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The Future of Democracy in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Extract

“The struggle of the African National Congress is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by theiT own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my life-time I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

These are the last public words of Mr Nelson Mandela before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. He evidently thought then that democracy had a future in South Africa, though he had already been driven to the conclusion that it could only be achieved by some kind of revolutionary violence.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 It was the intention to publish the winning essay in the Institute's journal. To the best of my knowledge this has not yet been done, nor the winner's name revealed. Perhaps it would now be too dangerous ‐ in itself a significant comment on the issue.

2 I refuse any longer to accord as of right this continental name to this small and bloody‐minded intrusive group, which only with extreme reluctance allows the indigenous population to be called African.

3 In ‘La sorcellerie des blancs; un anthropologue s'interroge sur ľ Occident’ (Etudes, March 1976), Rene Bureau suggests that what Europeans have always regarded as simply the backwardness of black Africa in the arts and sciences of civilisation is due to a deliberate social choice lying at the roots of African cultures. It is a choice governed by the sentiment of what he calls jealousy. Africans, he suggests, are jealous of their basic human equality ‐ their fundamental political value is therefore not liberty but equality. So they are jealous (not envious) of any man or any initiative which tends to upset this equality. This jealousy finds expression in the universal belief in witchcraft. This is the negative aspect of what he has discovered to be, in contrast with European civilisation, a singularly human and humane and adult culture. He suggests the best translation for African words commonly rendered by witch' or 'sorcerer would be the word ‘superman’. This is the man who has the genius, or the will, or the luck to excel his fellows, for his own ends. And against him African society sets its face in implacable jealousy. Since European civilisation, as experienced by Africans, sets a premium on success, and honours the man who excels (in whatever wav and for whatever purposes), white men are the supermen, the sorcerers par excellence. His studies have all been made in West Africa, and are doubtless not applicable without qualification to the South African village democracy, and especially its capacities to sabotage, with an ironic insouciance, the aims and dreams of western technocratic society.

4 CCM is the result of a merger between TANU, the Tanganyika African National Union, and the Afro‐Shirazi party of Zanzibar. It was under TANU that Tanganyika achieved independence.