The general tone and content of this story in today’s New York Times by its Johannesburg correspondent, Michael Wines, is so at odds with the headline.
What we get is a rehash of the ‘leadership struggle’ inside the ruling African National Congress (the party chooses its next president, and by extension, presidential candidate in the 2009 elections at its conference in December).
It is probably more a case of the the South African media only (like its US counterparts obsessed with ‘leadership races’ and personality politics) being enthralled by it. Masses of South Africans, struggling to stay alive, could care less.
A footnote: One of the odd things in the article is that one of Wines’s key sources is Marinus Weichers. Who? Weichers was last a regular pundit on South African state TV during late apartheid. I don’t know who still takes him seriously inside South Africa. Except the New York Times of course.
Wines, in fact, has a history of talking to the most unlikely ‘pundits’ in South Africa.
Earlier this year I actually wrote to the paper’s letters page about this tendency:
I agree with your Johannesburg correspondent Michael Wines that recent diplomatic gaffes by that country’s democratic government on Burma, Zimbabwe and Iran certainly undermine that country’s recently acquired moral stature (“Once a World Cause, South Africa Lowers Voice on Human Rights,” March 4, 2007, p1). What I found curious, however, were his choices of moral arbiters. He cites the official parliamentary opposition in South Africa (the Democratic Alliance), “a longtime [former] diplomat for South Africa” named Thomas Wheeler, and “a retired American diplomat with decades of Africa experience.” The DA (and its forerunners) has a history of openly supporting the white minority government’s indiscriminate killing of opposition members by official death squads while one of its former leaders, Harry Schwarz, served as ambassador of the apartheid government in the US. “Longtime diplomat” means only one thing in South Africa — Wheeler worked to defend and represent apartheid overseas. And US diplomacy in Africa has been characterized by more than its share of moral contradiction.
The ANC government has many critics with far better human rights credentials, forged in (rather than opposing) the very struggles that made South Africa a world cause to begin with – why is Wines not speaking to them?
The letter was not published of course.
I’ve tried all kinds of ways of framing my letters to The Times on their generally wildly inaccurate reporting (calling African languages ‘dialects’ most recently). Nothing seems to work — I’ve never even received an acknowledgment my emails reached the person whose job it is to delete them as soon as they enter the system.