By Danny Schechter
I am at the beachfront, in a small ocean-side clubhouse/restaurant that used to belong only to White surfers in the days when the beach was segregated, Apartheid-style, with unequal slices of sand designated for Whites, Indians and, sometimes, Blacks. There are no African names on the Surf Club’s roster of the men – all men – who ran the show here for decades.
Overhead, the loud noise of the wind and the waves is interrupted by two military helicopters probably carrying the South Africa’s president Jacob Zulu whose pricey homestead at Nkandla is about 100 kilometers up the beach in the rolling hills of what is now Kwazulu Natal.
I learned later that he spent the day there at a ceremony asking his ancestors to support his bid for re-election.’’
Like many of the country’s elite and leadership, he seems more comfortable flying above the fray and looking down. At the moment, he is distracted by charges that the government spent 250 million rand enhancng security at his private home. His defenders call it his ‘compound,’ which he did or did not build with personal funds for his four wives with his own funds, a “national key point” that must be defended against any and all threats, domestic, foreign and probably extra-terrestrial.
Otherwise, politics at the beach does not intrude except in my own mind as I reflect on what brought me here 45 years ago, at the height of the State of Emergency to do my bit, on a clandestine anti-apartheid mission. I saw the whole area then as enemy territory, a battleground in a holy war against racism.
Surrounding me now is the new, post apartheid South Africa, a work in progress twenty plus years on. Back in 1967, I was at the beach in Durban with signs telling people where they belonged. Today I am in the Northern suburb of Umhlanga that shot up around a huge mall for all with office parks and ritzy residential towers like the one I am staying in. It is modeled in design after a world famous hotel in Dubai; its four levels of parking look like a BMW/Mercedes dealership.
An economic apartheid replaced the racial one, Northern suburbs here and in Johannesburg became epicenters for concentrated wealth and industry. The center cities have been abandoned to their own devices as the big money and then new money flock to a new homeland-like enclave.
The part time black maid assigned to my rented apartment tells me that she can only get jobs cleaning, and that many young people are dropping out of school because there are so few opportunities for them.
Soon, this area has become a hub of the “festive season,” a time for vacations and downtime. There are rows of spiffy hotels just waiting for the onslaught of sun-hungry holiday-makers. Most are foreign-owned so the profits don’t stay in South Africa but are remitted back to their owners overseas.
This new South Africa looks and feels familiar to Americans like myself. The fast food restaurants are everywhere. And so are the brands and movies that I am supposedly comfortable with. Ten percent of the population prosper in privilege like affluent Californians. Unfortunately, more than 50 percent are still trapped in desperate poverty, often without food, or much hope.
The revolution fought in their name has yet to reach them.
It’s hard not to be disillusioned as I search for the fading fumes of the freedom struggle that has become, like the civil rights movement I was part of in the States, part of the past, a subject found more in museums and classrooms than in the active thoughts of millions of South Africans under the age of 25.
Nelson Mandela’s face is now on the currency but his ideals seem distant from many minds.
All I hear is grumbling and contempt for politicians, especially those in the ANC, whose honeymoon is long over. The media seems to have joined the opposition and is brimming with non-stop stories of betrayal, greed, and corruption. They are as hostile as the apartheid media was in the days when the movement was ritually denounced as terrorist and rarely quoted. Today, it is only quoted in stories that make it look bad.
This is not new, say veterans of the ANC including an old friend who was part of the “struggle” in its long years in exile. (I am not naming her or others I quote because I interviewed them for a still unreleased film,
not this essay.) “Danny we always had that. We had people who were very rich in the movement. A lot of the whites who came into the movement in the 50s had money, were highly educated. There were a few cases, there weren’t as many cases as there are now, but there were cases of corruption. There’s nothing new about all of this. And there were always dissatisfied comrades. And there was always moaning and groaning. We’re not moving fast enough, we’re not moving in the right direction, we’re selling out. Always...”
Back in 1994, on the very day of the country’s first democratic election I sat with ANC leader Joe Slovo, who even then worried and prophetically warning about the dangers of corruption by comrades who feel “the struggle owes them a living.”
