Mamphela Ramphele’s new “political platform,” or party-in-making, represents the latest in  a series of bids for the substantial number of black voters presumed to be disillusioned with the rule of the African National Congress in South Africa.  So far all bids have failed. Many black South Africans are indeed fed up with the ANC. Tens of thousands have joined often violent “service delivery protests” against ANC-run municipalities accused of corruption or neglect. Millions have stayed away from the polls. Yet, relatively few have been willing to vote for opposition parties. The last major new party to try wrest their votes, a breakaway from the ANC called COPE (Congress of the People), secured a respectable 7% at the 2009 general election, but has since descended into a shambles. The best hope for Ramphele’s outfit is that it will scoop up the black African voters poised to desert COPE, yet unwilling to vote for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), because of its white roots and leader.

It is not easy to give an ideological label to Ramphele’s party, provisionally named Agang (“to build” in the Sepedi language). Leftists dismiss it as a capitalist party,  and their stance is lent some credence by Ramphele’s recent senior positions in the World Bank and a major mining house, and by her concern to make South African economically productive, competitive and investor-friendly. At the same time she professes concern for “workers and poor people” betrayed by a “new elite,” and her policy portfolio is for now too vague to pigeonhole. Notwithstanding Marxist rhetoric emanating from in and around the ANC, there is not all that much by way of concrete economic policy to tell South Africa’s political parties apart. No significant electoral party calls for a break with capitalism; at the same time, none dare sound like rabid free marketers in a land so conscious of its gigantic inequalities. I expect Agang to meet more established electoral parties on the broad ground of the center-left.

What Ramphele stands for is similar to what the DA purports to stand for: good governance. She is presenting hers as the party of competence and integrity. A former medical doctor and academic, Ramphele is a self-appointed scourge of mediocrity. Her enemy is not capitalism, but crony capitalism. She wants a depoliticized, professionalized civil service and higher educational standards. She favors electoral reforms that will reduce the stranglehold of party bosses.  She wants to rescue South Africa’s reputation as a global beacon of human rights from the disrepute brought by the ANC’s coddling of dictators. She encourages a public-spirited ethos in place of the current reign of self-interest and a shared South African citizenship to counter the country’s racial and ethnic fragmentation.

There is a market for this sort of product, especially but by no means exclusively amongst educated urbanites. One commentator has suggested that there is no rationale for a “black DA,” but actually there may well be. What Ramphele lacks, for now, is a machinery to reach out to the five or ten per cent of her compatriots who might be attracted to just such a prospect. Her baseline constituency does not stretch beyond the professionals and businesspeople who admire what they see as her readiness to speak unpalatable truths to power. A good few of an older generation remember Ramphele’s fame as a 1970s Black Consciousness activist, who was personally and politically partnered to Steve Biko, but survey evidence suggests that she is largely unknown to younger people. Biko’s legend is unlikely to rub off on a party that has very little in common with Black Consciousness. Ramphele seems uneasy with racial affirmative action and has told an interviewer that she stands for “South African” rather than “black” consciousness.

Whether or not progressives should welcome Agang depends on which is more urgent in progressive terms: leftward ideological course change or the strengthening of a state machinery currently too hobbled by corruption and incompetence to perform any kind of pro-poor strategic role. Agang is certainly not the long-awaited challenge to the ANC from the left. The problem with Agang-like parties that promise simply to govern better – apart from the possibility that their programs may fail to address structural inequalities – is that their ideological vacuity tends to attract opportunistic hangers-on, especially when they are dominated by a single personality. The answer depends also on whether it is more progressive to favor an incumbent left-leaning party with a clear majoritarian mandate or a strengthened opposition able to check that party’s authoritarianism and looting.  Agang could help to build a countervailing power to the ANC, though it could also end up redistributing votes within the opposition rather than enlarging the opposition electoral share. The party’s significance thus remains to be clarified – by the fleshing out of its policy agenda, by the caliber of people it attracts, by the nature of its funding, by public opinion polls and above all by the next national elections in 2014.

Was it a ‘tragedy’ or was it a ‘massacre’? Were the police, shocked by the killing of cops and security guards a few days before, entitled to feel threatened by an advancing column of panga-wielding strikers fortified with traditional medicine to immunise them from bullets? Or were the cops guilty of penning the strikers in, making an unnecessary attempt to disarm them by force, employing unconscionable firepower to block their escape and killing stragglers in cold blood? Who fired the first round of live ammunition?

