Mamphela Ramphele’s new “political platform,” or party-in-making, represents the latest in  a series of bids for the substantial number of black voters presumed to be disillusioned with the rule of the African National Congress in South Africa.  So far all bids have failed. Many black South Africans are indeed fed up with the ANC. Tens of thousands have joined often violent “service delivery protests” against ANC-run municipalities accused of corruption or neglect. Millions have stayed away from the polls. Yet, relatively few have been willing to vote for opposition parties. The last major new party to try wrest their votes, a breakaway from the ANC called COPE (Congress of the People), secured a respectable 7% at the 2009 general election, but has since descended into a shambles. The best hope for Ramphele’s outfit is that it will scoop up the black African voters poised to desert COPE, yet unwilling to vote for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), because of its white roots and leader.

It is not easy to give an ideological label to Ramphele’s party, provisionally named Agang (“to build” in the Sepedi language). Leftists dismiss it as a capitalist party,  and their stance is lent some credence by Ramphele’s recent senior positions in the World Bank and a major mining house, and by her concern to make South African economically productive, competitive and investor-friendly. At the same time she professes concern for “workers and poor people” betrayed by a “new elite,” and her policy portfolio is for now too vague to pigeonhole. Notwithstanding Marxist rhetoric emanating from in and around the ANC, there is not all that much by way of concrete economic policy to tell South Africa’s political parties apart. No significant electoral party calls for a break with capitalism; at the same time, none dare sound like rabid free marketers in a land so conscious of its gigantic inequalities. I expect Agang to meet more established electoral parties on the broad ground of the center-left.

What Ramphele stands for is similar to what the DA purports to stand for: good governance. She is presenting hers as the party of competence and integrity. A former medical doctor and academic, Ramphele is a self-appointed scourge of mediocrity. Her enemy is not capitalism, but crony capitalism. She wants a depoliticized, professionalized civil service and higher educational standards. She favors electoral reforms that will reduce the stranglehold of party bosses.  She wants to rescue South Africa’s reputation as a global beacon of human rights from the disrepute brought by the ANC’s coddling of dictators. She encourages a public-spirited ethos in place of the current reign of self-interest and a shared South African citizenship to counter the country’s racial and ethnic fragmentation.

There is a market for this sort of product, especially but by no means exclusively amongst educated urbanites. One commentator has suggested that there is no rationale for a “black DA,” but actually there may well be. What Ramphele lacks, for now, is a machinery to reach out to the five or ten per cent of her compatriots who might be attracted to just such a prospect. Her baseline constituency does not stretch beyond the professionals and businesspeople who admire what they see as her readiness to speak unpalatable truths to power. A good few of an older generation remember Ramphele’s fame as a 1970s Black Consciousness activist, who was personally and politically partnered to Steve Biko, but survey evidence suggests that she is largely unknown to younger people. Biko’s legend is unlikely to rub off on a party that has very little in common with Black Consciousness. Ramphele seems uneasy with racial affirmative action and has told an interviewer that she stands for “South African” rather than “black” consciousness.

Whether or not progressives should welcome Agang depends on which is more urgent in progressive terms: leftward ideological course change or the strengthening of a state machinery currently too hobbled by corruption and incompetence to perform any kind of pro-poor strategic role. Agang is certainly not the long-awaited challenge to the ANC from the left. The problem with Agang-like parties that promise simply to govern better – apart from the possibility that their programs may fail to address structural inequalities – is that their ideological vacuity tends to attract opportunistic hangers-on, especially when they are dominated by a single personality. The answer depends also on whether it is more progressive to favor an incumbent left-leaning party with a clear majoritarian mandate or a strengthened opposition able to check that party’s authoritarianism and looting.  Agang could help to build a countervailing power to the ANC, though it could also end up redistributing votes within the opposition rather than enlarging the opposition electoral share. The party’s significance thus remains to be clarified – by the fleshing out of its policy agenda, by the caliber of people it attracts, by the nature of its funding, by public opinion polls and above all by the next national elections in 2014.

