To say the recent history of southern Africa has been turbulent is an understatement on a par with saying the Conservative-led coalition in Britain has made alterations to public spending. It belies a fundamental shift in power, influence and resources, coupled with the rise of strong personalities, against a background of international change, especially in the balance of trade, and a rise in the influence of multinational businesses and corruption.
Stephen Chan, Professor of International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, details the way in which Rhodesia moved through UDI, a savage civil war and a negotiated peace to become Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. He outlines South Africa’s transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy and, in both cases, illustrates how political power changes hands and then becomes entrenched and abused.
Mugabe, for example, was hailed as a near saint of Nelson Mandela proportions in the early days. Chan charts the progress of his regime, particularly the sophisticated vote-rigging, violence on a grand scale and the corruption of his generals in siphoning off wealth from mineral deposits in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, with a fluidity and simplicity which shows the operation of power politics in an African context.
Treachery and deceit often underpin the political process across the world. We should not be surprised it has happened, and continues to happen, in post-colonial southern Africa.
Chan has written a highly readable narrative of the past 30 or so years. He combines strong analysis of what has happened – and why – with some thoughts on how relationships might develop. It is a book that is as hard to put down as it is challenging and fascinating. His insights are invaluable, born of his intimate working knowledge of and presence in the region. Covering the post-colonial era and the defeat of apartheid, he traces the winding and inter-twining paths of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia since the late 1970s. Drawing in the experiences of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Congo, Chan has produced a remarkable summary of political, social and economic change that is succinct yet comprehensive. He explains political developments with clarity and a sense of purpose. He provides detailed backgrounds of major players including Mandela, Mugabe, Kenneth Kaunda, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Morgan Tsvangirai. Their complex relationships are revealed alongside the struggles they faced, rose to and overcame or failed to deal with.
His analysis of how the Cold War was fought out in the region is, of itself, a fascinating study of power politics and Clausewitz’ assertion of war being politics by other means. The respective roles of the Russians, Chinese, Cubans and Americans in manipulating the mineral-rich region for their own political and economic ends are revealed. Told here, too, are the stories of how the post-colonial powers, Britain and Portugal, sought to impose their will on the newly independent countries.
Why Mugabe used to refer to Tony Blair with such venom is covered in detail by Chan who leaves us in no doubt of the manipulative work of our former Prime Minister – to the point, in fact, where you have to pinch yourself not to have some sympathy with the tyrant Mugabe.
His narrative is also marked by some amusing anecdotes. Lord Carrington, for example, during the Lancaster House negotiations, was so taken by the charm and intellect of Mugabe that he joked about putting him up for membership of White’s – his London club. The BBC may be banned from Zimbabwe but Chan cuts John Simpson’s “secret reporting” down to size by revealing that the locals try to get in camera shot because they know the van following him is the camera.
To go to South Africa now it is easy to get a romanticised view. The trip from Cape Town’s modern World Cup refurbished airport to the Waterfront is a journey into an international city. Stay in one of the many hotels before venturing into the wine growing regions of the Western Cape with supermarket familiar names such as Paarl, Stellenbosch, False Bay and Franschhoek and the traveller can slip into tourist heaven lured by the delicacies of a cuisine that is as essentially African as it is Mediterranean, European or Asian.
Yet the contrasts are stark. That same ride into Cape Town will take the wide-awake traveller through some of the biggest shanty towns with people, almost exclusively black and living in poverty, packed into ramshackle, flimsy constructions. The workers in the now affluent Garden Route areas and wine regions fare better only in that they have low-paid jobs and a little more living space.
The pattern is repeated across the country. Durban, Pretoria and Johannesburg all boast beauty, modernity and occasional outbursts of opulence set against huge townships dominated by the poor, the dispossessed and migrant, mainly Zimbabwean, labour. Levels of crime are as endemic as those of poverty and ethnic conflicts raise the occasional spectre as unemployed South Africans compete for work with Zimbabwean ex-pats forced out by the politics and the poverty of their homeland. Harare, too, offers such contrasts as the country struggles to recover from the sort of hyper-inflation that makes the German experience in the 1920s seem a blip on the economic radar.
These contrasts of fortune lie at the heart of the politics of the region. Aspirations built up by liberation from civil war and apartheid are huge, as are the challenges of the governments to secure adequate public health, industrial infrastructures, education systems and social justice. It is a testament to Chan’s sharp powers of narrative and analysis that these challenges are made clear. By setting out the history and telling how the region got to where it is today, he has identified those challenges and sets the scene for what will be a meeting of the African solution and the pressures of the global community.