What we do know is that on August 16^th 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s Northwest Province, and that there was at a minimum an unforgivable failure of police crowd control.

With luck, a government-appointed judicial commission will tell us who did what to whom and in what order. In the meantime South Africans nurse their bewilderment.  Theirs is a violent land in which fifty people are slain daily in ‘ordinary’ criminal murder, and strikes are often enforced with deadly brutality, but a special shame attaches to a slaughter by state forces so redolent of apartheid-era massacres.

There are layers to this story. It’s about wage grievances, but also a battle between unions. Black platinum miners have until now been organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, a member of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions. Critics claim that NUM, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, is now a status quo union. Comfortable as management’s recognised bargaining partner, NUM resists calls for mine nationalisation. The union increasingly represents upwardly mobile above-ground workers rather than the rock drillers who do the most arduous work. The fact that NUM negotiated a better wage deal for the former than for the latter appears to have been a spark for the unrest.

Rock drillers have it hard. Platinum companies have invested little in surrounding communities. Those of its employees who do not wish to live in hostels are given living-out allowances to find their own accommodation nearby, where they are left to the tender care of dysfunctional ANC-led municipalities. Most end up in shack settlements threaded with bumpy roads and open sewers.

Given this, it is little surprise that a breakaway union, the Association of Construction and Mining Union, has found in drillers a ready recruiting pool. Precisely what role AMCU has played in the Marikana strike remains to be determined.

There is a gloomy economic context to this. The country’s crucial mining sector – weighed down by electricity price hikes, falling ore grades, safety concerns, labour unrest and skittishness about nationalisation – failed to ride the recent global commodities boom. Platinum long seemed immune from the industry’s decline. South Africa produces 80% of the world’s platinum, an extremely rare  metal vital in catalytic converters. In 1999 international platinum prices began a long surge that transformed becalmed bushveld mining towns into new conurbations. But recently prices have fallen and platinum companies face financial losses. Successive strikes at platinum mines have made matters worse for the companies, their workers and a middle-income country that still depends on mineral exports for foreign exchange. Job losses loom.

The political ramifications could be equally far reaching. Expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, an arch critic of President Jacob Zuma and longstanding mine-nationalisation enthusiast, has returned to prominence on the back of mineworkers’ grievances. Zuma’s prospects for being re-elected as ANC leader at the party’s December leadership conference suddenly look shaky, especially with so many of the strikers hailing from the politically crucial Eastern Cape.  The hegemony of NUM, a pro-Zuma union, is under threat. So perhaps is that of Cosatu, a federation willing to challenge the government but viewed by some as guarding a labour aristocracy in a sea of labour casualisation and unemployment. The ANC too is getting nervous: the Marikana strike is just the latest in thousands of incidents of local unrest signalling growing disaffection with the party of national liberation.

I for one do not welcome Malema’s opportunistic intervention or the left’s instant attributions of heroism and villainy. South Africa urgently requires a social-democratic accord, one underwritten by strong trade unions capable of winning decent work and expanding employment in exchange for industrial peace and productivity gains. Nationalisation may work for Norway’s oil industry but the South African state is chronically incapacitated and lacks the fiscal means to meet demands for new mining investment and rising mine wages. The splitting of established unions could weaken organised labour and leave mining in a limbo between institutionalised bargaining and quasi-revolutionary insurrection.

The truth of what happened at Marikana also needs to be objectively established, and its discovery is ill-served by incendiary sloganeering. Blame must be carefully apportioned and justice must be done. Only that will clear the air sufficiently to enable a worthwhile debate about what sort of socio-economic regime South African mining needs.

Tony Blair came to Johannesburg last week. He was part of the Discovery Leadership Summit, hosted by Discovery Invest, and as you might expect he was the headline act.  Tony Blair on leadership: now that would be an interesting lecture, if you could afford the high fee to attend (just over a quarter of the monthly take-home pay of your average South African academic).

As it happens in South Africa’s thickly political society, Archbishop Tutu, scheduled to appear at the summit as well, pulled out dramatically and at the last minute. He was unable to share a platform, he said, with the former UK Prime Minister given his ‘morally indefensible’ invasion of Iraq. Tutu’s moral stand also had the strategic political objective of refocusing attention on a war that many in South Africa have forgotten in our parochial obsession with our tangled society.