Was it a ‘tragedy’ or was it a ‘massacre’? Were the police, shocked by the killing of cops and security guards a few days before, entitled to feel threatened by an advancing column of panga-wielding strikers fortified with traditional medicine to immunise them from bullets? Or were the cops guilty of penning the strikers in, making an unnecessary attempt to disarm them by force, employing unconscionable firepower to block their escape and killing stragglers in cold blood? Who fired the first round of live ammunition?

What we do know is that on August 16^th 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s Northwest Province, and that there was at a minimum an unforgivable failure of police crowd control.

With luck, a government-appointed judicial commission will tell us who did what to whom and in what order. In the meantime South Africans nurse their bewilderment.  Theirs is a violent land in which fifty people are slain daily in ‘ordinary’ criminal murder, and strikes are often enforced with deadly brutality, but a special shame attaches to a slaughter by state forces so redolent of apartheid-era massacres.

There are layers to this story. It’s about wage grievances, but also a battle between unions. Black platinum miners have until now been organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, a member of the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions. Critics claim that NUM, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, is now a status quo union. Comfortable as management’s recognised bargaining partner, NUM resists calls for mine nationalisation. The union increasingly represents upwardly mobile above-ground workers rather than the rock drillers who do the most arduous work. The fact that NUM negotiated a better wage deal for the former than for the latter appears to have been a spark for the unrest.

Rock drillers have it hard. Platinum companies have invested little in surrounding communities. Those of its employees who do not wish to live in hostels are given living-out allowances to find their own accommodation nearby, where they are left to the tender care of dysfunctional ANC-led municipalities. Most end up in shack settlements threaded with bumpy roads and open sewers.

Given this, it is little surprise that a breakaway union, the Association of Construction and Mining Union, has found in drillers a ready recruiting pool. Precisely what role AMCU has played in the Marikana strike remains to be determined.

There is a gloomy economic context to this. The country’s crucial mining sector – weighed down by electricity price hikes, falling ore grades, safety concerns, labour unrest and skittishness about nationalisation – failed to ride the recent global commodities boom. Platinum long seemed immune from the industry’s decline. South Africa produces 80% of the world’s platinum, an extremely rare  metal vital in catalytic converters. In 1999 international platinum prices began a long surge that transformed becalmed bushveld mining towns into new conurbations. But recently prices have fallen and platinum companies face financial losses. Successive strikes at platinum mines have made matters worse for the companies, their workers and a middle-income country that still depends on mineral exports for foreign exchange. Job losses loom.

The political ramifications could be equally far reaching. Expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, an arch critic of President Jacob Zuma and longstanding mine-nationalisation enthusiast, has returned to prominence on the back of mineworkers’ grievances. Zuma’s prospects for being re-elected as ANC leader at the party’s December leadership conference suddenly look shaky, especially with so many of the strikers hailing from the politically crucial Eastern Cape.  The hegemony of NUM, a pro-Zuma union, is under threat. So perhaps is that of Cosatu, a federation willing to challenge the government but viewed by some as guarding a labour aristocracy in a sea of labour casualisation and unemployment. The ANC too is getting nervous: the Marikana strike is just the latest in thousands of incidents of local unrest signalling growing disaffection with the party of national liberation.

I for one do not welcome Malema’s opportunistic intervention or the left’s instant attributions of heroism and villainy. South Africa urgently requires a social-democratic accord, one underwritten by strong trade unions capable of winning decent work and expanding employment in exchange for industrial peace and productivity gains. Nationalisation may work for Norway’s oil industry but the South African state is chronically incapacitated and lacks the fiscal means to meet demands for new mining investment and rising mine wages. The splitting of established unions could weaken organised labour and leave mining in a limbo between institutionalised bargaining and quasi-revolutionary insurrection.

