South Africa

...THINGS COULD not be more different today...

...Combine this with the high unemployment levels, and it becomes less surprising that redistributive pressure from COSATU is so muted...

...The exceptions proving the rule were the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique...

...Banning Black Beauty was perhaps the comic apotheosis of their grotesque endeavor: they thought of themselves as Puritans no less than as racial purists...

...Cape Town is like Los Angeles: what life is like depends on where you live...

...we had no idea what real pornography was...

...The considerable distance between Parliament's will and what actually happens is a severe practical constraint on the ANC...

...Why does COSATU not push for more redistribution...

...Given the speed with which capital moves in the world today, there will always be destinations that DISSENT / Winter 1999 33 provide more attractive returns...

...In any case it makes few public statements on macroeconomic policy...

...The wealthy protect themselves with sophisticated security systems in gated communities staffed by private security forces...

...For the most part, redistribution to those at or near the bottom would involve the transfer of resources and benefits to people significantly below the economic levels of COSATU members...

...Remarkably, South African tax rates are comparatively low (the top tax rate is similar to that of the United States, low by world standards...

...That was tangible enough well over a decade before sanctions would begin biting...

...South Africa's corporatist policy-making bodies such as the National Economic Development and Labor Council involve big business and big labor, but not regional unions (not to mention the unemployed) whose members may stand to lose all employment if wages are not permitted to fall...

...In any case it does not criticize GEAR...

...Respectable people kept away...

...GEAR has been 30 DISSENT / Winter 1999 in place for over two years without producing discernible growth, employment, or redistribution...

...South African political parties are not required to divulge their sources of financial support...

...The political pact that led to the transition seems underwritten by an implicit social contract between the new political elite and those with economic power: the still overwhelmingly white landed and business elites...

...There was instead a negotiated settlement, designed in no small part to head off the possibility of revolution...

...If those who benefit from the neoliberal juggernaut can get their way in countries that have had institutionalized social democratic politics for decades, why would they not get it here...

...The Communist Party remains part of the ANC alliance, along with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU...

...Minimal inroads have been made into transforming the educational and health care systems, particularly in rural areas, so that millions continue to live without the most rudimentary provisions...

...Little is known about the expectations of South Africa's poor, but there is no evidence that the ANC is losing much support among them...

...The Basic Conditions bill is an obstacle to this to the degree that it is enforced, though what this degree is remains unclear...

...In the suburbs, garden walls have grown into fortresses topped with barbed wire and ostentatious alarm systems...

...To me these critics seem to miss the fact that there never was a revolution...

...By the 1960s the homeland and Bantustan resettlement policies had herded nonwhites into townships outside the suburbs that ringed the inner cities...

...Thanks, without implication, to Bruce Ackerman, Courtney Jung, Mahmood Mamdani, and Adolph Reed, Jr., for comments...

...This is most dramatically evident in the changes in urban geography that have turned South African cities inside out...

...But small absolute increases in living conditions may not be so lightly dismissed by the inhabitants of these camps...

...Instead of locking blacks out, whites now lock themselves in...

...Today television is filled with American fare, CNN is broadcast nightly, and the movies (no longer called films) in the theaters are identical to those playing in every American city...

...Democratic Party members see themselves as the middle-of-the-road, pro-business "sensible chaps party," and although there is a good deal of energy in their younger, increasingly Afrikaner, leadership ranks, it is doubtful that their support will break into double digits in the 1999 elections or that they will develop significant nonwhite grass roots...

...As with GEAR, one wonders whether these policies actually have more to do with satisfying particular interest groups than with providing what South Africa most needs...

...The increases in the minimum wage and a forty-five-hour work week contained in the bill are not only resisted by business, however...

...As the ANC drifts to the right, most of the official opposition parties are either indistinguishable from it or to its right on most matters of political economy...

...And substantial redistribution would take some of these resources from them...

...Our relations with blacks were limited to the obsequious interchanges characteristic of dealings with servants...

...All this means that the opposition parties are largely irrelevant to the political choices of the day, which are played out within the ANC...

...It is hard to overstate the degree to which white South Africa saw itself as one of the last outposts of Judeo-Christian civilization, fighting the twin evils of communism in the East and moral and social decay in the West...

...Indeed, they may actually be supporting the ANC government more than most people realize...

...This too has an American ring in that whites mainly talk about crime while blacks mainly suffer it...

...The great majority of violent crime is committed by poor non-whites against poor non-whites, much of it in the course of gang violence associated with drugs and organized crime...