On the day of Blair’s speech, protestors demonstrated outside the Sandton Convention Centre and grabbed headlines to the chagrin of the conference organisers (who, it must be said, remained graceful throughout).  Some of those protestors hoped to make a citizen’s arrest of Blair on the grounds that he was a war criminal. They did not get close, as security was amped up. And although I sat two feet behind Blair at the taping of a BBC debate on poverty, I did not feel moved to put my hand on his shoulder as the viral email explaining how to effect a citizen’s arrest advised; see http://www.arrestblair.org/. Neither the bounty of over 500 GBP, nor the reassurance that my motives for the arrest did not matter, tempted me. I like the politics of outrage as much as the next leftist, but I prefer thoughtful debate, when all is said and done.

I agree with Tutu that Blair’s war was based on slender evidence, driven by misinformation and an almost blind obsession with “following through” on his conviction (not to mention his commitment to President Bush) that the war should proceed. I would even confess to a visceral dislike of the smarmy mode of politics that Blair epitomizes. By contrast, I have admired Tutu for as long as I can remember and as a student I sat at his feet as he took on the apartheid government. Most recently, I supported his excoriation of the current government of South Africa for not allowing the Dalai Lama to join in Tutu’s 80^th birthday celebrations.

But it seems to me that Tutu missed an opportunity to engage with Blair in Johannesburg, and even to embarrass him, if that was the point. The enormous media coverage of Tutu’s action focused on whether Tutu was justified or not in boycotting the Discovery Leadership Summit, rather than on the causes of and justifications for the war.

An eloquent commentary on the nature of ethical leadership would have achieved vastly more in the public debate than the boycott has generated. It might have given us the arguments with which to take on Blair’s view that good leaders need to do what they think is right, even in the face of public disapproval. Really? No debate? Isn’t that what we call authoritarianism? It might have opened a discussion of what evidence is used in decision-making, and who has the right to information. Tutu might have asked Blair why he wrote in his memoir that he looked back on the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act and thought to himself: “you naïve, irresponsible nincompoop.” In retrospect, he thought empowering citizens was “utterly undermining of sensible government.”

Should a small elite, even if it is elected, make world- shattering decisions? And what about Blair’s notorious and repeated retort when questioned about Iraq that he will not apologize for removing a dictator: will he apologize then for supporting Gaddafi and Assad?

Tutu might even have opened a serious discussion of how we define “war criminals.” But the chance has passed, the Blair machine has moved on to its next engagement and all we have to celebrate is that the protesters did not get beaten up by the police.

By the way, if you are wondering what Blair had to say about leadership: not much. Certainly not enough to justify his reputed 6 000 GBP per minute speaking fee. To wit: we need an open society, responsible leadership, and Africans need to take their destiny in their own hands. Blair is a consummate public speaker so his speech was graceful and witty as could be expected, and the audience of high-level business leaders was impressed. The humorous manner in which he responded to his critics, including Tutu, was a model of diplomacy and could teach South African politicians a thing or two about the art of the stylish retort. On questions about his invasion of Iraq, he was smoothly evasive and showed no willingness to debate any of the key issues.

But what he did say – during his tenure as prime minister and again in the BBC debate on poverty – leaves me with a deep fear that the idea of “responsible and sensible” government might be displacing that of “accountable” government. That would be a profoundly undemocratic version of leadership.

As I post this, Mubarak has resigned.  The military is in control.  Elzbieta Matynia submitted these reflections yesterday, and now they are even more timely.  She looked beyond the immediate crisis and imagined the process of successful political transformation, thinking about past experiences, specifically about Roundtables – the form invented in the late twentieth century to facilitate peaceful transitions from dictatorship to democracy.  She writes in South Africa looking at Egypt, thinking about South Africa and her native Poland.  She presents her position in three acts.  -Jeff

Act One: The Meeting on the Square

How many of us, including the tourists to Egypt’s pyramids, were really aware that Egypt has been under a state of emergency for 30 years now? That the rights and freedoms of its citizens, guaranteed in the constitution, were indefinitely suspended, including the freedom of association, freedom of movement, and freedom of expression? (Except for family gatherings it is illegal for more than four people to gather even in private homes.) How many of us knew that censorship was legalized (no freedom of the press) and that tens of thousands have been detained without trial for defying these limitations? That people have lived in fear of the ubiquitous security forces? And that the  number of political prisoners in this country of 77 million runs over 30,000…

