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White South Africa-s alter ego
Ronald Suresh Roberts, Business in Africa
July 2007

The word 'Zimbabwe- is the Pavlovian Bell of the white South African mind. Once the word rings out, all remnants of liberal good sense retreat, replaced by salvation and loud barking. Consider Helen Suzman, interviewed by the London Weekend Telegraph under the headline 'Democracy?- "It was better under apartheid," says Suzman. You might think, reading this, that Suzman was talking about South Africa and seeking a return to its apartheid past. But you would be wrong on both counts. Despite the headline, Suzman was not seeking a return to the apartheid past and her thoughts were dominated by Robert Mugabe rather than South Africa. "For all my criticism of the current (South African) system, it doesn-t mean that I would like to return to the old one. I don-t think we will ever go the way of Zimbabwe, but people are entitled to be concerned. I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country - but not entirely optimistic."

The headline was flatly contradicted by the quoted content of the interview. Something more than incompetence was at work here: the headline felt right, despite its obvious contradiction of the interview, because Zimbabwe indeed operates in the colonial subconscious as an alter ego for South Africa itself. Most South African discourse on Zimbabwe is less about Zimbabwe than it is about South African and colonial whites granting themselves permission to indulge in dystopian nightmares that are starkly at odds with the new South African realities. Zimbabwe ceases to exist as a country with a people and a politics of its own. It becomes a prism through which apartheid liberals project their deepest and darkest - especially darkest - South African preoccupations.

In 2004 the Democratic Alliance (DA) erected a giant billboard in Johannesburg-s northern suburbs with a double portrait of Thabo Mbeki and Mugabe. Once the line between the distinct realities of Zimbabwe and South Africa is racially blurred in this way, the absurd becomes conceivable. The swart gevaar campaign of the DA in 2004, based upon the plainly spurious suggestion that the ANC would use a two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution, was not really catching fire. It had to be sexed up, as by Tony Leon-s statement, a few weeks before polling day, headlined 'Tony Leon: Zimbabwe: politically motivated genocide.- The text then read: "After much careful consideration and analysis of the available evidence, including the recent revelations on BBC television of government sponsored murder and torture training camps, we believe that there is now a possibility that the Mugabe regime may begin to engage in the systematic murder and torture of its political opponents in the run-up to the next election in Zimbabwe. It is thus not impossible that there may be a politically motivated genocide in Zimbabwe."

In a more subtle but equally insidious register is Helen Suzman-s comment: "This (South African) spends like a drunken sailor," Suzman told the Telegraph. Suzman simply could not make such a statement about 'South African- public finances without shifting, through a kind of racial alchemy, to reliance upon the facts of Zimbabwe. Whatever else the sins of the democratic government of Thabo Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, they are hardly offences of wild spending, as the country-s steadily rising credit rating since 1994 attests. Only through the racial blurring that creates a unitary Mugabe-Mbeki composite character can such a thing even seem plausible. Suzman subconsciously slips into a mindset that the openly racist Dan Roodt deliberately cultivates. Roodt-s two essays, collected in The Scourge of the ANC, repeatedly discuss a composite character: a 'Mbeki- who is actually shadowed by and merged with Mugabe. Roodt prefers not to deal with Mbeki himself. When Tony Leon referred to Haitian democrat Jean Bertrand Aristide as the "Mugabe of the Caribbean", he was deliberately performing a similar racial and ideological trick.

The dyspeptic Mail & Guardian columnist, Robert Kirby, regularly wrote of a fictionalized character called "Thabob Mugabeki", a troll who occasionally darts out from under his presidential bridge "to frighten passing Europeans" and whose subjects are accustomed to being "clubbed to death for not starving quickly enough". Such a composite figure operates, in all seriousness, throughout the white South African discourse of Zimbabwe. The name itself, Mugabeki, decorates the racist blogosphere while RW Johnson identifies something he terms "Mugabe-Mbeki speak". Rhoda Kadalie claims to have discovered for South Africans what she calls "our own internal Zimbabwe". William Gumede, in his usual self-contradictory style, has suggested that: "Although the ANC in South Africa and Zanu-PF are light years apart, the spectre of 'Zanufication- haunts South Africa." And, of course, Zwelinzima Vavi: "we may be on our way to the Zimbabwean crisis in the long run."

Having mentioned Mugabe earlier in one of his paragraphs, Roodt indulges in the suggestion that Mbeki is no 'statesman- but rather a "petty African terrorist and schemer". In a trope inter-changeable with Suzman-s Telegraph interview, Roodt writes: "Like his friends and comrade, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki intensely dislikes white people and regularly lurched into tirades against him." Roodt bluntly states his thesis:

"The future of South Africa will not be so much different to contemporary Zimbabwe".

