Democracy in a mean season - the tyranny that may continue in South Africa if the African National Congress wins the 1994 election

National Review, May 2, 1994 by R.W. Johnson

As the ANC edges ever closer to power, it feels less need to camouflage what its exercise of power will be like. And white liberals, not having intended to exchange one authoritarian rule for another, avert their eyes.

LAST YEAR, while acting as an international election observer in Lesotho, I found myself in the company of American colleagues who were, I realized, members of what has become virtually the new international profession of election-observer and democracy-installer: they'd just "done" Kenya, following Namibia, Zambia, Angola, and Pakistan, and they had half a dozen Latin American elections under their belts too. I asked the leader of the U.S. team what preparations he was making to monitor the coming South African election. "Oh boy," he groaned. "That's the eight-hundred-pound gorilla."

This has, so far, proved an accurate assessment. At times it seems as if the election is a vast three-ring violent circus. Certainly, the country is awash with celebrities: film stars like Danny Glover, come to do "voter education" and pretending to a momentary neutrality prior to their photo-opportunity with Nelson Mandela; politicians whose ability to be neutral is even more suspect (Neil Kinnock heads a Labour Party team, for example); rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; and legions of old South African exiles who can't bear not to be here for the crunch.

Meanwhile, people have been getting killed by the hundreds, especially in Natal. The worst single event has been the shooting dead of Zulu royalists in the streets of Johannesburg, which, together with the accompanying strife in the townships, cost 56 dead in one day, with several hundred more wounded. It seems clear that ANC security guards and activists did most of the shooting. At least, Shell House (ANC headquarters) has now admitted that its men shot into the demonstrating crowd at two separate places. Mystery still surrounds the identity of other sharpshooters who rained lethal fire down on the marchers from other buildings, but there is a widespread presumption that they too were ANC activists shooting at the hated Inkatha masses come, says the ANC, to attack Shell House; come, says Inkatha, to demonstrate in favor of their king. What is disputed by no one is that the marchers had obtained police permission for the march; that they carried spears and sticks but few guns; that they did not fire first; and that their assailants, firing from protected positions inside buildings, suffered no casualties. Mandela has intervened to prevent the police from searching Shell House for weapons or apprehending those who used them--he already has the power to do this sort of thing, a fact with ominous implications for the future rule of law. Meanwhile, Chief Buthelezi has compared the event, inevitably, with the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which demonstrators were shot down in a hail of police fire.

Denial Time

GIVEN THE centrality of Sharpeville to the mythology of the anti-apartheid struggle, the ANC's supporters have found this comparison almost unbearably anguishing. The sort of political and emotional acrobatics necessary to reject such a comparison are best seen in the commentaries published in the Weekly Mail and Guardian, the main mouthpiece of white pro-ANC liberalism. Editorially, the WM&G's strongest criticism was reserved for the police for not keeping better order--an odd attitude when one considers that no police force in the world can do much when faced with well-armed and hidden snipers firing into a dense street crowd. Rather embarrassingly for this point of view, the two peace monitors in charge pronounced the Zulu march to have been perfectly orderly, an assertion that naturally drew bitter criticism from the WM&G--which went on to suggest that the mystery snipers may have been "Inkatha members, using the old French World War I tactic of firing on their own lines to get the troops' blood up." The main WM&G reportage of the massacre goes even further, comparing the behavior of the leader of the Zulu march to the Nazis' Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. The point of such comparisons is surely to suggest a figure of such pure evil that one should be not just pardoned but actually congratulated for gunning such people down.

The reason for this particular sort of madness is that many liberal whites have made an enormous emotional investment in the ANC because they cannot bear to believe that the next government is likely to be just as authoritarian and corrupt as the old one. It is very frightening to know you have to live with the ANC in power if you also believe it capable of carrying out its own little Sharpevilles. Similarly, it is scary to stand on the verge of ANC rule if you accept that the ANC--Inkatha battle is a struggle between two equally ruthless brands of African nationalism, but very much less scary if you can convince yourself that Inkatha is evil to the point of Nazism.

Revolutionary Madness