Soldiers At Bay

May 15, 2014May 15, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Revolutionaries make lousy politicians, and that’s why South Sudan is so unstable.

Five theoretically democratic countries in sub-Saharan Africa were born of revolution: Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, South Africa and South Sudan.

(Modern Rwanda, which rose from the pyre of the 1994 genocide, never pretended to be democratic. Kenya’s election violence was too short-lived and geographically contained to be considered revolution. And The Congo and Somalia aren’t finished, yet.)

Of the five, South Africa is doing just fine if awkwardly so. Ethiopia is a far, far distant second, and Uganda and Zimbabwe are now lost causes. South Sudan, the newest, is still figuring out its peace land legs and right now, doesn’t look too good.

These five countries provide an excellent study of modern day transition from revolution and suggest what South Sudan must do to succeed.

All five countries sustained a revolution against their previous regime for a generation or more:

South Africa’s ANC was the revolutionary, fighting arm against the Nationalist government that blew up the factories and staged a couple fire bombs while figuring out ways from time to time to close the mines. The ANC is now in control of South Africa’s politics and has been since Independence twenty years ago.

The Ethiopian regime is composed of a segments of rebel groups pursued by the Terror Triumvirate, which assassinated Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

The current Ugandan and Zimbabwean regimes consolidated power after violent ousters of repressive regimes (Idi Amin in Uganda and Ian Smith’s UDI in Rhodesia).

The South Sudan is the newest, created from a 2005 peace deal with (north) The Sudan that led to independence in 2011.

All five countries pretend to be democratic and are founded on constitutions based on democracy. Only South Africa is.

Uganda and Zimbabwe are iron-clad dictatorships. Ethiopia is more communist than dictatorship albeit with a pretty wide net of political involvement across various segments of Ethiopian society.

We can predict what might happen to South Sudan based on what happened to the other four.

In all cases, the men (and it’s exclusively men) who shot guns and murdered adversaries of the ancien regime are now the political leaders. As George Washington summed it up when leaving a single term in office, soldiers do not make good democratic leaders.

Foreigners are eager to cast these country’s difficulties as ethnic, and to be sure the internal adversaries are clearly ethnically different. But I think as suggested by Hilary Matfess in an article in Think Africa Press, today, there are other more important reasons.

Once fault lines occur in a society, ethnic groups tend to congeal on one side or the other, and that’s certainly what’s happened in South Sudan. But that doesn’t mean the ethnicity or racism is the actual cause.

Ms. Matfess argues that it’s the constitutional makeup, but I argue that the constitution was made up by soldiers, and that’s the problem.

In a country as diverse, successful and developed as South Africa, soldiering onto the political stage worked well for the ANC, but soldiering into governance is not working so well. Nevertheless in South Africa, autocratic moves by politicians have been checked.

South Africa will do just fine as soon as these old soldiers go, and they are slowly but surely dying or being forced out.

Uganda and Zimbabwe, however, weren’t able to make the transition that I’m sure South Africa has, and both have devolved into despotic regimes.

I see Ethiopia as trying very hard not to slip into a despotic character, and the way it’s trying to do so is by a very restrictive, highly controlled mostly communist system that is forcing the old soldiers to stay at bay. Certainly without this very powerful central authority in Addis, the country would start fighting, again, and one or other of the soldiers would come to power as the despot exactly as Museveni and Mugabe have in Uganda and Zimbabwe.

This is South Sudan’s option, I’m afraid. Lacking the development and diversity that South Africa had historically, South Sudan must figure out “how to keep the old soldiers at bay.”

The only way is by a centrally restrictive “communist” government. All that democracy will do is facilitate war.

This is exactly the opposite of what Ms. Matfess believes, even though I’m using her argument to suggest it. But democracy cannot work until the population is educated enough to engage its mechanisms.

So if The West wants peace in South Sudan, it’s going to have to accept communism.

Now there’s a twist.

Democracy Secures Misery

May 9, 2014May 9, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

South Africans today “stayed the course” with the bungling ANC in control, but just barely. Change is in the air.

Three weeks ago I predicted that the ANC, which won 70% of the votes cast in 2004, would win less than 60% this time.

With 98% of the votes counted, the ANC has won 62%. Click here for current, updated results.

I was routing for an ANC loss. I wasn’t hoping for any other specific party’s win, because there are so many other parties and the ANC’s main rival, the Democratic Alliance, seems incapable of organizing the wide and disparate opposition to the ANC and so seems destined as a minority voice, forever.

The ANC’s problem is its top heavy leadership, steeped in buffoonery, bribery and bungling. Whether it’s President Zuma’s dozen wives or former President Mbeki’s certainty that AIDS is not a virus, these are the former freedom fighters who obviously never took Civics 101.

Except for Mandela, they lack any skills except survival.

In the 20 years since Independence, and the 12 years since Mandela left taking rational governance with him, the ANC has squandered South Africa’s resources and turned its political hierarchy into the same old self-serving idiots that lead a number of developing African countries.

And that’s the point. South Africa need not be a “developing” country, anymore. It’s rich, prosperous and filled with opportunity. But all this potential has been extirpated by the last two presidents and their cronies in scandal after scandal.

So my 2% mistake in calling the election you can rack up to hope.

Read my recent blog for my explanation as to why South Africans still support the ANC.

The ANC, however, is definitely on the decline. In the province of Gauteng, where Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria are located, the ANC won only 54%. With its mining, banking and other industry, this is South Africa’s most important province.

In the second most important province where Cape Town is located, the ANC won only 34% of the votes. There the Democratic Alliance holds solid control.

What I’m concerned about is that several very radical if incendiary parties, like the one led by Julius Malema, are growing in support. These are radical groups that would significantly alter South Africa’s democracy.

