Nelson Mandela and the Rainbow Nation he never saw

The South economy is the largest in Africa. Yet, since 2009 SA has had the distinction of beating the entire world as the most economically skewed society. This lopsidedness is not new. It grasped/gripped the attention of international social critics as far back as May 1998 when then SA Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki, stated before Parliament that SA was not a nation; it was merely two nations rolled into one.

To Mbeki, SA was a superficial synthesis of a small affluent white society whose lifestyles rivaled the superrich anywhere in the world. The other SA was comprised of black fellow citizens who were permanently locked in abject poverty without a way out. Mbeki’s statement came to be known as the ‘Two-Nations Speech’, a candid refutation of racial-economic harmony around the world.

Mbeki went on to point out that it would take a long time for the South Africa’s socio-economic fissure, a 350-year legacy of inequality, to narrow and allow the country to evolve the necessary psychological cement to form a bona fide nation. But until that happened, talk of a Rainbow Nation was premature, a mere dream deferred. And, Mbeki continued, a dream deferred festers into a rage which, ultimately, explodes. Was Mbeki forewarning of a racial confrontation? Did he have a foreboding about the impeding Marikana Massacre of August 2012 where 34 striking miners would be gunned down by police in broad daylight?

In analyzing SA’s economic inequality, social critics agree from the outset that colonialism and apartheid had much to do with it. But in the post-apartheid era, a small undercurrent of thought emerged suggesting that the country’s socio-economic woes were aggravated and perpetuated by ‘compromised negotiations’ that were spearheaded by the liberation icon, Nelson Mandela.

The compromised negotiations proposition remained relatively muted during Mandela’s lifetime presumably because few dared to stand up as Madiba’s distracters during his lifetime. After all, he was the beloved, ultimate victim of apartheid. Now in post-Mandela era, that same argument is again raising its head, vividly captured in the newly formed party, the Economic Freedom Fighters headed by the former ANC maverick, Julius Malema.

In the negotiations to dismantle apartheid in the early 1990s, the claim goes, Mandela was admirably tough on the political front, but he was excessively soft on the economic side. In the end, Madiba settled for a lopsided economic deal that disinherited his people. As one globally acclaimed analyst summed up the deal, ‘a great Faustian bargain was struck between the two races. The Whites said to the Blacks, ‘You take the crown and we will keep the jewels.’”

The economic ‘soft-to-apartheid’ logic has been articulated by prominent personalities deeply loyal to Mandela, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela’s former wife, Winnie. Its proponents do not necessarily accuse Mandela of deliberate wrongdoing but they do assert, at least by implication, that more could have been extracted in form of economic concessions for the dispossessed fellow Africans.

Occasionally, there have been whispers that Mandela went too far to accommodate the apartheid establishment in a manner that verged on appeasement. In return he got a ‘Sucker’s Deal’ economically. However, neither deliberate law breaking nor corruption is ever suggested. In fact, ethically and legally, Mandela’s post-apartheid leadership is generally portrayed as having been virtually impeccable.

A case could be made that Mandela’s overall soft-economic approach to the demise of apartheid was not an ad hoc matter, that it was derived from older Pan-African thought. Indeed, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah had addressed the same question of what domain should African anti-colonialism target first: political or economic power? Nkrumah responded in his capacity as the elder statesman in African nationalism by asserting, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you.’

During the negotiations to abolish apartheid in early 1990s, was Mandela aware of Nkrumah’s ‘political kingdom first’ dictum? He would be forgiven if he was not aware. After all, he was already in prison when African nationalism took off in earnest and such debates became commonplace.

Yet, evidence suggests otherwise. In addition to his well-known photographic memory, Mandela was well read. Professor Ali Mazrui tells how he was once in a conference and, accidentally, bumped into Mandela in the hallway. Startled, Mazrui greeted the global icon and introduced himself as Ali Mazrui. Mandela responded, ‘Oh, Professor Ali Mazrui, nice to meet you! I used to read your publications when I was in prison!”