Just a reminder to those of us who try to make sense of the developments in Egypt, including the recent Day of Rage, and the Day of Departure…

The people who gathered on Tahrir Square saw themselves for the first time as citizens, and indeed the square became their newly constituted public space. For Hannah Arendt such a coming into being of a space of appearance is a prerequisite for the formal constitution of a public realm.  In this space, there is an accompanying enthusiasm and joy of discovering one’s own voice, even if interrupted by the attacks launched by undercover police and those who side with the ruling regime.

Tahrir Square is hardly a square, as its center is a circle, huge and grassy, now occupied by a tent city. Its shape is additionally confused by construction work, as it spills over into two limbs, one ending at the Egyptian Museum, and the other, Al-Tahrir Avenue, ends up at a bridge over the Nile, where an army checkpoint is installed.

Act Two: Hope – Speech, Conversation, Nonviolence.

Press coverage mentions the extraordinary solidarity of people sitting around bonfires and talking. We all know by now that Tahrir Square means Liberation Square, and though it has been advertised on tourist webpages as gay-friendly, only now has its very name gained a performative power. This is where the people regain their dignity, expressing on their own “yes we can”. We hear their freedom chants (horiya, horiya). From the bits of interviews we know that the object of their discussion is above all Mubarak and the regime he embodies, but we also hear them talking about real elections, and about a new constitution. And they pray. That is the beginning, the beginning of a larger conversation, of the dialogue they need so badly.

Over the past two weeks Tahrir Square has become both site and narrative of a societal hope that centers on the kind of change activated by a newly arisen public realm. Such a realm could create the conditions for dialogue, engaged conversation, negotiation, and compromise that are deeply invested in the democratic promise. But how to facilitate the transformation of an authoritarian political context into a democratic one? How to prepare the ground for a democratic order to emerge where there was none before?

How to make sure that the change is not just a gloss-over, but that it is inclusive, that it also respects the rights of minorities in the society, and that it takes into account the rights of women? How to ensure that the transformation that aims at creating democratic institutions and  practices takes care to nurture the richer texture of democracy?

Finally, how to ensure that the path to a new democracy is not a mere copy of  what has worked in other places? We have learned our lessons, and we already know that democracy cannot be imported or imposed from the outside. We know that if limited to its key benchmark — free and fair elections — democracy could legitimately bring to power non-democratic regimes. We know such instances, and they serve as a cautionary reminder not only for democratic missionaries, but also for the citizens of any democracy that has become taken for granted and relies increasingly on experts, electoral campaign managers, bureaucrats, and money.

The transition to a meaningful and enduring democracy, never an easy project, has the best chance to succeed if it is initiated and owned by the local people and takes into account their voices, imbued as they are with their respective histories, cultures, and economies. But since we know this, how can we respond to those who are disappointed that we appear not to support the aspirations of the Egyptian people?

Well, there is a mechanism devised in the last four decades, known as the roundtable, that by taking dialogue between the people and the regime seriously, has facilitated peaceful political transformation from authoritarianism to democracy.  The choice is clear: either the use of force, or the negotiated settlement.

Act Three: Furniture Needed — a Sizable Round Table

The political mechanism, the roundtable, was introduced in Spain in 1975 and tested in Chile in 1988, and made possible the negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary in1989, and in South Africa in1993. The roundtable institutionalizes dialogue by providing for it a concrete framework in space and time, by authorizing and legitimizing the actors, by necessitating the drafting of a script, and by establishing rules for the conduct of negotiations.

In each case assuming local features, the roundtable seems to transcend geography as well as the varied historical and political circumstances that brought about the varied forms of dictatorship. After all, the cases of Spain, Chile, Poland, and South Africa are hardly analogous. The one thing they had in common was, generally speaking, the ostentatiously non-democratic character of their regimes, which were otherwise very different from each other. What may seem a paradox at first glance is that while in Poland it was the hegemonic communist party that was the ultimate confiscator of civil and human rights, in Spain and in South Africa it was mainly the outlawed communist party that acted against their respective dictatorships of fascism and racial apartheid.