Malema’s EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters Party), showed some significant improvement this year, winning just under 7% of the vote. But it won nearly 13% of the vote in the mining provinces where it commands huge support from the miners.

And the EFF’s first plank is to nationalize the mines and most everything else.

Just as in America, where the evangelical T-Party rose from the ashes of a generation of economic stagnation, so the EFF rose from a generation of poor governance.

It’s unfortunate that “clean government” legitimately can often be associated with authoritarian rule, the beneficent dictator who might feather his own bed but rarely allows others to do so. That’s how I, and I think many hard working South Africans, see Malema.

Nationalization, rapid redistribution of wealth, clamps on lying media, exchange controls … all values some of us hold but which never seem to work too well in practice, particularly in today’s capitalist world.

Yet that is exactly what Malema or incarnations thereof will do to South Africa if the ANC continues its buffoonery and reasonable alternatives like the Democratic Alliance are unable to forge strong alliances.

Bottom line? (1) Disappointment that the ANC showed slightly more support than expected or hoped for. (2) Some hope that the ANC’s dwindling support might be a bucket of cold water dumped on some hot heads. (3) Revolution in the wings.

On Safari: White Reflections

April 25, 2014April 24, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

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What I will remember mostly of our just ended week in The Cape is how white South Africa looks.

I hasten to make no judgment about this right away. But the facts speak for themselves. For a country less than 5% technically Caucasian, easily 80% of every one of our days was populated by whites only.

Now obviously we were tourists and visiting tourist destinations, and in today’s world where we as Americans routinely visit, the overwhelming percentage of tourists are white.

The Waterfront area of Cape Town had a greater diversity as it should since this was a major national holiday weekend. But I dare say it never was a majority of other than white faces.

Television presenters were mostly nonwhite, but television guests were mostly white. The South African business meetings that intersected our own holiday making at the wonderful Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch were nearly all white.

The beautiful beach suburbs and Table Mountain suburbs of Cape Town with their elegant mansions and beautifully manicured lawns are almost exclusively white.

And Stellenbosch itself, until you actually drilled into the college campus, was a town filled with white tourists and residents and even a majority of wait staff and store owners who were white.

It’s less than two weeks before the next important national election, and it’s been twenty years since apartheid ended. On our trips to and from Stellenbosch, the airport and The Cape Peninsula we passed multiple times the “Cape Flats” – an endless, it seemed, sprawl of mostly tin housing.

They were not white.

There were hopeful signs at various points of public housing moving forward, but it was mostly an unbelievably large, sprawling slum.

I am constantly amazed at the patience of the African, of his ability to suffer, and I try to be inspired by the overarching hope that must sustain that patience, because contrary to many detracting commentators, it is not some innate futility of personality. It’s patience.

And it’s forgiveness, as embodied by the great clergyman, Desmond Tutu.

But such humility and spiritual generosity does not alone a progressive society make. This election cycle is different from the previous in the rancor of its competitors and in the threats of those slipping in the polls (like the ANC) to redistribute “white land.”

Ultimately that will happen if social progress isn’t sped up. We listened throughout the week to our older white guides lamenting the departure of their white children who were unable to obtain decent jobs in a South African society currently heavily weighted with affirmative action.

Yet while those children may be gone and the opportunities for nonwhites improved, the visible whiteness of The Cape remains striking and surprising.

History is neither a liar or a fool. The stories of the past are clear, and while the patience of its peoples differs greatly, it will not sit back and wait for promised equality forever.

Whether it means yet higher taxes to speed up national housing, or some painful land redistribution or even more radical wealth distribution through controversial methods like nationalization, South Africa in my view must makes some radical turns to defuse its tinder box.

The explosion may not be imminent, but it is inevitable if its leaders are unable to speed up the process of promised equalization.

Jim and his group spend the next week in Botswana which unlike so much of Africa has very limited internet connectivity. AfricaAnswerman’s blog posts will likely be delayed.

On Safari: Flying High!

April 24, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Our several days in and around Stellenbosch ended with exciting “Eagle Encounters” at The Cape’s premiere raptor rehabilitation center.

Everyone got to “let an arm” for great birds to perch on. The center takes in about 400 birds annually, of which a remarkable 65% can be rehabilitated and released into the wild.

The remainder, most of them house pets, can’t fend for themselves and become part of the public exhibit.

We got a private demonstration of rock kestrels, barn owls, jackal buzzard, the magnificent Black Eagle, and the extremely endangered Cape Vulture.

We were shown how to handle all the birds but the vultures, which are simply too big for an untrained handler.

The “wine country” of The Cape is often poorly defined as, in fact, almost every part of The Cape from the very edge of the city to the Karoo has beautiful wine estates.

Even to refer to the triangle between the wine producing cities of Franschoek, Paarl and Stellenbosch as “the wine country” is also somewhat misleading, because Stellenbosch in particular is considerably more diverse than simply a wine and farming community.

Stellenbosch, in fact, is one of the most historic parts of South Africa and any attempt to understand the country’s complex history would be impossible without understanding Stellenbosch.

Today the city is principally known as the seat of Afrikaans and as the city of the country’s principal Afrikaans university.

Certainly one of the most conservative if rigid communities in South Africa, a simple glance at the city and university complex proves that diversity is pressing in. I remember hardly twenty years ago seeing a great divide in racial color here: waiters, drivers, even traffic cops were black, but virtually every student, consumer and tourist was white.

That’s changed and today a casual glance into the campus of the University of Stellenbosch reveals a rainbow of people. Unfortunately, this doesn’t continue into the town, where white tourists and white long-term residents seem to dominate the buying part of the equation, with black seeping into only the sellers side.

