Jacobin Magazine: From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]

It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]

Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.

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The New York Review of Books: South Africa’s Cattle King President

Ramaphosa is a Soweto homeboy, the son of a police sergeant, who now lives in a grand home in Hyde Park, one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs. He qualified as a lawyer—no mean feat in apartheid South Africa—but his roots are in the labor movement and he played an important part in the downfall of the apartheid regime, mobilizing mineworkers. He has long been an avid fly-fisherman and now owns a cattle-ranch. When I profiled him for a South African newspaper in 1996, just after he left politics and joined the country’s largest new black-owned business, New Africa Investments, I described him as “charming and unflappable, entirely in control”:  [...]

I have followed Ramaphosa’s career for three decades. I was astounded by his skills in the 1990s, when he led the ANC’s negotiating team, thrilled at the possibility that he would be Mandela’s successor, and then disappointed by his hubris when he flounced out of politics: he refused, even, to attend Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. When I wrote that profile two years later, I was warily interested in the way he was leveraging his political credibility to gain a place at the high table of industry, as a beneficiary of the official policy of “black economic empowerment.” But some fifteen years later, in 2012, I was—like so many South Africans—distressed by the way he used his political connections to insist that the police take action against a wildcat strike at a platinum mine in which he held a stake. In the resulting “Marikana massacre,” thirty-four striking miners were killed by police, in an echo of the 1960 Sharpeville shootings. [...]

Even if these regal cattle and this glossy book are signs of swagger, or hubris, Ramaphosa has always been intensely conscious of his image. I have no doubt that there is a plan to the way he has cultivated his cattle-obsession and put it into the public domain. Released in the middle of his leadership campaign, Cattle of the Ages is Ramaphosa’s equivalent of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. “Somewhere in the depths of my soul is the connection my father had to his cattle, the hills of Khalavha and his people,” he writes. “My love for cattle could be a reflection of my father in me; or some form of agency on behalf of my father, Samuel Mundzhedzi Ramaphosa,” because as “in most African cultures, cattle are a sign of wealth and stature among my father’s people,” the vhaVenda. Samuel Ramaphosa had tended his family’s herd but he had no opportunity to acquire his own, as he was forced in the apartheid era to migrate to the city for work. [...]

In his victory speech on Thursday, Ramaphosa diverted from his prepared notes to address the party congress’s standout resolution: to revise the country’s constitution so that land could be expropriated, without compensation, for redistribution to black South Africans whose ancestors were dispossessed by the 1913 Natives Land Act. When black people lost their land, he said, “poverty set in, because our forebears… [had] led a fulfilled life from the land. They were able to feed their families. And when the removals and dispossession took place, poverty became a partner to the people of our country.”

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Slate: What Is Going to Happen to Zimbabwe Now?

Michelle Faul: It came as a shock. It came as a shock to everybody, even though I was home for three weeks last month, and everyone was saying, “Something’s got to happen. It cannot continue. People are suffering so much.” People are starving in my country. It’s disgraceful. Mugabe inherited, when we finally got independent black rule in 1980, a country that was self-sufficient. Five thousand white farmers, whatever their politics—and I am black—produced enough food to feed more than 8 million people, and food for export. And he has reduced our nation to one in which one-third of the people need food aid. Another third of the nation has left. We are scattered all over the world. [...]

I said Emmerson Mnangagwa is evil because he is considered the mastermind or what we called, or Mugabe called, Gukurahundi. This means the cleaning of the chaff—when you have wheat and clean it. That was a project to try and wipe out the minority Ndebele people. Nobody knows how many people were killed between 1984 and about 1988. I had to leave the country. I was forced to leave my country as a result of my reporting on Gukurahundi. Perhaps 20,000, perhaps 30,000 people were killed, and Emmerson Mnangagwa is considered the mastermind of those killings. [...]

I think Mnangagwa realizes that for the country to have any kind of positive future it can’t continue in the way it has been ruled. Mnangagwa has indicated that he would be willing to allow white farmers to return to Zimbabwe and farm the land. What happened with that project was that Mugabe accused the white farmers of supporting the opposition MDC party, which we believe has won at least two out of three of the last elections. He said the white farmers were supporting his opponents, which is when he began his program of violently forcing them from the land. The real reason, we think, was that his moneybags—an Indian chap who had done all his laundering of money for him—had taken off with all the veterans’ pension money. Mugabe no longer had money to pay veterans; the veterans were getting angry. So instead he said, “I will give you land. You can go take the farms.” [...]

I would suspect that they will be allowed to retire in disgrace. What I would like to see is someone like Mugabe being sent to the International Criminal Court to face trial for all the killings that occurred and other human rights abuses. Nobody knows how many people have died because of Mugabe’s destruction of everything he built up. He built up a fabulous education system. He was a teacher. He then destroyed it.

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