Bryan Rostron - Out of Africa

DICTATORS come in all sizes and shapes – short, tall, obese or skinny – and encompass the gamut of religions and ideologies. The most common denominator, apart from an absolute lust for power, is that they despise their own people.

Dictators come in all colours, too. But when they are African dictators, even democratically-elected African leaders still instinctively bow to an unwritten post-colonial code: the right of African tyrants to harass, kill and exploit their own people.

This is why the turning back last week of the Chinese freighter carrying weaponry destined for the Zimbabwean military is of such historic importance. The about-turn was forced by trade union solidarity across several southern African countries – against their own governments. The ANC government in South Africa was particularly pusillanimous and evasive, despite clear legislation that would have allowed it to take a humanitarian stand.

Instead, in an action reminiscent of British dockworkers refusing to unload South African goods during apartheid, it soon became clear that unions here – as well as affiliates in Mozambique, Namibia and Angola – would refuse to handle this lethal shipment. The Chinese had little alternative but to order the An Yue Jiang to return home.

The South African government has long given President Robert Mugabe succour and comfort as he has fixed elections and reduced the majority of his people to penury. Three years ago, when the rigging of a Zimbabwean election was almost as blatant as the current fiasco, our foreign affairs minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, announced that the prospects for a free and fair poll looked excellent and lambasted the Congress of South African Trades Unions for talking of a union blockade of Zimbabwe.

Of course, what undoubtedly rattled the cabinet of President Thabo Mbeki, involved in a rancorous tussle with the left of his own party and COSATU, is that the main opposition to Mugabe (and the key founders of the Movement for Democratic Change) were leading trade unionists. You can see that Mbeki and his acolytes would not find the union-inspired upending of a nationalist government an enticing prospect.

Yet this is precisely what happened last December at the ANC conference. Mbeki was resoundingly defeated in his attempt to stay on for a third term as party president. If there was one link between that disparate alliance which led to the victory of Jacob Zuma, it is that the majority within the ANC, led by infuriated trade unionists, had come to feel that their own president and his sycophantic coterie viewed them with patrician disdain. Indeed, if there’s a link between Mugabe and Mbeki, it is this evident disdain.

In a poem they are both sure to know, The Solution, Bertolt Brecht asks: is it not easier “To dissolve the people/And elect another one?”

It is the common complaint of dictators that their own people are unworthy of them. As the tide in the Second World War turned against Hitler, the Führer began to rant against the German people: the volk had let him down and deserved to die for such weakness.

Benito Mussolini’s contempt for Italians has been well documented. Much of his fascist programme was aimed at producing an entirely different culture, from eating and clothing to an entirely “new” personality. When heavy losses of Italian troops were reported to him, Mussolini approvingly replied that the Italians needed to suffer in order to toughen up. “They must realise they can only come of age only by accepting obedience”, thundered Il Duce. “When they have learned to obey, they must and they will believe what I tell them and then they will march in compact ranks at my command.”

This could be the demented credo of any dictator. Judging by his actions, it’s a sentiment ruthlessly shared by Robert Mugabe as well.

But what of our own president? Thabo Mbeki’s acclaimed biographer wrote in The Dream Deferred of an interview when the president spoke “with more passion than he usually allows” about his shock on returning from exile in 1990. Mbeki discovered, in short, that black South Africans were a tremendous disappointment to him.

Mark Gevisser quotes Mbeki as saying: “These South Africans are not quite African, they’re European”. Gevisser continues: “The bleak picture he painted of a decultured South African society was one not only of dislocation, but amorality, too.” Mbeki also talked of “a slave mentality”, even among the black intelligentsia.

While apartheid wrought incalculable damage – physical and psychological – the internal fight against apartheid was probably more decisive than the efforts of exiles. Yet clearly, to Mbeki, local blacks proved a great letdown.

It is this very disdain that many in the ANC have picked up. The alliance against Mbeki includes spurned internal leaders who bravely led the battle against apartheid from within, trade unionists who gathered strength and power in the dying days of apartheid, and the overwhelming majority of the party rank and file. Together, last December, they decisively rejected Mbeki’s condescension. You can’t fool all the people all the time.