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<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blackagendareport.com/content/nelson-mandela%E2%80%99s-long-death">http://blackagendareport.com/content/nelson-mandela%E2%80%99s-long-death</a></small></small></b><br>
<h2>Nelson Mandela’s Long Death</h2>
<h3>by BAR executive editor Glen Ford</h3>
Wed, 12/18/2013<br>
<br>
<p>Had Nelson Mandela gone quickly to the grave when a lung infection
recurred in March of this year, the world might not have experienced
such a fantastic volume of political obituaries on his legacy. The
nine-month deathwatch, culminating in an unprecedented send-off by
nearly 100 heads of state, provided the space and time for a global
examination of, not only the great man’s personal saga, but the tragic
trajectory of the South African liberation struggle. Mandela’s long
death became a wake, at which the body of his life’s work – and that of
his comrades in the African National Congress (ANC) – was on display
for collective view, commentary, and assessment.</p>
<p>When a dying Black man is lavished with praise by virtually all the
imperial villains of the world, that is news, indeed. As corporate
journalists wrote, and then rewrote, their obituaries for the still
breathing Mandela, they revisited the critical period when a real
revolutionary transformation was averted in South Africa through the
miraculous ministrations of “Madiba.” For the first time, the
“mainstream” media explored the terms of the deal that was struck to
reconcile the demands of global capital and the white minority with the
aspirations of the Black majority. Thus, a discussion that had
previously been largely limited to the financial pages, on one hand,
and left publications like this one, on the other, became far more
general.</p>
<p>In the dimming twilight of Mandela’s life, the actual history of the
“transition” to Black rule was illuminated for the larger public. A
straight line could now be drawn connecting the ANC’s early Nineties
pact with capital and the massacre of 34 striking Black miners at
Marikana, in August, 2012. Foreign audiences could now understand how
Cyril Ramaphosa, a former mine workers union leader, a deputy president
of the ANC (and presidential contender), became a billionaire board
member of the corporation that owns the Marikana mine. South Africa’s
2011 United Nations vote in favor of a no-fly zone over Libya,
ultimately resulting in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, a great
supporter of the armed struggle against the white regime, makes perfect
sense in the context of Mandela’s and the ANC’s capitulation to
imperialism, two decades earlier.</p>
<p>For non-South Africans, especially, Mandela was the personification
of the ANC and the embodiment of the South African struggle. His living
aura was a prophylactic against serious analysis of the ANC’s
abandonment of the 1955 Freedom Charter<strong>, </strong>which called
for redistribution of the country’s land and nationalization of the
mines and banks.<strong> </strong>When death began to hover, this
spring, Mandela’s aura was insufficient to limit the scope of the
thousands of political obituaries that were being prepared for
distribution.</p>
<p>Ronnie Kasrils, a former fighter in the ANC’s armed wing who became
intelligence minister under Black rule and served as a high official in
both the ANC and the South African Communist Party, broke the silence
in June. “From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC's soul got under
way, and was eventually lost to corporate power,” he wrote in an
article for the <u><a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error/print">Guardian</a></u>.
“We were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry
out, we ‘sold our people down the river.’"</p>
<p>Kasrils, known as “Red Ronnie,” is white. Now that the “deal” is
common knowledge, there are attempts to blame it on white communists –
to absolve Mandela in much the same way as Black Obama apologists claim
that his white advisors tricked or pressured their icon into pursuing
anti-Black, reactionary policies. But the communists, who were
multi-racial, and the ANC (also multi-racial) were thoroughly
commingled in the South African leadership; they share responsibility
for the betrayal of the revolution. “An ANC-Communist party leadership
eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily
accepted this devil's pact, only to be damned in the process,” said
Kasrils. “It has bequeathed an economy so tied in to the neoliberal
global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room
to alleviate the plight of most of our people.”</p>
<p>On <u><a
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/12/from_marxism_to_neoliberalism_ronnie_kasrils"><em>Democracy
Now</em></a></u><em>!</em> last week, host Amy Goodman repeatedly tried
to get Kasrils to acknowledge or admit that Nelson Mandela had been a
member of the South African Communist Party’s Central Committee.
Kasrils said he would have known if that had been the case, and accepts
Mandela’s denial of membership. But Goodman’s pursuit of the matter
avoids the central fact of Kasril’s testimony: that the leading figures
in the commingled ANC, SACP and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade
Unions) all endorsed or acquiesced to the “sell-out.”</p>
<p>If the Nineties capitulation had been engineered by a small clique
in the leadership, then one could blame the debacle on a few
individuals. But the whole forward motion of the South African
revolution was turned around, so that when John Pilger <u><a
href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-121213.html">interviewed
Mandela</a></u> shortly after he assumed the presidency, he is told the
course is irreversible. “…for this country, privatization is the
fundamental policy,” said Mandela.</p>
<p>To make sure that the capitalist road was irreversible, the deal
included the near-instant creation of a Black business class hopelessly
tied to international capital – like Cyril Ramaphosa and other high
ranking ANC members – which would provide the African social base for
capital’s continued political dominance of the country. When South
Africa rises up, once again – and it will – the poor will have to cut
and hack their way through this new class of Black compradors. They,
too, are Mandela’s children.</p>
<p class="pull"><em>BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at </em><u><a
href="mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com"><em>Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com</em></a></u><em>.</em></p>
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