R. W. Johnson - South Africas Brave New World

ALSO BY R . W . JOHNSON

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The Long March of the French Left

Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007

Heroes and Villains: Selected Essays

Launching Democracy in South Africa (ed. with Lawrence Schlemmer)

Liberalism in Post-Liberation South Africa (ed. with David Welsh)

South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation

R. W. JOHNSON

South Africas
Brave New World

The Beloved Country since
the End of Apartheid

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2009

Copyright R. W. Johnson, 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

ISBN: 978-0-14-195791-3

For
Irina, Lawrie, Philippa, Hermann, Anthea and Omry

Contents

South Africas Brave New World

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Preface

This book has germinated for many years, starting in the 1980s when I became a regular visitor to the University of Natal at its lovely Durban campus, of which I am a proud alumnus. However, the South African political drama was playing itself out all around me often only a few hundred metres from the campus in the shape of the bloody war between the United Democratic Front and Inkatha, so I began to write about the situation frequently for The Times (London). This placed me in a strange situation at the university, where most of my colleagues were highly partisan UDF supporters and did not welcome press coverage which was less than fully committed to their side. But I had been through all this before, having been a fervent young supporter of the ANC in Durban in the early 1960s, a traumatic period I had shared with the likes of Jacob Zuma and Ronnie Kasrils. I had seen many friends pay a terrible price for their idealism then and later come to realize that they (and I) had behaved naively, even if none of us ever regretted our anti-apartheid passion. In exile in East Berlin, running the ANC magazine, Sechaba, my dearest friend and comrade, Barry Higgs, told me that they were instructed to avoid all argument, debate and controversy: the magazine must reflect monolithic unity. You realize soon enough that this is exactly wrong, that you should be arguing about everything and all the time, he told me. With such opinions it was no wonder that Barry didnt stay in East Berlin. He ended up as a bookseller in Devon, and died in his early forties, a fate undoubtedly brought on by the savage torture he had endured from Verwoerds security police.

Remembering Barry, I could hardly agree to toe the monolithic line again. I was lucky to find a friend in Mervyn Frost, then head of the Politics Department in Durban, who understood. Most didnt. One of my academic colleagues positively clanked with the weaponry he wore about his person for use, he told me, against Inkatha, to make sure they dont kill us first. There was no doubt that he and his colleagues did much preventive and pre-emptive work of that kind. He later died of Aids and was much lamented by many. I learnt from him, as I had from Mervyn and Barry, as also from many others. Some later repented of their earlier passions; some emigrated with their passions intact; while others stayed on, somewhat sadder and wiser. For South Africa is a hard school and it requires, among other things, a sense of humour. The greatest South African social scientist, Lawrence Schlemmer, to whom my debt is incalculable, was wont to say that emigration was a mistake if only because living in South Africa was such a test of character.