I later chatted about this situation with one of South Africa’s top writers, a world famous figure. She was besides herself, expressing a deep sense of personal loss:
“I find it very painful. Very disillusioning. It looks worse every day and every week. And then this terrible massacre going on between the police and workers at the Platinum Mines. So it’s very difficult not to feel discouraged. But I just say, now look, if we got through and rid of apartheid, somehow or another we must be able to get through and get rid of this corruption.’
She then put events in a historical context of conquest and colonialism, a context hardly on the minds of many whites:
“I think that without making any excuse for this, it is partly the legacy, not just of apartheid, but going back to 1652, when the first man from the Dutch East India Company landed on what is now the Cape. That was the beginning of the colonist period, the moment the foot of a white man went on the shore there. And the black population in SA, the indigenous people, have indeed been deprived of 90% of what life should mean for these centuries.
“And so then we had apartheid which was really the epitome of everything.
”Was been done to black people for centuries. I can only think it’s in the DNA, if you’re black. So there is this push to say, well we had nothing, now we must have everything. At any cost! And that leads to terrible corruption. I’m not excusing it, because the saddest thing for me is that some of our great heroes from the struggle have fallen into this mode of accepting corruption as part of what they were fighting for. And it’s the absolute opposite. It’s complete denial of everything the struggle meant.”
Another writer, a black literary lion who has appeared in some of my films, shares her view:
“It is precisely because of the high moral ground that the ANC is deeply associated with that there is a sense that the ANC, of all organizations, should have known better. And should have better prepared for the hurdles that we’re going through now.
“I have an understanding for black economic empowerment. I have an understanding of the attractions of wealth to people who have had a long history of depravation and suddenly are in power. But always there is another angle to this. That often when people suddenly have a lot of money, there is a history of them not knowing what to do with it. And then, all of it vaporizing, and disappearing within a short space of time.
“That is the danger... I don’t think that the ANC, as a party of liberation, can be free from the accountability of having not handled that issue very well.”
Oddly, on the literary right, an Afrikaner writer who makes a living coming up with gripping stories that eloquently unmask what he sees as the pretensions and hypocrisy of a struggle he condemns as fraudulent on almost every level, concludes his recent collection of stories that seem driven by fury if not bile, by realizing that he has no more cheap shots to share.
He refers his own bromides as “the same old what-ifs chas(ing) the same old “if only’s” around the same old obstacle course usually working their way toward conclusions so dismaying that I want to shoot myself.”
In the end, Rian Malan is hopeful that “the issues that divide us now will seem absurd in retrospect. The good that white men did will be acknowledged; the evil forgotten. The wounds of history will be healed. Would that I could live to see it.”
For me, I feel at times like I am at the end of my time here politically. I don’t think it’s my place to rage and rail against the government and the flawed system that it upholds. Or, that there is anyone really who wants to listen. I have plenty to criticize at home.
I still write and make films now about South Africa in hopes my work is relevant in some way.
I started out with a passion to change my own country and found myself somehow immersed with/supporting/reporting on a movement so many miles away that was hospitably supportive of my desire to be helpful.
I served, as best as I could, over more than four decades. I am not sorry I did.
Great things were accomplished that many of us never expected. Some think it was a miracle; I see it as the product of so many working so hard, and on so many levels. for so long.
Surely, larger than life leaders like Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and Slovo. Mbeki, and other key ‘comrades’ played the big role, but in the end, it was the people they inspired that brought down the old system with their blood, sweat and sacrifice.
Many of the people once viewed as the “masses” now want to move on, want to be optimistic but are trapped in structural poverty reinforced by a globally enforced system of neo-liberalism and remote control.
The “Washington Consensus” has an unspoken consensus that they must stay where they are.
When they protest – and many do in a growing number of increasingly violent township and labor “incidents,” they end up fighting against the very government they once struggled for.
Yes, parts of it came out badly, but look around the world, and name a country and a popular struggle that has achieved so much.
Years ago, after the old government unbanned the ANC, I was, in effect, still banned, forbidden to come back here in the early 90’s. I considered it a badge of honor, and I persevered.
And like an old dog, grayer now and slower afoot, I still persevere to say we were right to fight what we fought for, and now, to fight to make it right.
Saharareporters
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