...Fear of crime is rampant, endlessly sensationalized in the media...

...The fact that Madikizela-Mandela was outmaneuvered in her 1997 bid for the deputy 32 DISSENT / Winter 1999 leadership of the ANC with virtually no fuss (aside from the drumbeat of hysteria in the white press until it was accomplished) suggests that grass-roots populism has some distance to travel as an effective force within the ANC...

...The signs of violent crime, and measures to prevent it, are everywhere: bank guards carry automatic weapons in plain view, squalor and destitution abound...

...I have seen uniformed government employees cleaning street gutters in Nelson Mandela Park squatters' camp in Hout Bay...

...Employment in the formal sector continues to shrink due to a weak gold price and the loss of industrial jobs to the East...

...IBM, Jeep, and Kodak are making rapid inroads into markets abandoned to the Europeans and Japanese during the sanctions era...

...THAT THE government finds reality so difficult to reshape is less deserving of comment than how it, and other powerful political players, respond to this fact...

...SOUTH AFRICA' S politics have become notably banal...

...Certainly whites, especially lower-middle-class whites, also feel vulnerable...

...Most striking about South Africa in the 1960s was its extreme isolation...

...Phrases like "individual responsibility" and "budget constraints" fell effortlessly from their lips as they told of the limits within which they operate, insisted on the importance of reinventing and downsizing government, and of privatizing as much as possible, even public works...

...Turning unused gold mines two miles underground into prisons was one of the more notable ministerial suggestions of 1997...

...If not organized labor, what of a populist revolt among the ANC grass roots from those who are seeing few or no improvements in their lives—such as the unemployed, the sort of people Winnie Madikizela-Mandela can mobilize...

...We who lived in Johannesburg's northern suburbs never thought of trying to visit Soweto (which was, in any case, illegal), less than half an hour's drive away...

...Ironically, part of the answer may lie in the highly skewed income distribution itself: raising taxes on even the top 20 percent would mean new taxation of many COSATU members...

...As elsewhere in the world, the communists are in disarray...

...Others criticize it regularly, in the press if not in Parliament...

...Parliament passes all kinds of (often contradictory) legislation that emanates from different ministries (GEAR from the Finance Ministry, the Basic Conditions bill from the Ministry of Labor) and in response to different interest groups, but this says little about what is actually implemented on the ground...

...COSATU argues that the unemployed are substantially dependent on the employed, so that there is not really a conflict of interest as far as fighting for high wages is concerned...

...Dramatic as the residents find the changes, they are part of the normalization of South African life...

...The quid for the quo is that the economic elites do not defect...

...The ANC's 1994 pledge to build a million houses over five years (widely seen as responsibly moderate at the time) is less than 10 percent fulfilled...

...More apposite than proclamations that the ANC has sold out on the revolution was the prediction of one friend after the 1994 election that now Mandela would find out what it's like to be a black city mayor in the United States...

...Half of the unemployed live in rural areas, making them exceedingly difficult to mobilize...

...This is yet another area in which the dilemmas of South African politics seem all too familiar to the American observer...

...The informal sector of the economy is obviously thriving, but little of it appears in government statistics because people want to avoid taxation...

...Suburban whites felt even more threatened by the blacks they had banished than by the world outside South Africa...

...But because everyone knows that the CP would not win a single seat if it ran outside the ANC alliance, it has no real leverage over decision-making...

...The Inkatha Freedom Party, the ethnic Zulu party that has historically favored privatization, has not opposed GEAR (Inkatha remains a junior partner in the government...

...American fast-food chains litter the cities as they do here...

...The Democratic Party looks healthier, particularly in the Western Cape...

...The high incidence of daylight armed robbery, rape, and visibly threatening poverty amid plenty, makes this inevitable...

...McWorld seems to be embraced with open arms through much of the social order...

...Many squatters' camps have some, admittedly minimal, basic amenities that they lacked five years ago...

...Some polls show the UDP garnering support in the high single digits...

...Moreover, the ANC is not ignoring this group entirely...

...The inner cities have been ceded...

...No one expects the 1999 election results to be significantly different...

...Initially it is an incongruous sight, alongside the tattered washing strung between corrugated iron shacks and the scrawny roaming dogs...

...The United Democratic Party, organized by Roelf Meyer, formerly of the National Party, and Bantu Holomisa, ousted from the ANC, takes few identifiable stands on policy questions...

...His new book, Democratic Justice, will be published by Yale University Press in the fall...

...But no one sees it as a serious challenger to the ANC...

...What has replaced it is in some ways more African and in some more cosmopolitan...