We enjoyed several days here, staying at the beautiful if near perfect Lanzerac wine estate. We enjoyed several wine tastings in the region and a cellar tour. There are hundreds of wineries in The Cape and the vast majority are very small, producing hardly 50,000 bottles annually. But this smallness translates into an incredible array of wines and also maintains a historic uniqueness from one winery to the next.

The scenery in the area is awesome, with jutting sandstone mountains and perfectly manicured vineyards laid on the semi-arid slopes.

On Safari: This is Really The Top!

April 22, 2014April 22, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We didn’t “do” the Cape Point like most people “do it.”

My intrepid group of certainly retired if still adventuresome folk decided to pretend they were 35 years old.

Together with our 74-year old guide, John James from Fishoek, we decided to hike from the southwestern most point on the continent, to the visitor’s center where the funicular is.

But hold on. Not that ordinary mostly level beach hike that takes about an hour and has streams of people, albeit young and fit. No, John James chose for us the Pinnacle Hike, the one that goes up and down 1000 to 1400 feet above the sea, over the crests of the jagged granite mountains.

Everybody succeeded!

South African and rugged individual John James said it would take less than 2 hours. Well it did take less than, but not two hours. More like three. But we had given ourselves plenty of time, and traveling slowly, with no disruption to any other hikers because there weren’t any other hikers, we conquered the Cape Point with views to die for!

In fact at the end of the hike no one was the least bit interested in taking the funicular. We’d actually looked down at the lighthouse at the top of the funicular from one of our peaks!

It was a most invigorating day.

We began with the breath-taking ride on Chapman’s Peak, with plenty of stops at shark flags and view points, especially overlooking Hout Bay.

We carried a fabulous seven baskets of overwhelming gourmet food prepared by Cape Town’s outstanding “Dial-A-Picnic“. Fortunately there was an overwhelming amount of food, since several guests we hadn’t expected tore the sandwiches from us: baboons!

Then we traveled to Boulders to see the Jackass penguins. Interestingly the penguins normal June nesting habits have all changed, a probable mixture of global warming and conservation protection. So we got to see new nests, new eggs, new and old chicks.

And the day ended with the beautiful drive down Baden Powell into Stellenbosch where we now spend the next several nights.

Exhausted but proud!

On Safari: The Top of the Bottom

April 21, 2014April 21, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

From our breath-taking viewpoint atop Table Mountain the brass map showed us the most direct route to Sydney: south. And to Hawaii: south. And to paradise? Well, we’d already arrived there.

Many of us had five days in Cape Town, others only four, and it wasn’t enough.

As soon as everyone was gathered I began the orientation with the traditional walk through the Company’s Gardens, a perfect situation for encapsulating South Africa’s complex history in terms of the creation and development of its Mother City.

Modern South Africa began as a way station for “revictualizing” 17th century ships tearing the loot out of East Indonesia and China. It grew slowly and methodically into a complex multi-racial society rife with every human problem on earth.

The Cape was bantered back and forth between Holland and England as its settlers moved away from their heritage into the wilderness of the karoo, creating a whole new society, the Afrikaner. And weirdo geniuses like Cecil Rhodes complicated the human cocktail with the certainties of British imperialism.

All this and so much more is on display at some monument or garden nook or ancient tree or beautiful stone pathway in the Garden. After the orientation everyone dispersed with personal interests to the several excellent museum exhibitions on around the Garden, to the famous Slave Lodge and to the colorful barter of Green Market Square.

Then a very quick trip up to Signal Hill for an absolutely glorious sunset!

Sunday we spent the morning in the Kirstenbosch Gardens. Local guides make or break a trip, and the legendary Dot Malan took us through the garden with every one waiting on her every remark.

Dot knew so much about everything, from science to the history of the institution, to the anecdotal stories that brought us onto the grave site of a former director, buried beneath an “invasive” oak tree.

We saw the extinction garden, the 1000-year old cycad, the birds of paradise that have to be hand pollinated because the sunbirds here are just a little too short! Kirstenbosch is one of the real wonders of Africa.

Monday another outstanding guide, Pam Knipe, raced us around the top of Table Mountain proving that seventy year-olds is simply a theoretical concept. Everybody hopped rocks like klipspringers, sat next to rare Proteas, and learned of the ridiculously rare floral kingdom that decorates the mountain.

Joan & John von Leesen with guide Pam Knipe.

Afterwards I guided the group through Bo-Kaap and District Six with its curious if nagging history of alliance then departure through apartheid, ending with lunch at Bo-Kaap’s most famous restaurant.

The two “working class neighborhoods” with considerably different histories lie next to one another in the Cape Town City Bowl. During apartheid, District Six suffered much more seriously than Bo-Kaap, and the the residents of Bo-Kaap today indeed include the progeny of some of the earliest Cape slave workers of the 17th century.

Four days isn’t enough. Exhausted and breathless, tomorrow we head to Cape Point.

Fifty Years Later

April 18, 2014April 18, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Fifty years on Sunday, one week after the merciless white mercenary Ian Smith wrested control of independence in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) from the British, Nelson Mandela delivered his greatest speech.

He was in the docket in Pretoria following two years in jail for a variety of charges including murder and sabotage.

Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson supported the apartheid regime that brought Mandela to trial. America’s practical diplomacy, which Kissinger would later name realpolitik, needed South Africa’s trade, its uranium, its ports and four missile sites as a contra validation to Russia and China’s inroads in the continent.

The Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, blocked the U.S. from joining the economic sanctions increasingly coming from Europe, warning that weakening white rule would lead to “Communist infiltration.”

Communist infiltration. Inferior race. Slavery. Concepts at one time or another trumped all the glorious democratic principles on which the U.S. was supposedly founded.

And even more ironic that Lyndon Johnson’s great 1964 legislative achievement was the Civil Rights Act.

