AFRICAN STUDIES: The Beloved Country Since The End of ApartheidBy RW Johnson Allen Lane, 702pp, £25
IN POST-COLONIAL Africa presidential terms have all too often ended in hails of bullets, or with last-minute dashes from the palace to the airport.
So optimists might see Jacob Zuma’s ascension to the South African presidency, ensured by his party’s election victory last week, as cause for celebration: he will be the fourth person to assume that office legally and peacefully since the end of apartheid, a record for African democracy.
Pessimists will point out that all four presidents came from the same monolithic ruling party, the African National Congress, and that Zuma himself is a troubling figure, whose populist skills won him the presidency despite allegations of rape, reckless sexual conduct and personal corruption.
"Bill" Johnson, a Durban-born Oxford historian turned Sunday Timesjournalist, is very much a pessimist, and his latest book is a broadside against the incompetence, corruption, authoritarianism, grandiosity and racism of South Africa's self-serving black elite. His chief villain is the recently-ousted Thabo Mbeki, who quietly but ruthlessly seized control of the African National Congress from Nelson Mandela while the elderly liberation hero was still the country's first universally-elected president.
Western readers will already be familiar with Mbeki’s championing of the notion that Aids is not a viral disease but a racist western conspiracy against the people of Africa. With his country already suffering from the second highest HIV infection rate in the world, Mbeki bullied and bribed ministers and health officials to deny hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens access to anti-retroviral drugs, which could have prolonged lives and reduced transmission. According to Johnson, a study by the Harvard school of medicine estimated that this policy caused 365,000 unnecessary deaths between 1999 and 2005.
Also well known is the failure of Mbeki’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” to restrain neighbouring tyrant Robert Mugabe in his devastating war of starvation against his own Zimbabwean people. As Johnson’s narrative lays bare, Mbeki’s real aim was never to reform or remove Mugabe’s ruling party but to protect it from the democratic opposition. For Mbeki, the electoral defeat of another former black liberation movement would have set a worrying precedent.
Less well known to foreigners, but at least as disastrous for South Africa, was the paranoid stealth with which Mbeki subverted both the ANC’s internal democracy and the national constitution, concentrating virtually all executive power in his own fumbling hands.
A black empowerment programme intended to reduce white economic dominance became a massive get-rich-quick scene for a tiny and mainly black ANC elite, driving billions of dollars of capital offshore and spooking new investment. A remote and uncharismatic figure, Mbeki sought to boost his wider popularity by championing a harsh new African nationalist rhetoric, scornfully casting aside Mandela’s policies of inclusion and non-racialism.
His over-zealous racial affirmative action programme created a new black middle class, but also drove out tens of thousands of the experienced non-African professionals and technicians needed to maintain basic government services and run the state’s modern economy. In some regions public services collapsed almost completely. Crime and corruption soared. In 2008 the lights started going out.
In its broad strokes, Johnson’s picture of a state in decline is faithful to a sad reality. But viewed in closer detail, distortions begin to appear.
Although he opposed apartheid as a young South African “exile” at university in Britain, Johnson seems to loath the new order at least as much as the old one. Perhaps rather too much: a naïve reader of this book would be left to believe that the ANC, and not colonialism or apartheid, was the most evil force in South African history. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu comes in for frequent sneering jibes.
“Those of us who fought them thought we were cleverer and more sophisticated than the apartheid-supporters and we abhorred racism. It is painful to have to acknowledge that the racists often predicted the future better than we did. . .” Johnson agonises on page 605.
Nor can Johnson’s basic facts be relied upon. He remarks in passing, for example, that the ANC ran guns to the IRA (really?) and that Libya stationed fighter jets in Zimbabwe (why?). Charismatic ANC leader Chris Hani was murdered in 1993 by his own comrades, says Johnson, and not by the two white racists who were caught red-handed, and who freely confessed. Watch out for such phrases as “it seems beyond dispute”, “everything points to”, “clearly”, “it seems obvious” and “doubtless”.
Many of Johnson’s more remarkable claims have no attribution, while most of the footnotes which do appear point to “private sources” or to newspaper cuttings, many of these apparently Johnson’s own.
His most egregious remark – implicating Mugabe in the 9/11 attacks – is sourced to an article Johnson himself wrote in the April 2004 edition of the National Interest, a leading US right-wing journal.
This article, still available online, turns out to be an unintentionally hilarious soufflé of bad sources, worse logic and Enid Blyton-style detective work. Driving around Harare at night with the headlights off ( “so as to attract as little attention as possible”) Johnson hooks up with an assortment of furtive strangers – supposedly disaffected Zimbabwean intelligence agents – who tell him about a massive terror network directly linking Robert Mugabe to the September 11th terror attacks by way of Libyas Muamar Qaddaffi, who apparently controls Al Qaeda. Who knew? Hamas, Yasser Arafat, Islamic Jihad and Iran are thrown in for free.
Johnson then “corroborates” his story with the help of a snooping white “farmer friend” and “Richard, a keen body builder”, who reckons he saw some “Afghans” acting suspiciously in Harares Muscle Factory gym on September 12th 2001.
This may be the stuff from which Sunday newspaper “exclusives” (and Iraq invasions) are made, but it shouldnt be good enough for the history books.
Ed O’Loughlin is a former Africa correspondent for The Irish Times and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. His novel, Not Untrueand Not Unkind,has just been published