The truth of what happened at Marikana also needs to be objectively established, and its discovery is ill-served by incendiary sloganeering. Blame must be carefully apportioned and justice must be done. Only that will clear the air sufficiently to enable a worthwhile debate about what sort of socio-economic regime South African mining needs.

Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond.  She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.

She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research  scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post.  I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.

Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation.  Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things.  She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff

Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever?  Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of the big jacaranda trees that are about to provide this vigorous city with a brief but tranquil blue tapestry.

At the same time one senses a nostalgia for the recent winter that brought an even greater joy to this city and to this country, with the remarkable spirit of unity that blossomed during the World Cup, when the city and the country across racial and class divides reveled in being the center of the soccer world, proud of being a world class host for a global media event.

But now the political scene is getting increasingly bitter, and for many, worrisome. It is not easy for a visitor to make sense of it, but last week’s Durban conference of the African National Congress, the 98-year-old liberation movement and ruling party, forced some issues to the surface, brought them into sharper focus, made them for the moment at least, less confusing.

Julius Malema visits Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe

Although the conference allowed the media only limited access to its proceedings, it became clear that over the 16 years since the dismantling of apartheid, its leading actor, the ANC, faces a startling challenge from its own children, the ANC Youth League. Its controversial leader, Julius Malema, who was only twelve when the negotiated settlement with the apartheid regime was reached, is now the most divisive figure in the party. Though he never went to college, his skillful use of both irreverent and vitriolic language (recently directed against the ANC and its allies), and his dubious activities (a trip to Zimbabwe last March to lend support to Robert Mugabe’s policies) made him a popular public figure for some, and a dangerous demagogue for others. There is no doubt that his rebellious, populist performance (demanding legislation for the state to expropriate private property on behalf of the people), though still formally within the ANC framework, contributes greatly to the fragmentation of the party. He himself, flamboyantly arrogant, demands a radical transformation of the ANC, with a greater presence of the younger generation in its leadership.  Observing him one wonders how a high-school dropout could have arrived at such a powerful position. What makes people listen to him? President Jacob Zuma, who is also known for his populist rhetoric, presented himself at the Durban conference as a responsible leader and statesman. In fact many commentators talk about it as a struggle between the “juniors” and the “seniors”.

Though disciplined harshly by Zuma at the conference, Malema and his “young guns” managed to put on the agenda — uninvited and unwelcomed by the ANC elders – a push for the nationalization of mines.  At the moment Zuma seems to be still in charge of the situation, as everybody took note of his “have had enough” remark  and his closing words at the conference on Friday (9/24): Anyone who crosses the line in the ANC will “face the consequences”.

For a sympathetic outsider who is trying to make sense of it all, these are worrisome developments, and not only because they confirm the feeling that there seems to be a good climate in various parts of the world — from Global North to Global South — for effective demagoguery, the appeal to emotions and prejudices. What worries me is that here in South Africa they are combined with fairly advanced demands to establish control over the media, whose freedom has been seen as part of the problem. In fact a large part of the Durban conference was devoted to a discussion on setting up a special statutory body to hold media accountable for their reporting. And a majority of the delegates enthusiastically supported it.

For a sympathetic outsider who has herself lived in a system that presented itself as democratic centralism, the demands for party discipline are worrisome, even if they are meant to rein in political lunatics like Malema.  Today at breakfast a friend told me about the Zulu concept of hlonipha that is deeply ingrained in South African culture.  It denotes respect, especially respect for the elders to ensure dignity and stability at home. Young people should not criticize their elders, no matter how many wives they have or how many lucrative positions they hold. And they should not criticize the Party.

As somebody who cares about the ways in which local cultural paradigms and local knowledge are taken into account and engaged in strengthening and legitimizing political practices in new democracies, I do worry. I worry that the culturally embedded ethos of hlonipha may exclude debate, dialogue, and a free media, while supporting the newer, imported, and deeply anti-democratic  principle of democratic centralism and media censorship announced in Zuma’s introduction of  “revolutionary discipline”.