Good Morning Thabo Mbeki!

21, Jun 1999
It is with great pleasure that we welcome to the hallowed halls of power in the state of South Africa, our brother in struggle, Thabo Mbeki, who has now officially succeeded the Honourable Nelson Mandela. In a Reuters report on Thursday last, Mbeki, after his inauguration, was quoted as having spoken to his people, divided for centuries by apartheid, in the following manner:
"Our nights cannot but be nights of nightmares while millions of our people live in conditions of degrading poverty. No night can be restful when millions have no jobs and some are forced to beg, rob and murder to ensure that they and their own do not perish from hunger."

Chilling words indeed to describe a chilling reality! And we say in response, "Good morning, brother Thabo Mbeki, good morning, Azania!" Good morning to the realities of governance! And one must note well that we said "Azania" and not "South Africa".

In the years gone by the name "South Africa" had become synonymous with the evil apartheid regime, and the ANC (African National Congress), the vanguard organisation of the anti-apartheid struggle, had sought to rekindle the original name of the country, Azania, as symbolic of a return to authentic culture and a native way of seeing and doing.

"Azania" symbolised a new awakening in the thrust to embrace a new humanity as much as apartheid South Africa symbolised to the world, terror and barbarity. Why then has the ANC, now in power for some six years, not seen it fit to change officially the name of the country?

There is always grave danger whenever a progressive social grouping achieves power by way of a process that does not in itself dismantle the State. Under political and economic pressure from international forces, from armed ANC progressives operating covertly from both within and without its borders, from youth and democratic forces operating openly in the schools, townships and trade unions, etc.

Pretoria capitulated and the ANC was virtually "handed" the State with all its facets and structures and arrangements and systems of social relationships all intact and operative.

We have said elsewhere and I will say it likewise in this space that the State is intrinsically conservative by nature and logic. Once the State is left intact, its structures shall by their own dynamic justify self-perpetuation. Everything will remain as is, no matter how hard anyone tries, that is why such a situation is fraught with danger.

We have the historic example of Allende in Chile and how Chile came to be saddled with the diabolical Pinochet, presently still imprisoned in England awaiting resolution of the legalities involving charges brought against him internationally for atrocities when he wielded the Chilean State.

All the state bureaucrats of the past South African regimes who manipulated civil authorities in the interests of their own kind are by and large still there, they and their kith and kin possess all the skills and expertise to manage and run the affairs both in the private and public sectors. Apartheid left the African people out of the system except for the maids and the busboys and the gardeners.

When countries like Zambia, Ghana and so on became independent from British colonialism in the '60s, and the white public servants left, they were forced to turn to us in the Caribbean to provide skills such as typists and stenographers. Typists in Port-of-Spain who were doing a mere 45-60 words a minute were glad to hop the plane to Africa. And there was never anything even close to apartheid in Ghana and Zambia, so one can just imagine the situation in South Africa.

Nelson Mandela's role was to project the view of progress, development and revolution as a gradual rather than a confrontational process, thereby encouraging and exhorting the skilled whites to stay on and work for the social revolution by helping to empower the black masses. He is the only person who could have sold that line to the whites who have stayed, so great is the man's stature.

Now Mbeki, the much younger man, must begin the acceleration of the process. And again they have turned to the Caribbean for assistance in empowering their people because they feel that we of the Caribbean understand the need more than people of other regions, many of whom go to South Africa only to make a dollar and run.

We recall talking to one black professional South African at the Hilton Trinidad who pointed out that there is a township in South Africa as small in dimension as our Queen's Park Savannah populated by 300,000 people. The infrastructure requirements are mind-boggling.

One friend of ours who visited South Africa recently talked about seeing hundreds of black people one morning hanging around the hotel in which he stayed. He surmised that there may have been a rally planned for that day in the area, but that was not the case. They came every morning hoping that some white person would require some manual labour and pick them up. During our friend's short visit such an occurrence was quite rare, yet the black people came in their hundreds every day in hope. Our friend asked the professional white South Africans with whom he worked if they knew from where the blacks came and to which area they dispersed when night came and the whites replied negatively. They were unmoved by the reality of black existence.

In the meanwhile, large tracts of land remain underutilised and in the hands of whites, blacks remain unemployed and unemployable, side by side there exists extreme opulence and dire destitution and yet South Africa has in her hands, nuclear power capacity.

Elements among the black masses who were previously guerillas have on occasions threatened black bureaucrats of ANC about the slowness of the empowerment process. Mbeki has his task cut out and the future is fraught with danger, but of course he is quite aware of this.