Alone in America stood Robert Kennedy, who after being denied a visa to visit South Africa in 1965 got one in 1966 and raised all sorts of hell. But not even this was necessarily exemplary morality. Kennedy hated Johnson and seemed positioned to beat him in national elections.

The Founding Fathers were out to lunch in 1964.

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

There have probably been many historical personalities who valued their convictions as strongly and who then, died, and who then, we know little about. The fact that Mandela was not sentenced to death as he could have been likely reflected the apartheid regime’s belief that killing Mandela would have sparked an irrepressible revolution.

I’m not so sure. But I am sure that’s what the Bothas and Verwoerds thought would happen. They were not nice men.

I’m not sure that unwavering conviction is always a good thing. Consider the evil doers of the T-Party or the loonies in the Creationist Movement. Consider the Joseph McCarthy’s or the Klu Klux Klan. Belief just for its own sake can be wretched.

Mandela knew he was not going to be sentenced to death. He knew the white regime better than any of his colleagues, since he had practiced with them as a lawyer. He had felt the bitter racism of his jailors.

He knew that to challenge them with killing him was an ace in the hole. It flipped their own puritanical certainties on their buff. I don’t think Mandela believed the non-white population of South Africa would explode if he were killed. He just knew that his white oppressors thought so.

So I agree that this is a great speech but not because of what it said, but because of what it didn’t say.

He didn’t dare them to execute him. He played on their fears of black domination, based on their own visceral understandings of white domination.

Mandela was a great compromiser. He was not T-Partyish. He was the consummate politician who nevertheless managed to live by a set of principles. And that’s why when he came to power, the whites who remained in South Africa prospered.

Jim posted this blog in Cape Town.

SA Election in Balance

April 17, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

In three weeks South Africans will likely reelect the ANC to power, but it will also likely be the last time.

Standing for a second term, President Jacob Zuma, wouldn’t have a chance in most any other open democracy. His playful life style and his list of scandals would doom any earnest candidate in any place but South Africa.

In fact in his last two political rallies he was booed, and people in the audience started throwing stones at cars.

So why will he prevail?

Twenty years since the end of apartheid memories of white rule during the oppressive years of apartheid still run strong. Apartheid began with the Nationalist election victory in 1948, and the insidious laws that began implementation in the early 1950s. That was more than 40 years of politics that was arguably worse than Zuma, today.

So it is remarkable to think that the ANC might not have the staying power that the apartheid regime had.

In 2004, the ANC won 70% of the votes. In 2009 it was 65%. I predict that this time it will be under 60%.

The ANC knows it’s in trouble. In fact, ANC candidates have pledged if they can wrest control of the Western Cape (Cape Town) – which is extremely unlikely – that half of all white civil servants will be immediately fired.

This play on racism marks the desperation of the failing ANC, and Zuma’s ineptitude in particular. It’s typical of banana republics like Zimbabwe, not of mature democracies of the sort South Africa can be.

It hinges on the belief that “you had your 40 years of oppression, we now get ours.”

To be fair ANC officials at lower government levels seem to be doing a decent job. It’s the heavies at the top like Zuma who are creating the aura of buffoonery. And the old adage that all politics is local is also a significant reason that the ANC is expected to win, again, this time.

But their support is dwindling, and with Mandela gone, and with the years clicking by, the end of the ANC can be imagined. The next national election will be in 2019. I expect the ANC will lose, then, unless the antics of their leadership change radically.

Or as many suggest, a palace coup takes place that ousts the old revolutionaries for the technocrats being produced, today.

The South African president is not directly elected by the populace, but by the lower house of parliament. The process is nearly identical to the election of America’s Speaker of the House.

A party convention that disapproved of a sitting president would likely be sufficient for that person to resign or face a humiliating election whipping by his comrades. The magic number being bantered around for Zuma’s survival is 60% or more of the May 7 votes for the ANC. Less, pundits say, and Zuma’s out.

It’s going to be close.

Jim filed this blog from Cape Town.

We’re All Guilty

March 6, 2014March 6, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Whether Oscar Pistorius intentionally murdered his girlfriend or not, better than anyone he embodies the deep racism in many South African whites.

That’s hard for me to say, for two reasons in particular. First, I don’t think anyone anywhere is completely free of racism. Second, I personally know several white South Africans who eclipse Rev. Al Sharpton politically and socially.

And there are many, many more – perhaps a majority in some places like The Cape – who are far less racist than a random community in Texas.

But what the world is seeing in Oscar Pistorius’ life trial is a perfect reflection of racism.

If he is the premeditated murderer the prosecution contends, the anger that fueled such action followed by an attempt to disguise it as a reflexive response to a presumed home invader, is about two millimeters if that apart from Florida’s stand-your-ground laws.

And that, my friends, is racism through and through.

Yes, he’s also a murderer then as well, but my point is to show how deep and pervasive racism among some whites still is.

If on the other hand his self-defense defense isn’t a gimmick, but for real, that also reveals a trigger-happy mentality to shoot anything black in the dark.

I really have no sense whether Pistorius is guilty or not. My friends in South Africa are split, as I expect many friends and acquaintances of the growing number of self-defense accused in Florida are.

And South Africa, I believe, is trying to deal with racism a lot better than Florida is.

The South African Human Rights Commission is one of the best and most efficient mediators of racism on earth, a stand-out in a country built on such stellar principles, that is today in other respects breaking up miserably.

The commission reports of 10,000 cases it investigates annually, 80% are of racism.

Bad actions driven by racism are terribly tragic. They often reveal the schizoid nature of an individual who is racist, pitting a loving soul against a hating one, in the same body.

We like to think the loving soul will be the stronger, but it often isn’t.

