The Australian-British TV journalist John Pilger explains:
Why is Thabo Mbeki so soft on Mugabe? Is it simply loyalty to a past of “joint struggle”, as has been suggested? Here is a clue.
In September 2005, a study submitted to Parliament in Cape Town compared the treatment of landless black farmers under apartheid and their treatment today.
During the final decade of apartheid, 737 000 people were evicted from white-owned farmland. In the first decade of democracy, 942 000 were evicted. About half of those forcibly removed were children and about a third were women.
A law intended to protect these people and put an end to peonage, the Security of Tenure Act was enacted by the Mandela government in 1997. That year, Nelson Mandela told me: “We have done something revolutionary, for which we have received no credit at all.
There is no country where labour tenants have been given the security we have given them … where a farmer cannot just dismiss them.”
The law proved a sham. Most evictions never reached the courts and bitterness among black farm workers has grown inexorably and so too has the whole question of land, actual and symbolic. When the ANC came to power in 1994, the “priority” of land restitution was allocated 0,3% of the national budget. By 2005, it was still less than 1%.
When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki’s second term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe’s dictator a standing ovation. The embarrassment and message for Mbeki was like a presence. “This was probably less an endorsement for Mugabe’s despotism,” noted the writer Bryan Rostron, “than a symbolic expression of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just come-uppance.”
It was also a warning.
[Source.]
So Sean, I see Herman Wasserman also linked to this, and referenced your doctorate in the process. (Without expressing an opinion himself)
What is your opinion? Do you agree with the Pilger take that ‘Apartheid did not die’?
The short answer mhambi/wildebees is: Yes. I will find reason at some point in the future to post about the strident (and at the same time defensive) manner in which South African elites (whether white liberals, black nationalists, neo-conservatives, apologists for GEAR, etc) respond to John Pilger’s otherwise very common-sense and obvious analysis of the country’s politics, social and economic life. Later with that though.
Cool, I’m looking for ward to it.
I used to think that myself.
I bought Patrick Bond’s Elite Transition en pinned for the end of the Neo-Liberal Mbeki era.
But now I’m inclined to follow what Ferial Haffagee said on this subject, as I think the Bond, Pilger argument – although allot of it is spot on – is still too simplistic and reductive.
Maybe i am paranoid but i sincerely beleive Mbeki gains from Zimbabwe’s fall.
check out more African leaders response to Mugabe on my blog african1.wordpress.com