...Much white fear and black propaganda is about Africanization, yet the degree of Americanization is more striking...

...Just as white South Africans were massively ignorant of the rejecting world they eschewed, so were they ignorant of black South Africa and its inhabitants...

...On returning for a year's sabbatical leave in Cape Town in 1997, I quickly discovered that the country I grew up in no longer exists...

...The ferocious laws designed to suppress communism were paralleled by the often ludicrous but no less seriously meant battery of laws and regulations to halt moral decline...

...It seems to want to occupy whatever ground might open up between the ANC, the Democratic Party, and the remnants of the National Party, while linking itself decisively to the new order...

...The currency has lost over a third of its value since as recently as March 1997, and high interest rates (well over 20 percent for most purposes) stifle domestic entrepreneurship...

...Politicians grandstand with ever more draconian proposals...

...the Cape Flats could be Watts...

...THIS LAST point merits emphasis in countries like South Africa, which have severely constrained institutional enforcement capacities...

...It is, indeed, striking how little anti-American sentiment one discerns...

...Of blacks living further to the north we knew nothing...

...The urban geography story is the tip of an iceberg...

...It shows no signs of developing into a national party...

...The government avoids putting large-scale expropriation or increases in taxation on the table, it does not interfere with the self-protection of gated communities, and it largely toes the line so far as neo-liberal economic reform is concerned...

...One might expect it to be a major constraint on neoliberal policies like GEAR and a force for downward redistribution, and to a limited extent it is...

...The markets and shopping malls contain African curios, but also streams of Chicago Bulls paraphernalia and the like...

...Why didn't Pete Wilson think of that...

...By this I don't only mean its ostracism from the world community...

...The parallels in between hold as well...

...Even the "independent" reserve bank is a lot more constrained than those of less vulnerable economies, as we saw in mid-1997, when speculative attacks on the rand forced an abrupt about-face of its announced policy of bringing down interest rates to stimulate the economy and promote domestic entrepreneurship...

...Sea Point used to be a quiet, largely Jewish retirement neighborhood...

...But focusing on ostracism misses the degree to which apartheid South Africa's isolation was embraced by much of the white elite, English as well as Afrikaans...

...Although COSATU endorsed the ANC's recommitment to GEAR at its late 1997 conference, it also got much of what it wanted included in the Basic Conditions of Employment legislaDISSENT / Winter 1999 31 tion passed at around the same time, over strong objections from business, and in contradiction to GEAR's logic...

...Radicals have been disappointed for centuries when the dispossessed fail to make global distributional comparisons, focusing instead either on their own absolute conditions or on those closest to them in the socioeconomic order...

...in almost all respects it is a far cry from the South Africa I departed a quarter of a century ago...

...Hence its acronym UDP, evidently intended to be as close as possible to that of the United Democratic Front, the fulcrum of the 1980s resistance movement until the unbanning of the ANC...

...Our news from the outside world came from British Movietone newsreels, often weeks out of date, shown in cinemas before feature films...

...At one conference on parties where I questioned the wisdom of this, I found the ANC representatives more hostile to disclosure than anyone else...

...By the same token, the high unemployment statistics may reflect other weak institutional capacities...

...The trouble with endlessly positioning oneself to have the "correct" incentives for the private investor is that often this will not result in the delivery of goods and services to poor populations...

...The government is powerless to collect revenue from it, and most of the thousands of people who work in it may well be counted as unemployed...

...The poor fend for themselves with little help from often corrupt and in any case massively overworked police...

...In the 1970s there was no television and the press was myopically inward-looking...

...Our passports were not valid for any African countries even if they had been willing to admit us...

...Perhaps this is one of the final ironies of apartheid's legacy: white Afrikaner culture now absorbs much hostility that might otherwise be directed at American cultural imperialism...

...The upscale shopping malls at the Waterfront or in Cavendish Square in Cape Town are packed with the same clothes, computers, sports equipment, videos, and CDs that one finds in any comparable American mall...

...Given South Africa's exceedingly high unemployment (somewhere between 25 percent and 33 percent, depending on whose statistics you believe), these policies are contentious within the labor movement...

...This might change, but there are major obstacles...

...Part of this was, no doubt, a defensive response to rejection, but not all of it...

...Hillbrow, which had been a center of Johannesburg's nightlife and progressive culture (such as it was), is now a stark and frightening shadow of its former self...

...Despite continuing British influence manifested in Land Rovers on the streets, the BBC, cricket, rugby, and soccer, it is U.S...