Racism doesn’t begin willfully. Ending it requires great will, but the point at which someone’s behavior is governed by racism is not a conscious choice.

Their family, their community, their schools all contribute to creating a mind-set that makes judgments reflexively. Moments of life-and-death push racism to its extreme, because in such instants it’s hard to reflect carefully.

So whatever the Pistorius outcome is, it will likely be as incomplete and unsatisfying as the outcome of the George Zimmerman case. And guilt will never surely be known except for one thing:

The actions and the outcomes were determined no more by facts than racism.

LGBTP?

February 24, 2014February 24, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Anti-gay and women-suppression is sweeping through much of the non-Muslim world of Africa with a poignant argument against America.

Today Uganda’s dictator signed a long anticipated anti-gay law in an unusual public ceremony with much fanfare.

Immediately after signing he delivered a very provocative speech saying his actions were a response to “western arrogance” and attempts by countries like America to change Ugandans’ way of life.

The law has been several years in the making and received crucial legal and financial support from conservative American lawmakers unable to impose such nonsense on their own country.

The original called for execution of anyone found to be gay. That’s been changed to life imprisonment. But other parts of the bill are draconian and criminalize the knowledge that someone is gay if not immediately reported to the police.

Uganda has been spiraling into oblivion for several years, and this fire-brand piece of legislation follows a whole series of less known laws that criminalize certain dress like mini-skirts.

Hardly a day after that law was best, hoodlums beat poorly dressed women in the streets of Kampala under the noses of approving police.

Uganda is certainly the most extreme example in Africa of massive reversals of human rights Africans had gained this last half century. But it’s hardly the only one.

Anyone convicted as gay in Nigeria now faces up to 14 years imprisonment, after a much controversial law was passed in January.

Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan couldn’t be more different from Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. Jonathan is considered progressive and worked closely with western governments in the pursuit of BokoHaram and other terrorists groups.

Totally unlike Museveni he has led a fight against government corruption, rocketing him to popularity. But just as in America, pressed by his right and now facing an unexpectedly close election, Goodluck reluctantly signed Parliament’s bill.

Nigeria is a much more diverse and educated society than Uganda, and the two countries literally span the continent’s diversity. But all over Africa, even in such presumed liberal places as Kenya, anti-gay sentiment is building rapidly.

I cannot find a single country in sub-Saharan Africa where there is not a public campaign to criminalize homosexuality. Even in South Africa with a constitution that more forcibly protects gays than in America, and with same-sex marriage legalized since 2006, a campaign is on.

What’s going on? Why Africa?

The highly popular and respected Kenyan commentator Charles Onyango-Obbo says it’s all about women, not gays.

In a society that condones gayness, women would not have to submit to male authority: “Once you dismantle the sexual hierarchy…then you cannot maintain a political system in which men monopolize power and women have little or none.”

While the light tike Museveni swings his fist at the big guys like America, he’s buttressed by a powerful argument also swinging through Africa:

If same sex relationships are afforded equality in modern societies, why aren’t polygamous ones?

Both deviate from the norm. And Africa not just with its modern Muslim cultures but its centuries of traditional cultures validates polygamy. South Africa’s extremely modern government that has legalized same-sex marriage at the federal level has also legalized polygamy.

So Museveni and similar demagogs around the continent have a hard time criticizing South Africa. But not America.

Has this vicious little tike exposed a flaw in our own reasoning?

Waiting for Malema

February 4, 2014February 4, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

South Africans are in the lull after the storm of Mandela’s death. But the lull also ends and the future looks troublesome. Elections are in several months.

Of course it may be a worldwide phenomenon. Obama’s Number #1 issue in 2008 was climate change. Anybody hear him speak of that recently?

The Arab Spring is no more. In promising societies like Kenya, politics entrenched in racism has muffled the country like greasy mold. In Tanzania, a new draft constitution reached prime time comedy this week when the only tenant everyone could agree on was an unenforceable edict to “control” corruption.

Mandela’s death coming at the beginning of the end of the Great World Recession was coincidental, but superstitious Africans and me may think otherwise.

The Mandela spirit was a revolutionary one that manifest significant structural change in political control: Power to the people. In today’s fast paced world, though, no one expected every goal to be realized or every project to be completed on time. Africans are uniquely patient.

The South African constitutional guarantee of housing was simultaneously uplifting and dangerous. Something so necessary that is suddenly promised as a human right that must be ensured by government is like a tsunami of common sense. Everyone’s on board. Everyone’s elated.

Except the architects, the engineers, the construction workers that run out of basic building supplies and later, the electricians and plumbers that have neither source or output for their orders.

Ditto for land reform, mining reform, currency reform and a bunch of other things. The New York Times called the mess “Mandela’s Socialist Failure.”

The death of Mandela was the bookend on Stage One of South Africa’s change. Stage Two is growing like a hidden virus in every dark corner of the land.

Politicians know this. The South African poor are among the most educated and aware people on earth. I dare say that the residents of the Cape Flats, Cape Town’s sprawling slum, know more about the world than most well dressed children in Oklahoma.

So after Mandela’s death, the politicians began to scramble.

The stranglehold that Mandela’s party, the ANC, held on the country since Independence began to fracture. Support for the current president and his cortege of rulers-in-waiting began to break down.

An enormous opportunity was born for the multitude of opposition parties. One of the ANC’s strategies all these years was to foment so many singular opposition parties that none were capable of really challenging it.

The most hopeful of the greatest alliances possible broke down last week. The strong party that rules much of The Cape — heavily white and colored – offered to support the presidential candidacy of a rival black party. There was new electricity in the country, but it didn’t last.

Nothing’s left now for the April elections but another win for the ANC.

And that will mark the end of the lull. The South African poor, heavily colored and not at all vastly supportive of the ANC, are building a hiphop agenda that lacks any manners whatever.