Suzman "became powerfully animated" when the talk turned to Zimbabwe. According to the Telegraph, Suzman "gestured fiercely with the manicured middle finger of her right hand" and said: "Mugabe has done that to the whites, and I think that is exactly what Mbeki admires about him. Don-t think for a moment that Mbeki is not anti-white - he is, most definitely. His speeches all have anti-white themes and he continues to convince everyone that there are two types of South African - the poor black and the rich white." This, of course, blatantly misrepresents Mbeki-s 'two nations- theme, which was intended as a move towards one nation by dismantling a divisive past, rather than as a means for giving the vulgar middle finger to whites.

To the unsubstantiated bogey of an 'anti-white- Mbeki, Suzman added: "Mugabe had destroyed that country while South Africa has stood by and done nothing."

All such chatter is less about the real problems of Zimbabwe than about the conscious and subconscious ears, resentments, jealousies and desires for historical vindication of white South Africa. The quest is not to solve Zimbabwe-s problems but the fear of racial 'contagion- by them. The war against such realities necessarily relies upon the liberal-s traditional weapon of stereotype. As Ken Owen has noted, "Zimbabwe has become a pretext for renewed demands for President Thabo Mbeki to 'do something-, failing which he is to be denounced as unfit to govern."

Owen concluded that Suzman and her successors 'display a more venomous and more reckless passion towards Mugabe-s oppression that they did towards apartheid."

Or Israel. Owen also pointed out that Suzman, a longtime fundraiser for Israel, wanted an outcry against Zimbabwean land-seizures but not against "Israel-s seizure of East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank". Indeed, Suzman supported the Goethe Institute-s silencing of Intelligence Minister, Ronnie Kasrils, after he had been invited by NGOs to speak on Israel. The Goethe Institute initially consented and then revoked the platform. Suzman supported this censorship because the Institute should not be used "as a venue for Ronnie Kasrils to make his outrageous assertions about Israel". Moreover, while Kasrils had a right to differ with a South African government position that was more quiet and diplomatic towards Israel than was his own, "he should not make statements thereon". So Mbeki-s quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe was bad, but on Israel was good - and how dare Kasrils defy the later, although Suzman herself defied the former?

One could with equal absurdity argue that anti-black hatred is 'fostered- by Suzman-s pronouncements against Mugabe. If you doubt the last assertion simply consider the experience of Christan Lamb, who arrived in Johannesburg to promote her book, House of Stone: The true story of a family divided in war-torn Zimbabwe, an unsparing critique of the human toll that Mugabe-s policies have taken upon Zimbabwe. But Lamb was unpleasantly surprised. She discovered at first hand that the discourse of Zimbabwe in South Africa has less to do with the problems of Zimbabwe than with the quest for vindication of the old displaced settler elite that "took the gap" to apartheid South Africa after white supremacy lost the war there in 1980: "Within a day in Johannesburg, I experienced at first hand the difficulties of engaging with Zimbabwe. I was due to address a lunch about my new book on the country, when the man next to me said: 'Rhodesia used to be a wonderful place - they didn-t let blacks walk on the pavements-. During the entire discussion not a single person referred to the neighboring country as Zimbabwe, its name for the past 26 years. They insisted on calling it Rhodesia."

Zimbabwe presents, especially among those for whom it remains 'Rhodesia-, the most neurotic form of mother-country confusion. To salve this neurosis the settler press needs to use each episode in today-s Zimbabwean woes in order to drive home the good news that: "Racism is not the only evil in the world."

Every twist and turn of the Zimbabwean saga indeed provides a convenient opportunity to say to Mbeki: 'Just Shut Up- about apartheid and post-apartheid racism. "In his weekly African National Congress newsletter yesterday, Mbeki said South Africans should use next week-s annual Human Rights Day to address the continuing scourge of racism in the country. He made no mention of Zimbabwe," wrote Business Day.

The soul such commentators want to save is the white one that felt apartheid was not all that bad and Ian Smith was slightly right. This very same soul-saving of the guilty apartheid soul through blaming Mbeki for Zimbabwe - is at work in Helen Suzman-s letter, published alongside Business Day-s editorial on the same day, pitching apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster as the man to be emulated. Mbeki ought to threaten "to instruct Eskom to turn off the lights in that wretched country, following the example of John Vorster when Ian Smith went ahead with his unilateral declaration of independence," Suzman wrote. She was saving her own soul. Zimbabwe was merely the means. "World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz told this newspaper that the world was looking to South Africa for leadership on the crisis in Zimbabwe," wrote a sonorous Sunday Times editorial headlined: 'Mbeki has lost the plot.-

The world (or at least Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya) was apparently not looking to Wolfowitz, the foremost ideological architect of the George W Bush regime change in Iraq, for accountability in that bloody mess. Wolfowitz apparently hasn-t lost the plot.

* This is an edited extract of Ronald Suresh Robert-s book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki

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