If Mandela remembered Mazrui’s name and that he had read his publications while in prison, he certainly knew of the economic-political kingdoms debate relative to African decolonization. Indeed Nkrumah’s dictum on this issue is one of his three most cited decrees ever and Mazrui has published extensively on Nkrumah. In de-emphasizing the economic front in the negotiations to abolish apartheid, was Mandela of the early 1990s acting under the spell of Nkrumah, the leading continental Pan-Africanist?

In all likelihood, Mandela of that time was preoccupied less with ideologies than the practical circumstances that surrounded him, realities that were uniquely South African. For the survival of his country, he had chosen to enlist the political kingdom first of reconciliation and nation-building. This, an attempt to build a Rainbow Nation, was indeed the only viable alternative that was open to discussions. In this sense, Mandela was not alone. He was reminiscent of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta who also came out of a colonial jail and wrote a book clearly aimed at ‘coddling’ his former British detractors. Hence the unsurprising title of his 1968 book, Suffering without Bitterness.

Additionally, SA of the early 1990’s did not have much of an economic kingdom to offer. At that time most of the world was still too caught up in the euphoria of Mandela’s release from prison to realize that the economy of the country that Mandela was soon to govern was in shambles. For decades, SA had been the world’s number one pariah state and had been victimized for being ‘God’s forsaken country.’ Its economy was virtually wrecked by strikes and rampant violence, an atmosphere of doom, instability and uncertainty.

The mood of doom that hung over SA deteriorated immensely from the 1980s and was profoundly unattractive to foreign investors. International economic sanctions had become universal and were now biting deeply. Suddenly, these forces were boosted by the 1986 passage of the US Congressional Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.

The divestment movement was also gaining momentum in the US and contributed further to apartheid’s economic woes. Finally, there were anti-apartheid protests in almost every Western city. It was not an exaggeration when white SA lamented of total onslaught against them. Even Christiaan Barnard, the famous first human heart transplant surgeon in the world (and an anti-apartheid activist) went to his grave believing that he fell short of the Nobel Prize in Medicine because he was a ‘white South African.’

Those economic circumstances left little room for Mandela to push immediately for remedial socio-economic programs such as nationalizations of mines and land reforms. In a realistic sense then, Mandela did not deliberately compromise his people economically in the negotiations to dismantle apartheid; the state of the economy added immensely to the compromising.

Politically, it is often forgotten that SA could have easily drifted into an unmanageable race war. On one side of the pole were millions of Blacks who had endured decades of staggering deprivation and humiliation for no fault of their own. By the early 1990s, they were surely angry and in a hurry.

At the other end of the spectrum were the whites who had always known privileged existence. In case violence erupted, to them it was a matter of do or die. Taking ‘their property’ would have been the last crossing of the red line.

Mandela committed the force of his personality to assure both sides that SA was big enough for both sides and by insisting that it belonged to all those who lived in it, a Rainbow Nation. His primary mission became to convince both sides that violence was not an option. To fellow Blacks he repeatedly said, ‘Some of us talk of revolutionary change like we are dealing with a defeated enemy, far from it.’ In other words, violence at that juncture was tantamount to racial suicide.

Simultaneously, Mandela was telling the white right- wing, ‘If you want to go to war, I must be honest and admit that we cannot stand up to you in the battlefield.…It will be a long and bitter struggle. Many people will die and the country may be reduced to ashes. But you cannot win because of our numbers. You cannot kill all of us. And you cannot win because of the international community; they will rally to our side and they will stand with us.’

Mandela did play his historical part in terminating political apartheid and bringing democracy to SA peacefully. For that he won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. But the task of fusing socio-economic equality into the political kingdom has turned out to be an infinitely more difficult undertaking. This year marks two decades of democracy in SA. Yet, de facto economic apartheid remains intact. South African blacks remain horrifically poor in absolute and relative terms. Indeed in 2009, SA sidelined Brazil as the most skewed society in the world.

By Thabo Mbeki’s 1989 definition, SA is still not a nation; it is remains two nations in one. How to narrow the gap between the White haves and Black have-nots, how to construct genuine fundamentals of a Rainbow Nation, eluded Mandela. Unlike Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nelson Mandela’s SA is an incomplete revolution, a work in progress.

* James N. Kariuki is a Kenyan Professor of International Relations and an independent writer based in South Africa.