A vicious radical and possible psychopath, Julius Malema, would like nothing better than to create a Franco-styled proletarian dictatorship. He is the kids’ current hero, the star of their music videos and their dreams. The man who will redistribute wealth with no fear of economic fundamentals.

South Africa has little time to stave this disaster.

Send Speelman to Sochi!

January 31, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

Help a black native South African kid go to the Olympics. Sive Speelman qualified and was invited by the IOC to Sochi, but an antiquated racist quasi-government authority has forbid him from going.

Invictus no more.

Nine mostly fat old South African men and only three women, most incapable of croquet, issued a finding last week that Speelman was not good enough to represent their country, noting that he’s ranked 2,290th in the world of skiers.

(I’m ranked 5,497,213,455th. By the way, I would like to point out that the composition of SASCOC with only three women violates the gender equality clause of the South African constitution.)

Click here to sign the petition that at the very least will embarrass SASCOC. And who knows, if enough of you sign, perhaps Speelman will be set free.

And support the kid: like him on his Facebook page.

Here’s the thing, South Africa. The Olympics is not just about winning. It’s about competing, and Sive Speelman can ski circles around your martinis.

Speelman is an 18-year old native South African who actually learned skiing and trained as a skier in South Africa, and that’s not easy. He would have been one of only 7 African contenders at Sochi, (which is terrible by the way).

And of the remaining 6, Speelman would have been one of only two (!) who are truly through-and-through African!

Only 17-year old Kenza Tazi of Morocco was born and lives in Africa (although she trains in France and spends a lot of time, there). Mathilde Petitjean Amivi (Togo) was born in Niger and lives in France.

Adam Lamhamedi (for Morocco) was born and lives in Canada. Mehdi Selim Khelifi (Algeria) was born and lives in France. Alessia Afi Dipol (Togo) was born and lives in Italy.

And 21-year old Luke Steyn, the only real contender, was born in Zimbabwe but has lived virtually all of us life abroad and is currently a student at the University of Colorado.

Speelman was born, raised, continues to live and train in the far eastern Cape, one of the few places in South Africa where there is regularly enough snow to ski.

“Any other nation in the world would jump at that opportunity and I’m as puzzled as many people are… It’s just sad,” Snow Sport SA president Peter Pilz said.

“It has devastated him,” said his coach.

South Africans of all races are sports crazy. But this is even crazier. This is when winning becomes everything, when bucking the odds is tantamount to failure.

And this will be lasting. It changes forever how the world will think of South Africa, now. No longer a toughie, the image has become one of lack of self-confidence, the little guy who will never get better and so just sits in the corner, whines and refuses to compete.

The fear of loss trumps the best there is.

Just as the ANC seems to be finally evaporating from the scene, so will the latent racism that even shackled blacks carry, today, in South Africa, dissipate. This kid was born after South African independence.

He deserves more. And apparently his home country won’t give it to him.

# 3 : The Death of Mandela

January 3, 2014January 3, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Nelson Mandela’s death mostly marks the end of predictable politics in South Africa, where reverence of him was the only reason that vying political factions didn’t compete on the public stage.

But the period of his dying will be remembered mostly for the crazed man scamming being a signing interpreter at his eulogy and the shake of hands between President Obama and Cuba’s president, Castro.

Mandela’s dying and the end of an era is my #3 story for 2013 in Africa.

As an individual, Mandela exhibited the profound restraint and patience that is the hallmark of his generation – and the many before his – of being an African. It seems so unreal, today, that for so long Africans accepted slavery, then oppressive colonialism, then the strains and inherent oppression of being proxies for Cold War adversaries, even in light of the terrible power of their masters.

I say this not with the vengeance of youthful activists today, but with real fascination. The notion of “Live Free or Die” is hardly uniquely American. Revolutions around the world through all of time were fueled by this ultimate mantra.

But until recently, Africans turned over and gave up. This is a horrible generalization, I know, and there are countless examples throughout African history of heroic rebellions and Mahdi-like successes. But as a judgment over a long term of all of African history, I stand by it.

And Mandela was the epitome of one of its leaders. He steadfastly held to his principles. But he continually negotiated his oppression. When the tide turned in South Africa it was as much because of the world changing, and the super powers levying sanctions against the apartheid regime, as anything that Mandela and his cohorts were doing.

Mind you, the world may not have changed so fast, and sanctions certainly would not have been levied so quickly without the low level revolution and far more important widespread civil disobedience that Mandela and company had orchestrated.

But more similar to his earliest friend Gandhi than one of his later friends, Castro, Mandela believed justice was more inevitable than forced. Human rights were inalienable, and their achievement was only a matter of time.

I’m not sure, though, if Mandela had suddenly found himself in late 19th century Bolivia, or 18th century Paris, or 1950s China if he would have turned out to be the relatively passive revolutionary he was.

Most good leaders throughout time have been very special individuals with enormously deep and unfailing characters, staunch belief systems to which they remain steadfast, tremendous charisma and above all, very loyal and dedicated followers. Mandela fits this to a T.

But there must be many millions of people like that throughout history. Leaders come from this universe of good people, but they rise to power not because they have the potential to do so, but because by happenstance they are manifest by their societies. Power holders are products of widespread grass roots emotions. Rarely if ever has a powerful leader’s personal beliefs or actions alone created a successful social movement.

And that was what Mandela was, and it’s on the one hand heart warming and on the other, frustrating: Heart warming because of its intrinsic optimism and faith in the human condition; Frustrating because it takes so long; Exasperating if, like me, you’re an impatient person.