Still, beyond society’s mastering of local ways of social self-organization in Spain under Franco’s aging fascism in the 1970s, in Poland under Jaruzelski’s compromised communism in the 80s, or in South Africa under the desolate Botha – de Klerk apartheid of the 90s, there was also a recognition on both sides of the pressures exerted by the international human rights community and by world public opinion, foreign governments, investment companies, and donor agencies.

• Who is to be the intermediary?

As the launching of a dialogue between enemies is a daunting task, an external third party, serving as promoter, guardian, or intermediary in the process, usually assists it.  Interestingly, there emerge often surprising or even unlikely allies. Both in Spain and in Poland the third parties that exhibited considerable initiative in facilitating this experimental path were the ancient if not pre-modern institutions of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, respectively. In South Africa they were the Afrikaner nationalists, or more specifically the verligte wing of the governing National Party, enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals, mostly academics, but still loyal to the nationalist outlook. Who could perform such a role in Egypt?

Who is to furnish the table for the dialogue and negotiations? Who is to authorize and legitimize the actors/participants in the talks? Who is to draft a script for the talks, establish the principles of negotiations, and plan for a contingency infrastructure in which any lack of agreement could be dealt with?  In both Poland and South Africa, the roundtable established the grounds for the new order and marked the beginning of the long, tedious, and less thrilling process of building the new– in Adam Michnik’s words—“gray democracy”.

Who will act as the “intermediary” in Egypt? The military, which is already seen as the quiet protector of the protesters, and is not hated as the state police are? Or perhaps exiles who are not known to the larger public but are not tainted, and who bring with them the experience of living in overseas democracies?

• Who might to be sitting at the table?

The roundtable provides tools for institutionalizing a dialogue between those who hold dictatorial power and those social movements which — though still illegal, and often represented by people just back from prison or exile and labe

led enemies of the state — are now acknowledged by the regime, however reluctantly, as the only ones able to bring credibility to the proposed dialogue and an eventual contract.

Omar Suleiman

At the roundtable, outside of a few pre-written threads, the rest has to be improvised, or “written on stage”. That kind of performance requires enormous discipline, continuous research and training, a study of the new language, and a search for fresh ways of encouraging support from, and interaction with, the audience. The key actors have to come from both sides, the regime and the dissenting civil society.

Among those that we know from the media is General Omar Suleiman, former Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, recently named Vice-President of the county, who seems to be trying to take charge of  the talks. There is a reluctant leader Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, a lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency ; and there are some political prisoners better known in Egypt, such as Ayman Nour, a lawyer, leader of the Ghad Party,  and a presidential candidate who ran against Mubarak  in the 2005 elections that according to international monitors were rigged.  There is – no doubt— the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and one of the oldest opposition groups, illegal since 1952, but therefore even more influential, though currently holding back from  the forefront of the current protest. But of course there are no doubt actors on the ground that we outsiders have not heard of.

Mohamed ElBaradei

• The Benefits of Conducting the Process in Public – a Key to Building Democratic Culture  in Egypt

The manifest publicness of the roundtable talks serves an additional purpose in building any democracy: it exposes the larger society to the broad foundations of democratic politics, serving as a tutorial in participation, deliberation, representation, and discussion. Like its great-grandfather the New England Town meeting, the roundtable engenders the arts of dialogue and compromise and further underscores the performative dimension of democracy-in-the-making.

The anxious monitoring of the talks by the public – including its frustration over their less publicized parts — adds its own voices and gestures, expands the size of the theatre of political negotiation, and enables a larger co-participation in the roundtable talks. At the same time, the very mechanism and performance of the roundtable expands the stock of non-violent settings and political idioms that facilitate democratic change in contexts that lack democratic institutions and processes.

What is most important: the launching of a dialogue is not the result of the “good will” of the ruling regime, but a combination of factors, one of them being the recognition by the regime of the creative emancipatory invincibility demonstrated by society, the other party to the negotiations. It is important to observe that the invincibility reveals itself in a non-violent way (even if — or especially if — the non-violent approach is a recent one), and that it is not fueled by fear.

