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For our collusion with Mugabe black SA should feel ashamed
Xolela Mangcu
July 12, 2007

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A514277

"IF WE are incapable of being ashamed of our country, we do not love it. It is a shame that can be valuably mobilised," renowned scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson said during an address at Wits last year.

I have often locked horns with many white South Africans over their lack of shame about apartheid. This lack of shame has often turned into outright denial of how apartheid gave them a cruel and unfair advantage over black people. I suppose their unspoken logic is that any expression of shame would lead to a pronouncement of guilt, which would in turn to lead to punishment.

But as Anderson puts it, there is something intrinsically redemptive about shame — without extending into guilt and punishment.

In the same way that I have been astonished by this lack of shame in white society, I cannot see how black people cannot be ashamed by our complicity in the Zimbabwean tragedy.

I will leave criticism of "quiet diplomacy" to foreign policy experts. I am talking about something much more basic and simple than such sophisticated concepts. I am simply asking whether we can feel proud about our South African identity and our values given our own collusion in what has happened in Zimbabwe.

Collusion may seem like a strong word. After all, our country did not send troops to put down the people of Zimbabwe. But I would argue that we provided this monstrous dictator with psychological aid and comfort. Our leaders and intellectuals swallowed President Robert Mugabe's lie that Zimbabwe's problems were a creation of the western world. We gave him standing ovations and received him with thunderous applause whenever he came here. We put down his critics as agents of the west or sellouts or coconuts of one type or the other.

We argued for noninterference as articulately as our former oppressors did during those long dark decades of apartheid. We did and said all of these things even as we witnessed the destruction on our television screens. The idea of a country in which the government has to arrest shop-owners for increasing prices to stay in business is truly absurd.

Reasonable people have been asking how it is that a whole society can stand by while their ruler does as he wishes with the whole country. In many ways that is a question for the people of Zimbabwe to answer. The question for South Africans to answer is how could we have given psychological aid and comfort to the agents of this tragedy. Personally, I was sickened by the whole thing, and our participation in it. I always felt we had squandered our moral authority in defence of an irredeemable monster.

I suppose part of the reason I write is to simply record my own reactions to history. And when it comes to Zimbabwe it is a history of which I am utterly ashamed.

In the final analysis my expression of shame about our support for Mugabe also has something to do with our political future. I fear that in our support for Mugabe we demonstrated that we lost the basic value of ubuntu that was supposed to underpin our political democracy. If we can show such callousness towards the people of Zimbabwe, what would stop us from such callousness to our neighbours here at home?

After all, world history is littered with examples of neighbours turning on each other in the name of ethnic and racial nationalism, mainly at the instigation of thugs and gangsters lodged deep within the state. For example, there is still more we need to know more about the genocidal campaigns that Mugabe is said to have unleashed on the people of Matabeleland in the 1980s.

In the final analysis, Mugabe's terror raises lessons for SA about what happens when thugs take over the state, when its citizens become accomplices to the terror, and when politicians and intellectuals become the chief theoreticians of that terror. We have the responsibility to do some soul-searching about our own role in this sordid and tragic affair, if only to prevent it from happening here any time in the future.

Our first instinct may be to deny any such complicity, and say there is nothing we could have done. But did we really have to applaud this murderous dictator? What does that say about us and our own cultural and political values? How did we become cheerleaders in an unseemly celebration of mass murder and gangsterism?

The answer must begin with a sense of shame, but then shame presupposes an articulation of preexisting values. I still look forward to the day when all this racial nationalism is no longer with us, and we can speak openly about the values we hold in common.

* Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation, and a visiting scholar at the Public Intellectual Life Project at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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