Black fascism

Spectator, The, Jul 5, 2003 by Kenny, Andrew

So one reason Matanzima is revered is that he belongs to Xhosa royalty. There is a general election next year, and the ANC will need the Transkei chiefs, who regard Matanzima as a king, to instruct the rural people to vote in the correct way. When Lukas Mangope, former president of the Bophuthatswana homeland, dies, I should be very surprised if there were an official funeral with a eulogy by President Mbeki. This is because Mangope is a Tswana not a Xhosa and is not an ANC supporter or ally. (Bophuthatswana was the best-run homeland. Its capital was Mafeking, now called 'Mafikeng'. On the collapse of apartheid, Mangope formed his own Christian Democratic party and prepared to stand in South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. However, two of his senior party officials were murdered by 'necklacing' and he withdrew from the election so as not to risk the lives of the others.)

The other reason is ideological. South Africa is a full democracy, but the ANC has authoritarian tendencies, a blend of traditional African autocracy and Western totalitarianism, notably communism. The apartheid regime and the ANC resemble each other in thought. Both are obsessed by racial ideology and state control. The ANC government has allowed more free enterprise than apartheid ever did but without ever relinquishing a tight commanding grip. South Africa today is not so much capitalist as corporatist or fascist, along the lines Mussolini wanted for Italy, with the masters of big business, the trade unions and the government doing coercive deals among themselves to control the whole economy. (One result is highly restrictive labour laws and 40 per cent unemployment.) Both the apartheid regime and the ANC hated 'liberals' more than they hated each other. Liberal philosophy - that there must be no racial discrimination, that the centre of society must be the free individual working in voluntary co-operation with his fellows, and that the state must serve the people, not the other way round - is anathema to both. According to his testimony, Eugene de Kock, the most notorious killer of the apartheid regime, was approached by the ANC in 1994 and invited to work for them. But the official opposition in parliament, the Democratic Alliance, a liberal party with an impeccable history of opposing apartheid, is constantly denigrated.

South African history is being rewritten so as to erase the part played by white liberals in the fight against apartheid. The only anti-apartheid whites we must remember are the communists. In the new 'Apartheid Museum' in Johannesburg, you are hard put to find any pictures or mention of Helen Suzman, Alan Paton, the Liberal party, the Progressive party or the Black Sash. But there are large pictures of South African communists, such as Joe Slovo, who adored Stalin and cheered when the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in f968.

When the ANC looks beyond our borders, it brings together two themes: support for black allies, however brutal, and dislike of liberal ideas. Mbeki shows consistency in his treatment of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Kaiser Matanzima in the Transkei. There are no tribal affinities between the ANC and Robert Mugabe, but they see him as an ally and this solidarity is strengthened by liberal criticism of Mugabe's tyranny. Mugabe's slaughter of more than 10,000 blacks in the 1980s, his torture and killing of black people in recent years, and his gang rape of black women none of this has received a peep of public protest from the ANC. Neither President Mbeki nor any other senior ANC minister has ever condemned the massive violation of human rights in Zimbabwe under Mugabe. Instead they denounce any liberal who does so.