Patience vs. impatience. Another way of looking at this – a more African way perhaps – was discussed by Obama in his eulogy of Mandela when he invoked and tried to explain “Ubuntu.” Obama worked its derivation as “the tie that binds the human spirit.” Non-violence, shared understandings, a sort of political Zen.

Mandela was the placeholder when South Africa’s apartheid ended and so he will be historically credited with ending it.

But the fight against apartheid in South Africa had begun in the 1700s, and the list of crusaders probably exceeds the population of most South African towns, today. It is so right that we should so wonderfully honor Mandela, but his accomplishments in this age of impatience are not without flaws.

He is, above all, a man of the past.

Beyond Wrath and Tears

December 10, 2013December 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

None but Mandela were able to get the presidents of the United States and Cuba to shake hands.

According to Reuters, a U.S. official implied it was a planned gesture of reconciliation in the spirit of Mandela’s legacy. As Obama walked from his seat to the podium to deliver his eulogy, he stooped briefly to shake Castro’s hand.

The day was marred by climate change. (Forgive me, that’s quite an exaggeration. But it’s true that throughout sub-Saharan Africa weather is increasingly severe as it is becoming at home.) Rain – heavy at times – competed with the aggressive vocalizations of the crowd in the stadium.

Obama was the most widely cheered. In stark contrast, South Africa’s president and his associates were so widely booed and jeered that the proceedings were interrupted.

And in a twist only explicable as South Africa’s growing frustration with Zuma and their increasingly corrupt government, the great and merciless tyrant from next door, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe, received thunderous applause.

The tributes at today’s Memorial Service for Nelson Mandela were given by arch enemies and celebrated virtually every political system that exists today in the world.

The first speech was appropriately given by UN secretary general Ban. The second speech was given by the AU Commission chairperson.

The third speech, and the first of six world leaders was given by President Obama.

Obama was followed by the president Rousseff of Brazil, Chinese vice-president Li Yuanchao, Namibia president Pohamba, Indian president Mukherjee and Cuban president Castro.

Obama’s speech was indeed grand, as many of his public speeches have been. He began poetically and gently as you would expect from this gentle academic, acknowledging the sadness which in fact may not exist at quite level commensurate with Obama’s speech.

He then moved chronologically through Mandela’s life, linking him with the life ways of Ghandi and King, taking up the shackles of the oppressed.

Ever the equalizer, Obama referred to Mandela’s ascent during the time of “Kennedy and Khruschev” and then veering into the hyperbolic he compared Mandela to Lincoln for holding the country together “when it threatened to break apart” and completely ignoring the fact that Mandela himself had little to do with his country’s profoundly wonderful constitution:

“he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations – a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power.”

Politicians have a clever way of stinging those listening to them (Castro and Mugabe, both of whom lead dynasties of power that have lasted longer than the life span of an average South African).

Obama then spent too long extolling Mandiba’s self-doubt and humility: “ “I’m not a saint,” Obama quoted him, “unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” Politicians rarely praise someone without praising themselves.

Obama then explained Mandela’s greatness in terms of his family and closer friends, again a somewhat tenacious bend of history, as for whatever reason, Mandela’s pre-release relationships were rarely strong or lasting.

In a recurring theme in almost all Obama’s speeches that refer to another individual, and a message that I find tiresome but was not the least tiresome on the South African audience, Obama defined greatness in an individual as something to be manifest in the simplest of men and women: Mandela should be used as model for yourself.

Losing himself momentarily, Obama praised Mandela’s “rebelliousness” only to immediately pull back and remind the audience of his team work.

In what I consider one of his greatest and most revealing lines, and one I see as timely and hopeful, Obama said that Mandela “learned the language and customs of his oppressor so that one day he might better convey to them how their own freedom depended upon his.”

It’s an insightful look into the mirror, and one tempered with humility.

Referring to “Ubuntu” which today mostly refers to a widely used computer operating system which like Linux is mostly free to African users, Obama worked its derivation as “the tie that binds the human spirit.” Non-violence, shared understandings, a sort of political Zen.

I don’t think Obama got it wholly correctly, and he certainly misused it as a lead into complementing Mandela for his work fighting AIDS. This may have been intentional, since it’s widely construed as one of Mandela’s greatest failings, his lack of wholly grasping what AIDS was and what South Africa should have done about it during his time.

Courageously embracing the fact that both Mandela and he above all represent victories in the struggles against racism, Obama said “Michelle and I are the beneficiaries of that struggle.”

He then quickly qualified the point that the struggles aren’t over, and while in the same remark he would once again chastise Cuba, Zimbabwe and China for their suppression of human rights, he began instead:

“There are too many of us who happily embrace Madiba’s legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality.”

That was when I applauded most.

The end of the speech was magnificent, painting a wonderful picture of a wonderful man and ending with the poem Invictus.

Ninety world leaders plus dozens other dignitaries attended the service. Six world leaders sat on the podium and gave eulogies: China and Cuba are communist. Brazil and India are democratic socialist about equally left of U.S. democracy. Namibia like South Africa is squarely democratic, both a bit right of the U.S.

Obama went first among them, and the applause was thundering. It was much less so for the five who followed.

Mandela almost joined the communist party in South Africa during his youth, and much of his training in the 1960s and 1970s was paid for by China in Tanzania. The Indian icon and revolutionary, Mohatma Ghandi, was close friends with the first Secretary-General of the ANC, John Dube. Their lives followed remarkable parallels in South Africa where Ghandi lived an activist life for more than 20 years.

During the days of the 1980s when the ANC was blacklisted as a terrorist organization, Cuba was a vocal and proud supporter. Travel to the west by ANC executives from Tanzania, where most were exiled, was arranged almost always through Havana by Cuba.

