Tony Blair came to Johannesburg last week. He was part of the Discovery Leadership Summit, hosted by Discovery Invest, and as you might expect he was the headline act.  Tony Blair on leadership: now that would be an interesting lecture, if you could afford the high fee to attend (just over a quarter of the monthly take-home pay of your average South African academic).

As it happens in South Africa’s thickly political society, Archbishop Tutu, scheduled to appear at the summit as well, pulled out dramatically and at the last minute. He was unable to share a platform, he said, with the former UK Prime Minister given his ‘morally indefensible’ invasion of Iraq. Tutu’s moral stand also had the strategic political objective of refocusing attention on a war that many in South Africa have forgotten in our parochial obsession with our tangled society.

On the day of Blair’s speech, protestors demonstrated outside the Sandton Convention Centre and grabbed headlines to the chagrin of the conference organisers (who, it must be said, remained graceful throughout).  Some of those protestors hoped to make a citizen’s arrest of Blair on the grounds that he was a war criminal. They did not get close, as security was amped up. And although I sat two feet behind Blair at the taping of a BBC debate on poverty, I did not feel moved to put my hand on his shoulder as the viral email explaining how to effect a citizen’s arrest advised; see http://www.arrestblair.org/. Neither the bounty of over 500 GBP, nor the reassurance that my motives for the arrest did not matter, tempted me. I like the politics of outrage as much as the next leftist, but I prefer thoughtful debate, when all is said and done.

I agree with Tutu that Blair’s war was based on slender evidence, driven by misinformation and an almost blind obsession with “following through” on his conviction (not to mention his commitment to President Bush) that the war should proceed. I would even confess to a visceral dislike of the smarmy mode of politics that Blair epitomizes. By contrast, I have admired Tutu for as long as I can remember and as a student I sat at his feet as he took on the apartheid government. Most recently, I supported his excoriation of the current government of South Africa for not allowing the Dalai Lama to join in Tutu’s 80^th birthday celebrations.

But it seems to me that Tutu missed an opportunity to engage with Blair in Johannesburg, and even to embarrass him, if that was the point. The enormous media coverage of Tutu’s action focused on whether Tutu was justified or not in boycotting the Discovery Leadership Summit, rather than on the causes of and justifications for the war.

An eloquent commentary on the nature of ethical leadership would have achieved vastly more in the public debate than the boycott has generated. It might have given us the arguments with which to take on Blair’s view that good leaders need to do what they think is right, even in the face of public disapproval. Really? No debate? Isn’t that what we call authoritarianism? It might have opened a discussion of what evidence is used in decision-making, and who has the right to information. Tutu might have asked Blair why he wrote in his memoir that he looked back on the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act and thought to himself: “you naïve, irresponsible nincompoop.” In retrospect, he thought empowering citizens was “utterly undermining of sensible government.”

Should a small elite, even if it is elected, make world- shattering decisions? And what about Blair’s notorious and repeated retort when questioned about Iraq that he will not apologize for removing a dictator: will he apologize then for supporting Gaddafi and Assad?

Tutu might even have opened a serious discussion of how we define “war criminals.” But the chance has passed, the Blair machine has moved on to its next engagement and all we have to celebrate is that the protesters did not get beaten up by the police.

By the way, if you are wondering what Blair had to say about leadership: not much. Certainly not enough to justify his reputed 6 000 GBP per minute speaking fee. To wit: we need an open society, responsible leadership, and Africans need to take their destiny in their own hands. Blair is a consummate public speaker so his speech was graceful and witty as could be expected, and the audience of high-level business leaders was impressed. The humorous manner in which he responded to his critics, including Tutu, was a model of diplomacy and could teach South African politicians a thing or two about the art of the stylish retort. On questions about his invasion of Iraq, he was smoothly evasive and showed no willingness to debate any of the key issues.

But what he did say – during his tenure as prime minister and again in the BBC debate on poverty – leaves me with a deep fear that the idea of “responsible and sensible” government might be displacing that of “accountable” government. That would be a profoundly undemocratic version of leadership.

