In his new book, A Simple Man — Kasrils and the Zuma Enigma , Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s former Minister of Intelligence, recounts his close relationship with former President Jacob Zuma. The story opens with the two as fighters in the war against apartheid and then slips into Mr. Kasrils’s time in the post-apartheid government and Mr. Zuma’s fall into corruption.
When Nelson Mandela appeared in 1990 after 27 years in prison, great hopes were vested in the new South Africa. But the country was isolated. There was no Soviet Union to give the old communists ballast. At Davos in 1992, Mandela toned down his position. A negotiated settlement followed which undermined any hope for the Black working class. “I believe we were virtually sleepwalking into an economic order that was being created under our noses,” writes Mr. Kasrils. “They [his comrades] simply did not make enough of a stand against the neoliberal policy slate that suffocated their dreams,” he told this writer in Johannesburg.
Money changed the liberation fighters. Communist leader Chris Hani, who used to say, ‘Socialism is the future’, was assassinated in 1993. A few days later, another revolutionary, Oliver Tambo, died. People of high integrity left the stage. The compromises of the African National Congress (ANC) led leaders like Mr. Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa into a culture of personal graft. Almost a quarter of a century since the apartheid ended, more than half of the nation’s population lives in poverty.
Mr. Kasrils grew up in the Yeoville section of Johannesburg, not far from the home of communist leader Joe Slovo. When Slovo returned from exile, he moved back into a modest home in his old neighbourhood. “This house is good enough for me,” he said. He didn’t fancy cars or amass personal wealth.
A pan-African neighbourhood
Yeoville is a pan-African neighbourhood — with Congolese women selling cooked cassava leaves, Nigerian men plying suits and Zimbabwean DJs playing dance-hall music. Liveliness is the order of the day. The Yeoville market is a warren of small shops that sell dried catfish and hair oil. At the market’s heart are modest restaurants. It is in these restaurants that the restaurateur Sanza cooks his inventive Pan-African meals for his Yeoville Dinner Club. Everyone knows Mr. Sanza. His is an infectious personality. The Kenyan poet Shailja Patel, the blogger from Kongo Travels Tania Mukwamu and this writer rush after Mr. Sanza in the market. This South Africa seems far removed from the world of Parliament and graft. It is, of course, not that far away. There is poverty here behind the bustle. Taxis refuse to come to the area for fear of crime.
The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina came to the Yeoville Dinner Club regularly when he lived in Johannesburg. He had already gained fame for his essay, “How to Write About Africa”. Suffering, war and nature must dominate in any story on Africa. There should be no mention, Mr. Wainaina wrote, of “ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans, references to African writers or intellectuals”.
An Africanist clothing store near the Rasta House in Yeoville has portraits of old national liberation icons — Robert Mugabe and Kwame Nkrumah among them. There are no pictures of Mr. Zuma. None of Mr. Ramaphosa, the new President. The well of national liberation seems empty. Underneath the noise of the market, other dreams slumber, waiting to be woken up to a new project, a deeper national liberation that would undo the negotiated settlement of the past and address the immediate needs of the workers and the poor.
(Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental Institute and was recently in South Africa)