It is important to mention that the Spanish, Polish, and South African roundtables were not generated by frightened, atomized societies deprived of any capacity to resist the dictatorial power. Instead they brought together a motivated, hitherto rather unlikely assembly of modern subjects, half of whom at these tables, representing the oppressed, were well aware of having been stripped of their basic rights and capabilities as citizens. The other half at the table, the oppressors, have to acknowledge — even if reluctantly – that they are the keepers of a system whose very existence depends on excluding large parts of society from participation in the political decision-making process, and therefore from access to the resources and capacities needed to advance the well-being of both community and its individual members. But this is only the beginning.

The ambivalence around the WikiLeaks mission and especially its recent disclosures are understandable (see Jeff’s previous post). On the one hand, it does make us feel that we no longer have to live in a fog called the diplomatic game, that we need no longer be treated like children who for their own protection are excluded from family secrets, and that we the citizens of the world deserve not to be patronized and paternalized by our own governments, and need not concede so much discretionary power to our government officials.

On the other hand, as someone who is living at this moment in post-apartheid South Africa, and works in the archives (of which only a small part is available to the broader public), and who has studied the processes that led to the dismantling of Soviet-style autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe, an apparently widespread schadenfreude about exposing everything to everybody brings shivers. Two very different, but in both cases repressive, regimes in Poland and in South Africa, would not have ended peacefully as they did, if not for lengthy and secret conversations that laid the groundwork for the official public negotiations.  Imagine that the secret meetings between Church officials, leaders of the outlawed Solidarity movement, and General Jaruzelski’s government in Poland had been exposed in 1987…….Or that the “talks about talks”, and the meetings between exiled leaders of the ANC and certain members of the ruling nationalist party, had been exposed by WikiLeaks.

Nelson Mandela in 1937

In each case, the negotiations that led to fundamental systemic change and the launching of democratic rule were preceded by an overture, made of many secret meetings. The South African overture began roughly with a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where most of the ANC leaders lived, and was followed by twelve clandestine gatherings in England, gradually building a fragile trust between the key enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC leaders. And it took four years !

In Poland, even during the actual negotiations there were still side-bar meetings conducted privately in rather inaccessible backstage rooms outside of Warsaw. It was there that the sharpest disagreements were softened, making possible a return to the big and public roundtable negotiations. And indeed – no matter how problematic at the time — it was these intensely private encounters, discussions, and conferences among South Africans and Poles that influenced and shifted mutual perception on both sides.

As somebody who celebrates talk in public space as the very condition for democracy to emerge and to function, I also recognize that the very important work of rebuilding trust and reopening paths of communication may have to start in private, with privacy protected.

Remember TV’s incredible bird’s-eye views of people standing in miles-long lines to vote? Remember Mandela with his awe-inspiring gravitas undiminished by TV lights, bringing a new humanity to our living rooms? Remember our admiration for the South Africans hammering out what was clearly the most progressive constitution in the world?

I am not going to tell you that this is all gone, because it is not. But even if it seems to have gotten reinvigorated, democracy here, like any new democracy, whether in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else, is still fragile, and today it faces a major test.

Ironically there is a well-advanced effort by the ANC government to introduce a new piece of legislation that would dramatically restrict media freedom , and that — in an uncanny echo of Orwellian doublespeak — has been given the name Protection of Information Bill.  The bill endows the ruling party with the power to decide what information is “unfit” for consumption by the larger public. This launch of censorship, which for many reeks of the apartheid era, is effectively designed to stop any state information that could be classified as harmful to the “national interest,” which, as both media and public know, includes potentially embarrassing information about both past and present. If one reads the proposed bill it becomes clear that there is hardly anything in South Africa that could not be defined in terms of national interest.  Moreover it is up to politicians to decide what should be defined as a national secret. This legislative initiative is coupled with a newly proposed Media Appeals Tribunal “to strengthen media freedom and accountability,”  which recommends draconian penalties: e.g., from 3 to 25 years for those from the media who act against “the protection of information”

South African democracy may be young and fragile, but luckily it has a robustly refreshed civil society and a thick layer of moral authorities who speak out against the return of “1984”.

The Nobel Prize laureate, author Nadine Gordimer, a political activist whose books were banned under the apartheid regime, and Andre Brink, well-known South African novelist, have written a letter protesting these developments, now also signed by many other writers and intellectuals. In an interview for the well-regarded Mail and Guardian, Gordimer said, “People died in the freedom struggle and to think that having gained freedom at such a cost, it is now indeed threatened again… If the work and the freedom of the writer are in jeopardy, the freedom of every reader in South Africa is too.”