Remember TV’s incredible bird’s-eye views of people standing in miles-long lines to vote? Remember Mandela with his awe-inspiring gravitas undiminished by TV lights, bringing a new humanity to our living rooms? Remember our admiration for the South Africans hammering out what was clearly the most progressive constitution in the world?

I am not going to tell you that this is all gone, because it is not. But even if it seems to have gotten reinvigorated, democracy here, like any new democracy, whether in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else, is still fragile, and today it faces a major test.

Ironically there is a well-advanced effort by the ANC government to introduce a new piece of legislation that would dramatically restrict media freedom , and that — in an uncanny echo of Orwellian doublespeak — has been given the name Protection of Information Bill.  The bill endows the ruling party with the power to decide what information is “unfit” for consumption by the larger public. This launch of censorship, which for many reeks of the apartheid era, is effectively designed to stop any state information that could be classified as harmful to the “national interest,” which, as both media and public know, includes potentially embarrassing information about both past and present. If one reads the proposed bill it becomes clear that there is hardly anything in South Africa that could not be defined in terms of national interest.  Moreover it is up to politicians to decide what should be defined as a national secret. This legislative initiative is coupled with a newly proposed Media Appeals Tribunal “to strengthen media freedom and accountability,”  which recommends draconian penalties: e.g., from 3 to 25 years for those from the media who act against “the protection of information”

South African democracy may be young and fragile, but luckily it has a robustly refreshed civil society and a thick layer of moral authorities who speak out against the return of “1984”.

The Nobel Prize laureate, author Nadine Gordimer, a political activist whose books were banned under the apartheid regime, and Andre Brink, well-known South African novelist, have written a letter protesting these developments, now also signed by many other writers and intellectuals. In an interview for the well-regarded Mail and Guardian, Gordimer said, “People died in the freedom struggle and to think that having gained freedom at such a cost, it is now indeed threatened again… If the work and the freedom of the writer are in jeopardy, the freedom of every reader in South Africa is too.”

Civil society here is also expressed in its countrywide “Right to Know” campaign. I’ll stop right here, but please see these pictures from a recent march in “Joburg” that went from Witwatersrand University to the Constitutional Court. It was to be a silent march, but in the end it was a fitting combination of various forms of protest — songs, the high-stepping toi-toi , creatively sardonic buttons and t-shirts, placards with demands like STOP THE RETURN TO APARTHEID-ERA SECRECY, and lips silenced by masking tape. There is a one white button in particular which appealed to me and I’ll bring back to New York, in case it comes in handy in the new political climate.  Take a careful look, and discover some friends in the crowd…

The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.  When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.

One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?

There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.

When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard.  The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.

Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a deliberately peaceful process of dismantling the authoritarian system.

But 1989 brought not only the joyous image of the Berlin Wall being taken down, but also horrifying images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, where tanks charged defenseless students demanding democratic reforms.

Would the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of the students at Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, bring new strength to those who sat there with him, those who looked on, and those who are  younger and know little about the students trying to stop tanks?

While I was finishing this note, trying to return to my reflection on performativity, I received an email with a piece on the Nobel Peace Prize written just a moment ago in Warsaw by Adam Michnik, one of the Solidarity movement’s leaders, for today’s Gazeta Wyborcza, the second-biggest newspaper in Poland.  I opened it quickly, as I know that he traveled to China this July, and I’d like to end with a brief excerpt by this seasoned political thinker, lifelong dissident, and former political prisoner:

“I was struck in China by a vast change that is rarely reported on by the world’s media — the newly independent public opinion, and the embryonic civil society emerging there.  Liu Xiaobo, the Laureate of the Peace prize and a political prisoner, was one of the creators of this public opinion and civil society. He paid a high price for this – the price of discrimination, loneliness, and imprisonment. Liu deserves admiration and respect, as he is one of those people who restore a belief in the existence of elementary values.”