South africa

Tuesday

Rian Malan

What did you do in the struggle, daddy? The real story of Nelson Mandela and the communists

Reading the obituaries last Friday, one was left with impression that Nelson Mandela’s only flaws were fastidiousness and a tendency to flirt with every pretty girl he met. Otherwise, he was exemplary in every respect, and of course a human right activist in the exactly the sense that Western liberals find winsome and cuddly. ‘Flawless,’ said Archbishop Tutu. ‘One of the true giants,’ said Blair.  Even the Tory Cameron could barely contain himself, describing Mandela as ‘the embodiment of grace.’  You had to have sharp ears to hear the discordant note struck by Johannesburg’s Business Day, which a ran a front-page story headlined, ‘South African Communist Party admits Mandela was

Friday

Alex Massie

Nelson Mandela gave us the greatest gift of all: Hope

Sometimes when a significant public figure dies, even, perhaps especially, when that death comes as no surprise and may, indeed, be considered some form of release there is a natural tendency to wonder if the blanket media coverage that invariably follows is altogether appropriate or even seemly. Is it not all too much? A man is merely a man; a woman merely a woman. Sometimes too, it is natural to react to the endless parade of tributes and wonder how genuine they really are. Is there not something vainglorious about them? Is there not something a little ridiculous about all these attempts to cling to the coat-tails of greatness? Perhaps

Thursday

Richard Stengel

Nelson Mandela: The man and the mask

South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela has died aged 95 this evening. From The Spectator’s archive, here is a personal account of Nelson Mandela’s character from November 1994. Richard Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Nelson Mandela loves newspapers. He reads them slowly, studying each article, turning the page with unhurried precision. On Robben Island, newspapers were denied him and he still savours them. For most of our flight down to Natal, Mandela was absorbed in the weekend Johannesburg Star. I sat across from him in a cramped and aged four-seat propeller plane. It was April of 1993, and I had been in South Africa for

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Life among South Africa’s nouveaux riches

Not long ago Cyril Ramaphosa, probably South Africa’s future president and ANC leader, attempted to buy a buffalo. It was at an auction for hunters and game ranchers. He bid £1.3 million and, incredibly, lost out to another tycoon. At the same event he still managed to spend another million pounds on game species for his ranch — but later he apologised in light of the fact that South Africa is a ‘sea of poverty’. One South African who is unapologetic about his bling and conspicuous spending is Kenny Kunene, who famously held a birthday party at his ZAR nightclub in Johannesburg at which guests ate sushi off the body

Wednesday

Peter Guest

Africa’s growth spurt

When South African police opened fire on striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine, it had all of the hallmarks of the bad old days of the continent – the tangled and violent business of pulling metal from the ground in the “Dark Continent”. The events at Marikana were symptomatic of the fractious politics of labour in South Africa, the uncomfortable alliances forged in the anti-apartheid struggle that have not resolved themselves in peacetime. However, at their root they have the simmering tension caused by the unequal distribution of economic opportunity that is not restricted to South Africa. The mining sector there, and elsewhere in the developing world, is nearly

Tuesday

Martin Plaut

South Africa: Mired in corruption?

On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the ANC’s moral authority has been eroded, tainted by allegations of corruption; a temporary betrayal of its history.’ From an old friend of the ruling party this was damning indeed, but is she right to refer to corruption as a ‘temporary betrayal?’ The ANC’s history is more complex and more difficult than supporters like Mrs Robinson

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Saturday

Michela Wrong

Fear and loathing in the Congo

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. When the UN peacekeepers made contact — and there was always a risk they would run into Rwandan rebels with very different priorities — his job was to persuade twitchy,

Saturday

Douglas Hurd

Go out and govern New South Wales

‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. ‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. Straight-backed, grey-haired, he had the bright eye and bristled moustache of an ageing fox-terrier.’ Reading this, at the beginning of a chapter, we cannot be sure whether what follows will be Lytton Strachey or John Buchan. The tale might go either way. The letter might be either an invitation to shoot grouse or in answer to a summons to cope with a crisis threatening the British empire. The second guess would be right. The letter was

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

When the best defence is no defence

This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to be known as the Delmas Four. It is also a wonderfully vivid and at times alarming account of the inner workings both of ANC ‘operations units’ and of the police, who used torture, murder and intimidation without compunction in the fight to save South Africa from what they saw as a communist threat. As South Africans in general drew closer to some sort of détente between the ANC and the nationalist government, neither the ANC on the one hand nor

Monday

Daniel Korski

A flooded world

It looks like the opening of a Hollywood disaster film. The South African government has declared parts of the country disaster areas, after 40 people died in floods in a month. At the same time, the UN is to launch an appeal for emergency flood aid for Sri Lanka, where at least 32 people have died and more than 300,000 have been displaced. Meanwhile flood waters in Australia have left a trail of destruction, at least 18 dead and a billion dollar bill for reconstruction. And in Brazil, survivors of the floods that have killed more than 600 people are frustrated by the lack of government help. Are these floods

Saturday

Andro Linklater

Tried and tested

In June 1964, when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage against the apartheid government of South Africa, he was, as photographs reveal, a burly, blackhaired man, with a handsome, pugnacious grin. By the time he was released in 1990, his hair was grey and his features gaunt. But his first speech as a free man described the same ideal of a democratic, multiracial South Africa that he had presented in his final address before being sentenced — ‘an ideal I hope to live for, but if needs be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die’. That imprisonment should neither have broken nor embittered

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Survive the World Cup in Style…

Because everything is a market opportunity, here’s a perfect gift for any friend going to the World Cup this summer. Adding team colours is a particularly nice touch. Apparently this is a genuine product and at least 35 vests were sold the first day they became available. So rush now before they sell-out… Disclaimer: I actually think the World Cup will probably go off pretty well and that fears of crime, while understandable, are likely to be exagerrated somewhat.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Mousavi and the South African Example

Democracy in America goes back to pre-election profiles of Mir Hossein Mousavi and finds a “cautious, pragmatic, vague and increasingly shrewd politician.” This seems a fair verdict and, as we know, Mousavi can hardly be the perfect poster-boy for liberals since, if he were, he wouldn’t have been permitted to stand in the first place. But that was then and this is now. The movement is bigger than Mousavi now and it’s hard to see how much of it he and his advisers really control anyway. What can be said is that reform is a process, not an event. Furthermore, I would hazard that the regime faces a pretty bleak