CIS Special Feature
February 4, 2009
Obama and South Africa
As the world watches President Obama make history in the United States, the echoes of earlier transitions are especially meaningful in South Africa.
By Mark Gevisser
"It’s just like 1994!"
Over and over again, last month, I heard these words being used – by South Africans and by Americans who know the South African story – to describe the way they felt during the inauguration of Barack Obama. “Finally!” one of my American editors said to me. “We too get our Madiba moment!” Even Obama’s distressing decision to offer the inaugural invocation to a notoriously homophobic preacher was filtered through this prism: “If Madiba’s inclusivity enabled him to have tea with Verwoerd’s widow, I guess we can tolerate Rick Warren.”
The emotion pouring out from my usually-cynical American friends and colleagues is deeply moving, and is indeed reminiscent of our own ‘Madiba Moment’. “I never thought I’d have a president I could actually believe in,” one texted me. “I keep on having to pinch myself,” another said. “I’ve lived my entire adult life –even under the Clintons- defining myself as being in opposition to the powers that be. I’m going to have to change the way I understand power – and my relation to it.”
As I watched the inauguration this week and thought about the ways that the “Obama Moment” was a reiteration of the “Madiba Moment”, I remembered a passage from Obama’s luminous memoir, Dreams of My Father, in which he wrote that he actually found his own political voice through the anti-apartheid movement: at a rally calling for divestment from South Africa while an undergraduate in the 1980s. Obama discovered that he could use the South African freedom struggle to demand that his fellow students choose sides: not “between black and white”, he writes, but between “dignity and servitude,” “fairness and injustice”, “commitment and indifference”, “right and wrong”.
The story points to the symbolic significance of the South African struggle, particularly in the United States, where the anti-apartheid solidarity movement inherited the mantle from the civil rights movement as the world’s great moral cause. If, then, the last great redemptive moment in global politics was Nelson Mandela’s liberation and ascent to power in the early 1990s, then Obama’s election has provided the next.
This is in part because of the charismatic force of both men – their ability to embody and articulate universal aspirations – and in part because of what they represent: democracy’s ultimate promise, the equality of all people. But it is also because, as in 1994 when South Africa peacefully voted in Mandela, a choice once more appears to have been made: if not quite between “dignity and servitude” or even “right and wrong”, then certainly between “commitment and indifference” – and, accordingly, between hope and cynicism; engagement and alienation.
In this context, the global euphoria triggered by the Obama moment seems to have given South Africans a particular buzz. On one level, this has to do with the politics of identity: not just that he is a black man, an African, but that his very being expresses our own struggle’s “non-racial” values. In South Africa, remember, there was an Immorality Act that forbade intimate relations across the colour bar, let alone marriage. The “unlawful carnal act” act that produced Obama could have landed his parents in jail if it had taken place in South Africa - and would certainly have rendered the young family social outcasts.
But there is another dimension to South Africa’s exhiliration after the Obama victory; one bittersweet with nostalgia. For as we watched Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday, how could we not but think of another such event round the corner, at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, and how different it will be from that epoch-making moment fifteen years ago? Our own era of redemptive politics has come and gone, and we find ourselves, now, mired in a post-independence era of disillusion and cynicism, with leaders not only self-interested but morally compromised too.
This was brought home to me, just two days before the Obama inauguration, by an interview, in the Sunday Independent, with Lindiwe Sisulu, an ANC leader with a reputation for impeccable integrity. Sisulu acknowledged what has been apparent for a while: that by choosing Jacob Zuma as its leader and insisting on him as the country’s next president, the ANC has made his problems its own. The party thus had no choice, said the daughter of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, but to get “involved” in trying to squash the case against Zuma, as it was “de facto” affected by it, by virtue of his leadership of the party.
Little wonder, in the face of such blemish, that the opposition Congress of the People has been so keen and quick to invoke the rejuvenative properties of the Obama Revolution, from its campaign slogan - “A New Agenda for Change and Hope” – to its attempts to replicate the Obama campaign’s savvy use of technology. But COPE’s senior leaders are no less compromised, as Thabo Mbeki’s lieutenants, and their stated aspirations to usher in a more responsive and accountable democracy ring hollow too, given that they were for so long part of the very oligarchy that buttressed Thabo Mbeki. They may well have illustrious enough struggle credentials, but there is nothing to suggest that they might become South African Obamas.
Of course, like so many South Africans, I have the deepest yearnings for a politician of Barack Obama’s calibre to emerge out of post-apartheid South Africa. Wouldn’t it be amazing if South Africans were mobilized into active citizenship not by the singing of an obsolete struggle anthem but by the righteous articulacy of a profound and subtle thinker? Perhaps paradoxically, however, there is something of a relief in being free, at last, of the politics of redemption. Americans might need Obama at this particular moment in their history, but in the adolescent South African democracy, we are coming through a critical rite of passage: the coming to grips with the truth that politicians are flawed and self-interested men rather than liberating godheads, and thus that if things are going to change, we are going to have to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves.
Similiar to the way the Obama campaign has mobilized Americans today, the ANC under Mandela unlocked a powerful sense of agency among all South Africans in the early 1990s. But this has dissipated over the last fifteen years, as citizens seemed to have deferred to a paternal and omnipotent leadership reminiscent of age-old feudal African society. Of course, one of the glories of the democratic process is that it allows for regular reinvigoration, and many in the ANC argue that the ousting of Thabo Mbeki – beginning with his defeat at Polokwane in December 2007 – presents precisely this opportunity.
And so, as we approach our own elections, it is worth asking a question. Even if there is not a chance that Obama’s standard, witnessed on Tuesday, might be met by Jacob Zuma (or, for argument’s sake, Terror Lekota) when he takes the presidential podium at the Union Buildings in April or May, could it be that we too are on the cusp of an era of rejuvenated democracy? There are certainly encouraging signs, in the number of new first-time voters who have registered, in the fledgling COPE’s extraordinary recruitment drive, and in the way South Africans are talking about politics, openly and vigourously, in a way not seen since the mid-1990s.
The most important statistic to track in our own upcoming elections is not whether the ANC gets its two thirds or loses a province or two. It is whether there is a spike, or a drop, in the total percentage poll – and particularly whether young people vote, this year, as they last did in South Africa in 1994, and as they just did in the US. This will give us an indication as to whether we are emerging out of our alienation and discovering the real agency of adulthood, or whether will remain trapped forever in political adolescence: wallowing in a fantasy of redemption even as we trust our elders less and less.
While the latter will lead us down a path of ever-diminishing quality towards the mediocrity which typifies African statesmanship, the former might just bring us, one day, to what is truly the redemptive possibility of democracy: a scenario where Madiba Moments or Obama Moments happen not just once in a lifetime, but every time you cast your vote.
Mark Gevisser's newest book is A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in March 2009. Gevisser will discuss the book and Barack Obama's significance to South Africa at the May 26th installment of the World Beyond the Headlines lecture series. Gevisser is working on a new book, The Second Transition.