What is the matter with this country? If oppression by the West
is to blame, why are things getting worse under indigenous rule?
AIDS, which had a manageable prevalence in the
early Nineties, is now set to kill at least
a quarter of the
population. The new president, Thabo Mbeki, has responded by
questioning whether HIV causes AIDS. Crime has become so routine
that to speak of certain areas as dumps for the bodies of raped
and strangled children is not a hyperbole. Foreign policy is a
long funeral for the country’s hopes, with the regime openly
seeking advice from Libya, Zimbabwe, and Algeria.
Post-apartheid South Africa looks to me very much like another
case of African government. Africans can call me a racist if they
feel like it. (The sanction has little meaning where it is
applied even to black journalists indicting corruption that
starves the black underclass.) African culture does not provide
the intellectual means to govern a modern national state. Western
values would be useful, but African leaders dismiss (as “the
hypocrisy of colonialists”) the best ones, those that set limits
to the power of individuals.
Even the most appealing of African leaders does this, as I found
in reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom
(1994). Though full of indignation against
apartheid, Mandela appears throughout his life devoid of any
competence in political science, as opposed to the strategizing
necessary to take power. The African National Congress’s own
Freedom Charter