Civil society here is also expressed in its countrywide “Right to Know” campaign. I’ll stop right here, but please see these pictures from a recent march in “Joburg” that went from Witwatersrand University to the Constitutional Court. It was to be a silent march, but in the end it was a fitting combination of various forms of protest — songs, the high-stepping toi-toi , creatively sardonic buttons and t-shirts, placards with demands like STOP THE RETURN TO APARTHEID-ERA SECRECY, and lips silenced by masking tape. There is a one white button in particular which appealed to me and I’ll bring back to New York, in case it comes in handy in the new political climate.  Take a careful look, and discover some friends in the crowd…

Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond.  She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.

She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research  scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post.  I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.

Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation.  Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things.  She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff

Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever?  Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of the big jacaranda trees that are about to provide this vigorous city with a brief but tranquil blue tapestry.

At the same time one senses a nostalgia for the recent winter that brought an even greater joy to this city and to this country, with the remarkable spirit of unity that blossomed during the World Cup, when the city and the country across racial and class divides reveled in being the center of the soccer world, proud of being a world class host for a global media event.

But now the political scene is getting increasingly bitter, and for many, worrisome. It is not easy for a visitor to make sense of it, but last week’s Durban conference of the African National Congress, the 98-year-old liberation movement and ruling party, forced some issues to the surface, brought them into sharper focus, made them for the moment at least, less confusing.

Julius Malema visits Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe

Although the conference allowed the media only limited access to its proceedings, it became clear that over the 16 years since the dismantling of apartheid, its leading actor, the ANC, faces a startling challenge from its own children, the ANC Youth League. Its controversial leader, Julius Malema, who was only twelve when the negotiated settlement with the apartheid regime was reached, is now the most divisive figure in the party. Though he never went to college, his skillful use of both irreverent and vitriolic language (recently directed against the ANC and its allies), and his dubious activities (a trip to Zimbabwe last March to lend support to Robert Mugabe’s policies) made him a popular public figure for some, and a dangerous demagogue for others. There is no doubt that his rebellious, populist performance (demanding legislation for the state to expropriate private property on behalf of the people), though still formally within the ANC framework, contributes greatly to the fragmentation of the party. He himself, flamboyantly arrogant, demands a radical transformation of the ANC, with a greater presence of the younger generation in its leadership.  Observing him one wonders how a high-school dropout could have arrived at such a powerful position. What makes people listen to him? President Jacob Zuma, who is also known for his populist rhetoric, presented himself at the Durban conference as a responsible leader and statesman. In fact many commentators talk about it as a struggle between the “juniors” and the “seniors”.

Though disciplined harshly by Zuma at the conference, Malema and his “young guns” managed to put on the agenda — uninvited and unwelcomed by the ANC elders – a push for the nationalization of mines.  At the moment Zuma seems to be still in charge of the situation, as everybody took note of his “have had enough” remark  and his closing words at the conference on Friday (9/24): Anyone who crosses the line in the ANC will “face the consequences”.

For a sympathetic outsider who is trying to make sense of it all, these are worrisome developments, and not only because they confirm the feeling that there seems to be a good climate in various parts of the world — from Global North to Global South — for effective demagoguery, the appeal to emotions and prejudices. What worries me is that here in South Africa they are combined with fairly advanced demands to establish control over the media, whose freedom has been seen as part of the problem. In fact a large part of the Durban conference was devoted to a discussion on setting up a special statutory body to hold media accountable for their reporting. And a majority of the delegates enthusiastically supported it.

For a sympathetic outsider who has herself lived in a system that presented itself as democratic centralism, the demands for party discipline are worrisome, even if they are meant to rein in political lunatics like Malema.  Today at breakfast a friend told me about the Zulu concept of hlonipha that is deeply ingrained in South African culture.  It denotes respect, especially respect for the elders to ensure dignity and stability at home. Young people should not criticize their elders, no matter how many wives they have or how many lucrative positions they hold. And they should not criticize the Party.

As somebody who cares about the ways in which local cultural paradigms and local knowledge are taken into account and engaged in strengthening and legitimizing political practices in new democracies, I do worry. I worry that the culturally embedded ethos of hlonipha may exclude debate, dialogue, and a free media, while supporting the newer, imported, and deeply anti-democratic  principle of democratic centralism and media censorship announced in Zuma’s introduction of  “revolutionary discipline”.