One of Mandela’s few progressive initiatives was to develop a trade alliance that included India to the east and Brazil to the west. This successful trade powerhouse is now beginning to wield incredible influence in the world arena. Brazil’s rapid economic growth in many ways mirrors South Africa’s.

South Africa was given stewardship of the German colony of Southwest Africa (later to become Namibia) by the United Nations after the Nazi collapse in World War II. Enormous international pressure on the apartheid regime granted some autonomy to Namibia that allowed apartheid to effectively end there just before it did in South Africa.

But in return for this autonomy, South Africa retained control and assumed sovereignty over Walvis Bay, the only effective port in the country. One of Mandela’s first actions as president was to return Walvis Bay to Namibia.

The fact that a single world leader can command such tribute from such a range of ideologies and traditions is proof in my opinion that there are far better solutions to crises than war and that maybe the difference between these ideologies isn’t really as great as the proponents within each ideology may claim.

But listening to Obama carefully I realized that neither Mandela or he are capable of truly changing history. The gauntlet of demarcating important changes in history must just be too great a tax on the resources of the individual.

Mandela – and Obama – are artists, one revolutionary, the other an organizer. I wholeheartedly subscribe to their shared world view, one of enduring compassion and justice.

But the implementation of Mandela’s and Obama’s dreams must wait for less gentle souls. Judging from the impatience and enthusiasm of the South Africans applauding Obama, that won’t be long.

Ending Legacies

December 9, 2013December 9, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The ANC’s manifestos for what a free South Africa would be is far from what we see, today. Mandela’s vision of the ANC was far from what it was when he was released. White South Africans certainty that a black South Africa would self-destruct was dead wrong.

There’s a lot of myopia in South Africa’s most recent history.

In the rainbow of organizations that confronted apartheid — from the communist party to the almost identical but intensely rival trade unions, to the ANC to the Zulu off-shoots to the white ladies’ “Black Sash” – there were violent disagreements over what a new South Africa should be.

Ending apartheid was the only unifying force. I often wondered while working in a shared office in Johannesburg in the late 1980s and coming into contact on a daily basis with all these different political activists, that if apartheid ended quickly and abruptly, say by some or other group staging a successful coup, that all hell would break lose among the opponents of apartheid struggling for control.

All but white anti-apartheid groups also were unified in desiring a socialist society, one that was fairly tightly controlled from the top, and this was most represented by the certainty that South Africa’s mines would be nationalized.

The gold, diamond, coal and precious metal mines of South Africa is what gives it its wealth.

The communists and most of the trade organizations and radical youth groups also wanted to nationalize the banks. The apartheid government had essentially already nationalized the massive transportation system, so quite apart from equality for the races, education and health, nationalization was a fundamental core of the fight against apartheid.

But apartheid didn’t end abruptly with a coup, but with multiple years of negotiation albeit mostly in secret.

And today South Africa is one of the most capitalistic countries in the world. France, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries are far more socialist than South Africa.

The country is also increasingly corrupt. No-bid contracts are the rule of the day for the current government, and that has led to a clique of new age business people that it is assumed either give huge kickbacks or equally valuable political support.

It has compromised the education of young children, the quality of infrastructure, and even the government’s own plans for home construction. This very rich country seems unable to improve the lot of its most oppressed, while its leaders become millionaires.

The country lost a decade or more in the fight and control of AIDS, as both Mandela and his successor refused to believe it was a sexually transmitted epidemic.

The youth of South Africa, those who are called “new borns” for having arrived after Mandela was freed, are understandably angry and impatient. The passing of Mandela will give them new strength.

I believe that one of the reasons South Africa flounders today is because Mandela carried no clear ideology with him into the new South Africa. Like Obama, overwhelmed at the helm of history making a radical change in course, Mandela became the Great Compromiser.

Keeping society at peace during such a serious change overwhelmed everything else. This is completely understandable. For if peace had not been maintained, a revolutionary period would likely have resulted in an even worse situation.

The country’s constitution is a magnificent document, but Mandela had little to do with it (and today’s problems rest squarely in not implementing it fully and well.) The lack of retribution and aura of magnanimity ascribed Mandela was really created by Desmond Tutu and others. The transference of real economic power that was tried in the late 1990s was instigated by the youthful agitators in the mines and the ANC, and by that time, Mandela was already gone.

One of the reasons Mandela did not oversee a major transformation of South African society is because he was a construct of others who were much more powerful than himself.

It’s fascinating today to read of white South Africans’ certainties that Mandela was a maverick operating outside ANC direction, while simultaneously listening to old ANC members claim how they groomed Mandela as their figurehead from the getgo.

The real truth is likely somewhere in between, in that compromise that is Mandela’s greatest and perhaps his only legacy.

“Real Change” remains a political banner. You can change the color of the president in both South Africa and the United States without altering where black people remain on the graphs of economy.

It’s a question that is being asked round the world, not just in South Africa.

But I admit it was a bad time, the early 1990s, to experiment with new social orders. The Cold War had been definitively ended with a victory of capitalism over socialism. It would be several more years before Hugo Chavez would be democratically elected to renew such experiments, and that hasn’t gone particularly well.

Mandela will forever be remembered, and rightly so, for peacefully transferring power from the oppressors to the oppressed. That’s remarkably important and a statement for the ages that retribution never works for any ideology, any idea.

He deserves the great honors that attracted. But the concept of a peaceful transition wears poorly when not enough then changes as a result.

The Cold War has ended. Overt racism at least is grudgingly ending slowly. The Great Recession is ending. From South Africa to the United States, there is an energy in the youth to bring to fruition the symbols their parents created as landmarks out of a terrible past.

It could be an exciting future. And if so, Mandela’s legacy of peaceful transition — and likely Obama’s too — will be an historic moment, the last moment of symbol, a turn towards substance.

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Category: South Africa