Bryan Rostron - Out of Africa

OUR central political paradox here in South Africa, when you compare the rhetoric against reality, is that we have a neo-liberal economic policy often driven with Stalinist ruthlessness.

Most ANC leaders who returned from exile received their training in the old Soviet bloc, including President Thabo Mbeki. They may have ditched rigid Marxist dogmas for gung-ho free enterprise, but habitually – especially when having to force through capitalist measures – they robotically revert to a paranoid mindset and Stalinist jargon.

The other day, I picked up a copy of Lenin’s 1920 manifesto, “Left-Wing” Communism: an infantile disorder. The style seemed eerily familiar. It reminded me of Mbeki’s former weekly online letters. That’s a suggestion for future historians, but it would be odd if the well-read Mbeki hadn’t studied this work when he was sent to Moscow’s Lenin Institute for instruction.

One phrase jumped out at me, regarding the necessity of an alignment between the vanguard party and “the masses” who must be convinced “by their own experience” that their leadership is right. “Without these conditions”, wrote Lenin, “all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end in phrase-mongering and grimacing.”

This describes our current reality exactly. The black majority may still vote for the ANC, but with unemployment and poverty rising, opinion polls (and disturbances) show that the party’s popularity is wilting. So this yawning gap is regularly filled with hollow bellowing and posturing from party apparatchiks.

Now a younger generation of ANC leaders, forged neither in exile nor in battle, has taken up this hackneyed jargon with gusto, rendering it even more mendacious.

The leader of the influential ANC Youth League first announced he was prepared to “take up arms and kill” for ANC president Jacob Zuma. He later clarified: kill “counter-revolutionaries”. On the very same day, his hero, Jacob Zuma, in his bid to become the country’s next president, informed a Financial Times dinner that he had no intention of changing our current economic policy.

Yet the ANC Youth League leader claimed: “An attack on Zuma is a direct attack on this revolution.” Then the secretary-general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions vowed to “shoot and kill” for Zuma.

Of course, Zuma’s homily to the Financial Times dinner sounds less like Lenin than, well, “counter-revolutionary”, but to plug this all-too-glaring gap his supporters – like Mbeki’s before him – have to resort to “phrase-mongering and grimacing”.

How else can one explain the response to our recent xenophobic mayhem by Christine Qunta, Mbeki acolyte and deputy chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation? She asked: “What if we were in the middle of an attempted coup?” Qunta drew a chilling picture of the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende and concluded by urging us “never to allow our hard-won democratic gains to be stolen by criminals and right-wing elements, as happened in Chile”.

When Willie Madisha was sacked recently as president of COSATU, it was widely seen as a purge for arguing that unions should not support Zuma’s presidential ambitions. When he was subsequently expelled from the Communist Party, he likened this to Stalinism. He was, unsprisingly, smeared as a “counter-revolutionary”.

In his epic novel Life and Fate, Russian author Vasily Grossman tried to explain the slavishness of “party-mindedness” and the acquiescence of once brave revolutionaries who kept quiet as Stalinism took hold. “Fear alone cannot achieve all this”, he wrote, “It was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality, that justified today’s pharisees, hypocrites and writers of denunciations in the name of the future, that explained why it was right to elbow the innocent into the ditch in the name of the happiness of the people.”

How else to explain that not one of Mbeki’s ministers took issue with his AIDS denialism? Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang trained at a Soviet institute influenced by Stalin’s lauded agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who applied Marxist dogma to biology with disastrous results. “Perhaps”, observed Dr James Wilmot, “this is why she does not appear to understand how the genetics of retroviral co-evolution works.”

Vasily Grossman, famous for his war reporting from Stalingrad, witnessed the corruption of Stalinism. His great novel was only published after his death, yet Grossman also captured something of what is going on in South Africa today: “The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrap-heap. The new age needed only the hide of the revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.”

He could have been describing many of our new generation of ANC party hacks.