This Tuesday, we went a step further.  I introduced the project to some dear friends and colleagues at the annual opening party of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies.   The party was a pleasure, as it always is.  I was especially pleased by the response to my developing blog, and the prospect that this will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship between TCDS and DC, a variation on an old theme.

TCDS and Me

The story of TCDS and my story are intimately connected.  It’s an example of the politics of small things, in which I am one of the central actors.  There is a long version and a short version.  I’ll start the long by highlighting the short with some quick headlines, and hope that we can continue the story’s themes in this new setting.

Elzbieta Matynia (who is the TCDS director) and I each worked on the sociology of theater in Poland, meeting there.   More details about this time later, for now just note that a deep friendship between Elzbieta and my wife, Naomi, and me developed and has endured, through major international and personal crises, martial law in Poland, changes in our social and political circumstances.  We developed parallel careers which met at the New School.  When martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, Elzbieta’s one-year scholarship to study at our university became a lifetime relationship: first as a visiting scholar, then as an adjunct instructor, now as the Director of the Transregional Center and senior member of our Department of Sociology and Committee on Liberal Studies.

The seeds of TCDS were planted when she and I met in Poland.  It was firmly rooted in the mid 80s, when, with her help, I established an unofficial, and in Central Europe clandestine, Democracy Seminar, chaired by Adam Michnik in Warsaw, and Gyorgy Bence in Budapest and me in New York. Vaclav Havel was to chair a section in Prague, but political conditions made this impossible.

In 1989, the clandestine met the open air and bloomed, and the small seminar that I chaired expanded beyond the three countries and beyond my administrative competence and imagination, and became first the East Central Europe Program, directed by Elzbieta.  Later, as our scope broadened to include South Africa, and most of the new states emerging from the former Soviet Union, including the Republics of Central Asia, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies was instituted and flourished due to her passionate and visionary leadership.

Chris Hani, left, with Nelson Mandela

All sorts of scholarly exchanges, incredible summer institutes in Krakow and now Wroclaw, Poland, in Cape Town and soon to be Johannesburg, South Africa; seminars, lectures, films, performances and conferences were developed, presented and flourished.  Tuesday, we were opening this year’s activities, but there was an unusual strained, though hopeful, note.  Elzbieta was off to South Africa the next day, as a Fulbright Research Fellow to conduct a study of the difficult case of the assassination of Chris Hani by the exiled, anti-communist Pole, Janusz Waluś, an assassination that almost derailed the peaceful dismantling of the Apartheid regime.  She hopes her study will include interviews with the incarcerated assassin.  How could someone who was associated with a liberation movement kill a hero of a similar movement?

As we wished her good bye and good luck, students and faculty who were returning from this year’s Institute in Wroclaw caught up with each, as did veterans of the Institutes past and other TCDS activities.  Ann Snitow, the co-editor of  the important, Feminist Memoir Project and author of the brilliant “A Gender Diary,” and the leading force behind the Network of East West Women, gave a quick and unfortunately dark account of how the commemoration of the Gdansk agreements went.  The commemoration of the great achievement of independent workers and their supporters against the Communist regime, she sadly reported, made little sense, was confused and poorly organized.  Ann, my beloved interlocutor in many past Institutes in Krakow, settled in conclusion on a colorful Yiddish term meaning all mixed up and without meaning, kitschy, overly ornate, “ungapotchka,” to summarize the event.

And I introduced DC, on a more hopeful note, inviting everyone to take a look and think of how they might add their voices, their insights, their deliberate considerations about the pressing issues of the day with meaning and to the point.  I was pleased by the excitement and anticipate that my many friends and colleagues who were at the New York party will join us, but also that the great number of TCDS alumni and participants from around the world will join in.

I look forward to hearing from you and hope that we can continue to discuss together serious problems, as we have done in Poland and South Africa, and in the many countries of East and Central Europe, and in New York.  Please do make a comment, ask a question, or just say hello.  I hope this venue will help us to continue the ongoing discussions that for me started so many years ago in Poland, and are now centered in New York, but can become active here.  I await Elzbieta’s first report about how things are going on her new adventure.   And I will further explain in future posts what I have done at TCDS and earlier in the Democracy Seminar, as it informs what I hope we will do at DC.