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Book reviews - September 3, 2009
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September 3, 2009
By James Mitchell
People's War: New Light On The Struggle For South Africa
by Anthea Jeffery
Jonathan Ball R275
Somehow I can't foresee many enthusiastic reviews: this is altogether too dour a reassessment of the legend of heroic people's struggle against the forces of darkness and oppression. Neither does the media itself emerge entirely unscathed.
Popular history has it that the more than 20 000 people killed in the decade ending in 1994 were victims of an apartheid state-inspired Third Force. This meticulously researched work begs to differ.
In his foreword, the SA Institute of Race Relations' John Kane-Berman writes: "Our research convinced us that the transition in 1994 from minority to majority rule was not a 'miracle', as often suggested, but the product of a remarkably successful strategy."
The People's War, inspired in part by the lessons of Vietnam, didn't need victory on the ground as long as it could dominate the propaganda war. And so it proved, according to Anthea Jeffreys, author of The Natal Story: Sixteen Years of Conflict and The Truth About the Truth Commission.
Propaganda domination was aided, Jeffreys quotes Azapo secretary-general George Wauchope as saying, by the harsh reality that "black journalists living in the townships were 'paralysed by fear'." Thus even when a court interdict - a public document - was obtained prohibiting the Soweto Youth Congress and other UDF affiliates from attacking Wauchope, "the press remained reluctant" to publish the names of those allegedly involved in petrol-bombing his house and torturing to death a 14-year-old friend of Wauchope's son.
Jeffrey's description of the carefully planned demonisation of Inkatha - and the careless acceptance of this by the media - makes chilling reading.
Repeated allegations against Inkatha became "fixed in the public mind. By contrast, once-off reports about the killing of Inkatha members tended to fade rapidly from recollection", she writes.
Accusations that Buthelezi was no more than an apartheid puppet went hand in hand with a false impression that there was wide-ranging support for the UDF in Natal.
Claims Jeffrey: "Newspaper coverage of this kind was highly successful in discrediting Inkatha among the upwardly mobile African population in townships across the country. This more sophisticated African community was also turned against Inkatha through the constant denigration of Inkatha members as backward tribalists unable to adjust to the demands of the modern world."
Lest all this be too easily condemned as a mere anti-ANC rant, it is worth noting Jeffrey's claim, in her Introduction, that to "ensure fair treatment for the ANC, particular care has been taken to reflect the organisation's own perspective on the violence". To this, she writes, were added the viewpoints of others institutionally sympathetic to the ANC, such as the SA Council of Churches.
Few will today wish to be reminded of the sordid details of what is now generally called "South Africa's first democratic election"... by implication the country's first "free and fair" election.
Yet the Independent Electoral Commission's own Judge Johann Kriegler was quoted in Business Report as having acknowledged that "the elections were 'a shambles' ".
Commented The Weekly Mail & Guardian: Kriegler "had ceased to be a judge, ruling on the accuracy and validity of the result, and had become a mediator, desperately negotiating a result that all parties would accept. So an election, which should have given a clear numerical indication of the strength and weakness of each party... has turned into another product of negotiations".
Jeffrey's ultimate judgment is equally harsh. She contrasts Nelson Mandela's emphasis on togetherness at his May 10, 1994 inauguration with the ugly reality of the preceding four years.
As the world joined South Africa in saluting its first black president, "it seemed churlish to remember the warlike speech that Mandela had made on his release from prison in February 1990. It seemed crass to wonder how different the intervening years might have been if Mandela's emphasis had then been on peace and reconciliation and the need for all to join together in healing past wounds and building a just future. In particular, it seemed unthinkable to recall or acknowledge the 15 000 people who had died since political liberalisation in the course of a continued people's war... in the main, not to bring apartheid to a more speedy end but to give the ANC the hegemony that it had now secured".
Is it any wonder that these 600-plus pages are likely to be ignored rather than attacked, for to do so would require examination of the cynicism with which "the struggle" was waged... not for liberation, but for domination.
365 Modern History
by Gerard Cheshire with John Farndon
Icon R184.95
What happened today in recent (post-World War 2) history? Grim: on September 3, 2004, the school siege in Beslan, North Ossetia, ended with more than 300 deaths after Chechnyan terrorists had taken about 1 100 children and teachers hostage.
This is a year's-worth collection of news items, one per day. Nine days after the massacre date, but in the year 1977, South Africa features with the death in custody of Steve Biko. Infamously, it left "Justice Minister" Jimmy Kruger cold and the police attempted a cover-up, but "a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail named Helen Zille exposed the truth. The story caused international condemnation."
Go to December 3, 1967, and this country features in something more positive: Chris Barnard performs the world's first successful human heart transplant.
More than 40 000 have been done since then.
- James Mitchell
Review
The annual James Lee Burke fix has our reviewer captivated from the start and revelling in the writer's wealth of descriptive passages. Rain Gods features the ageing Sheriff Hackberry Holland again, trying to deal at one and the same time with love and hate. Turn to the main body of The Star for a full review of this novel of the Texas border badlands.
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