
How sad this is as the party celebrates its 100th anniversary, and I’m not trying to be ironical. I’m sure the party will not miss those of us whose support bordered on fanaticism in the 1980s and 1990s, but who are now disillusioned, to use the cliché and some understatement. Still, there seems to be little in the current ANC with which to identify for many of its former activists.
My friend does a lot of work with the government, and his assessment is the same as that of many others: party and state have become indistinguishable, and it’s like fighting the National Party all over again. Walk down the passages of a department in Pretoria, he says, and one would be back in some or other homeland.
The ANC’s history remains worthy of awe. It’s right up there as one of the key movements in the evolving global ethos and rights structures of the 20th century. Its legacy of putting ideals of nonracialism into practice, also when a measure of force was required as part of a broader programme of action, will inspire many in the years to come.
What went wrong is well documented. We should not forget that it is still a democratically elected movement – its failings have at their root the completely forgivable inability of the electorate to look beyond the still too recent trauma of apartheid. Until it gets voted out of power, its supporters will have to put up with the vagaries of cold-blooded corruption and party-sanctioned incompetence.
Therein lies the rub: if it ever allows itself to get voted out. Its claim to power is now almost sacrosanct, and it is fast becoming a civil religion just like apartheid, with its declarations of eternal government until Jesus comes (which is a more subtle statement than it appears, since he is not an African). Its new sacraments of power replacing those of human rights are being performed dutifully by one African dictator after another attending the spectacle in Bloemfontein.
I have one quibble, though, with the emerging consensus on the ANC’s degeneration, that is a degeneration to start with. The roots of the ANC’s own dictatorial ambitions go back right to the formation of its predecessor, the South African Native National Congress, in 1912.
It should always be remembered that the National Party, formed at about the same time, was an anticolonialist movement too. Apartheid as an ideology arose from the British empire being perceived as acting in cahoots with the black tribes against Dutch-speaking poor whites. To right these perceptions, the empire allowed the South African union of 1910 to adopt the infamous 1913 Land Act, reneging on promises to partition the country equally.
The long lead-up to the act, and its clauses aimed at destruction of the rising black middle class by banning sharecropping, was the direct inspiration for the formation of the SANNC. But a key element to grasp was that the organisation’s main grievance was a sense of betrayal.
As brilliantly recounted in Native Life in South Africa, SANNC founder member Sol Plaatje’s book of reportage, black South Africans looked up to the British empire as the broader structure that would both unite the fractious tribes into a new modernity and safeguard their rights as British citizens. Plaatje went on a tour of Britain to persuade the British that the SANNC saw itself very much as a part of the empire. In his book he headed every chapter with indigenous language versions, including two varieties of Afrikaans, of the first two lines of the British troopies’ song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary to demonstrate this allegiance.
It took the rebellion of the youth league under Nelson Mandela to finally rid the movement of its delusions that the British government was on its side.
But the ANC’s identification with empire has remained. Among the gurus of the Occupy movement are Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who have offered a new critique of empire after the collapse of the Soviet “second world”. A key concept of theirs is that there is no single, dominant empire, but rather several nodes of empire stretching across the globe, from Washington to Beijing, from Stockholm to Pretoria.
This concept allows them to take in flagrantly despotic regimes in the “third world” as part of their critique, whereas their leftist predecessors relied on the rhetoric of anticolonialism to explain the failures of Africa in particular.
The ANC’s imperialist ambitions show in its perception of itself as a vanguard movement in the new multipolar world, as Africa’s representative. As South Africa’s government it did not join the Brics bloc to bequeath to it its human rights legacy, but because the alliance offers it a chance to co-rule the world, along with the Communist party and Vladimir Putin’s securocrats. It torpedoed the Dalai Lama’s visit to South Africa not only to please China, but also because it does not like anti-imperialist movements like Tibet’s.
Chinese diplomats boast of the ANC’s admiration for the Communist party. Of course, if it can duplicate that country’s growth rate and ability to create jobs for its citizens all over the world, the electorate would not complain, and neither would South African business.
China and the global Sinosphere have replaced the British empire as the ANC’s guiding light. At the moment though, the most obvious similarities lie in the 180 000 or so “mass incidents” every year in that country, and the continuing “service delivery” protests in South Africa, by far the most frequent on the continent.