...Even in its regional stronghold in Natal, Inkatha has the support of only about half of the Zulu population...

...Support for all political parties has softened somewhat, but it remains substantially where it was in 1994...

...This may be true some of the time, but it glosses over important issues of gender and urban-rural inequality, and in any case it ignores greater net gains that might be achieved if unemployment could be reduced...

...Why is there not more pressure from the organized left to redistribute downward through the tax system, either directly in the form of transfer payments or indirectly in the form of funding public works...

...Lorene() Marques (now Maputo) and Beira were seen as places where the risque few allegedly took off for long weekends involving gambling, drugs, and black prostitutes...

...The one party that one might have expected to emerge on the left is the Pan Africanist Congress, but it remains in the same disarray as when it garnered negligible support in the 1994 elections...

...Now South Africa has American-style inner cities that the white middle classes avoid as much as possible, limiting their pathways to business districts and DISSENT / Winter 1999 29 daylight hours...

...This is not to mention their effect on the poor, who might otherwise use the sixteen thousand rand (about $2,700) government grants to leverage the cost of building a house...

...Playboy was banned as pornographic...

...After all, the Asian miracles of the 1970s and 1980s were not achieved in open economies...

...In interviews with several ministers and deputy-ministers in May of 1998, I was struck by how much they have embraced the same mantra as New Democrats in the United States and New Labour in Britain...

...The multimillion Rand taxi business is a good example...

...In a country with the high levels of mobilization that South Africa has seen over the past decade and a half, one might anticipate that this would carry over into pressure on the ANC from below...

...Moreover, the goalposts continually shift...

...If you have been living amid stinking refuse for years it makes a difference when it is removed...

...Those who live in urban areas (mainly squatters' camps in and around the towns and cities) might seem more likely candidates, but there are plenty of Latin American and Asian illustrations of the proposition that the urban poor can remain politically unmobilized for decades...

...Now it is more like West Hollywood with its adult video stores, bars, and strip joints...

...Although inflation has been brought down into single digits and spending targets have been more or less met, only the informal economy appears vibrant...

...Figures like Michael Jordan, Wesley Snipes, and Michael Jackson are immensely popular...

...It might make more sense for South Africa to focus less on elusive foreign investment for a while, and more on getting interest rates down and stimulating the domestic economy, worrying less about deficits and inflation and more about growth and employment...

...It is easy to be taken aback by the extent to which this is true...

...Apartheid cities were well-heeled at the center, banishing poverty and urban squalor to the townships outside...

...SOME POLITICAL commentators excoriate the ANC for having sold out on the revolution in South Africa...

...Some of their leaders and intellectuals march in lock step with the ANC leadership...

...Under World Bank and various forms of corporate pressure, the African National Congress (ANC)-led government quickly abandoned its (moderately) redistributive Reconstruction and Development Program in favor of a conventional neoliberal economic restructuring diet intended to produce Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) by cutting public spending, limiting the deficit, holding taxes down, reducing inflation, and privatization...

...IAN SHAPIRO teaches political science at Yale...

...This naturally prompts the suspicion that they would be the most embarrassed were the sources of their funds to become public...

...Rondebosch and much of the southern suburbs could easily be Beverly Hills or Brentwood...

...polls reveal it to be the principal beneficiary of National Party disarray (though some Nationalists will move to the minuscule right-wing Freedom Front...

...From the Immorality Act, to the laws banning virtually everything except religious service on Sundays, to the laws against every sort of gambling, to anti-drug laws that were harsh even by contemporary American standards, South Africa's governors saw themselves as drawing multiple lines in the sand...

...Yet here too South Africa no longer seems exceptional...

...The National Party is riven by internal conflicts and a terminal identity crisis...

...influence that seems ascendant...

...This makes the country an exceedingly weak player in the poker game of currency speculation...

...The result is that governments committed to this strategy find it increasingly difficult to keep control of their policy agendas...

...Those in the middle manage as best they can...

...COSATU's relationship with the ANC leadership is more multifaceted...

...That suggestions of this sort seem to fall on deaf ears in the ANC should scarcely surprise us...

...Here one might expect opposition to neoliberalism to manifest itself, but the main likely vehicles are all problematic...

...The norms are depressing, no doubt, but why should we expect things to be different...

...In the case of the Basic Conditions bill, for instance, it may well be that regional unions and employers conspire to ignore it...

...South Africa's foreign-exchange reserves are no greater than a medium-sized hedge fund...

...These places were said to be rife with syphilis and Arab sailors who would slit your throat for a wristwatch...