by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 Africa Correspondent

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - To dispel this suffocating fog of silence and lies ... - Antjie Krog ...

I have been watching the video of Nelson Mandela's release from Prison in 1990. The whole euphoria of those days came back to me, poignantly rather than blissfully. I was younger then, full of youthful well meaning hopes and I trusted the world order.

I vividly remember that February day. I was travelling on a Trunslux coach to Johannesburg for another varsity year. The bus had stopped, at 2100 hrs, in Bloemfontein (a strong base for Afrikaner nationalism) for drinks and snacks. The television at the supermarket we were buying in was broadcasting Mandela's release from Victor Forster prison earlier that day. He walked out of prison hassled by the glamour of being the national liberator. He was met by a hurricane of hope and an explosion of demands in anticipation of a vision that usually comes from years of solitary contemplation. His release prompted all sorts of things. For instance there was a sudden proud declaration of our African culture and dignity with an overrated sense of entitlement in most black folks. It seemed as though, at last, a dream of the system of democracy for our country was in the offing, because Mandela, our prophet and liberator, was free. It was hoped that free and equal relations between people would emancipate all from their respective miseries.

Of course there were those who had put themselves on the wrong side of Mandela's struggles who were then distressed and panic-stricken by his release. Take the supermarket owner in Bloemfontein, for instance, an Afrikaner. He turned off the television while we were still watching in vexed impatience. Most of us just laughed at him and realised the country still had a long way to go. With the exception of his likes, most white people had already educated themselves out of their antecedent prejudices. Even some were watching with us in polite patience and became most vexed when the owner turned off the television. Some, naturally, were just anticipating the moment he would offend against their prejudices in his speech.

At that moment we saw the real bent of Mandela's character. He was moderate in his resentments without any passion for pre-eminence though he found himself an idol of the masses. You could feel his spirit trembling as he spoke, the usual sign of those who have heeded the meaning of their sufferings. Outside Victor Voster prison, he stood with his arm raised for the amandla (power) sign. His eyes looked bitter with wisdom of weighing whether the fame gained was commensurate with the garnered experience of hidden tragedy, the buried 27 years. I must have been wondering whether the youthful, brave guesses of his heart that led him to prison were worth the famous reception he had gained in his ripe years.

He staggered for a brief moment from the firm hold of Mrs Nomzamo "Winnie" Mandela. In that moment the real man behind the icon was revealed. We saw an intense perplexity in his eyes of a circumstantial hero who was now transported only by an unfaltering hope for a better world. There was a transparent simplicity that was characterised by the rustic realism of a tribal sage in him. He presented the second hand opinions and clichÈs the party politic had written as his speech with equinimanity. His voice had the light hoarseness of a cawing crow.

I wouldn't compare his oratory gifts to Cicero. They lacked brevity and Cicero's mordant irony. Nor would I compare his words to those of Demosthenes, which "drove intolerable darts that stung and purified like a running fire." But then again, Mandela had no studied hidden agendas that drove him into passion. If a statesman is a trustier spokesman of the average man than a philosopher or a poet, then of the above Mandela is one. Take him all in all; he is the voice of the people and the kind of leader demanded by our times.

I can't help finding superficial similarities between what's happening to the Iraqi people now, and what was happening to us then: Noami Klein wrote thus in her article titled 'Privatization in Disguise' from The Nation about the Iraqi people:

A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverized by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country has been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their newfound "freedom"--for which so many of their loved ones perished--comes pre-shackled with irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling.

They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy.

There's a feeling of deja vu as I watch the Iraqi people celebrate the fall of Saddam and loot their towns. It happened in Cape Town, to some extent, when Mandela was due to give his first speech. When I see the US manufacturing ready-made leaders for the Iraqis, who'll toe the American line no doubt, I empathise with them. They've exchanged a tyrant for enlightened despotism that legitimizes and sanctifies greed in the name of freedom.

Now the gruesome deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians will not scream at the ears of the Western world who literally created the tyrant.

Other Iraqis will be left to die quietly in the back streets of shanty towns and it'll be business as usual in the Occidental countries. The Iraqis are now condemned to enjoy none of the benefits of democratic liberty while they'll suffer the worst features of effective democracy, the invisibility of being poor. I can almost hear them, in five years time, sigh with permanent disappointment: "We were saved from a tyrant only to be reserved for robbers."

That's when they've ended up a disillusioned and hard-bitten population, in the mist of foreign-owned prosperity, with first class markets which benefit them nothing. For now at least the illusion is still stunning and complete so the jubilations ring. But joy from foreign liberators lasts only a moment. Then comes the realisation of the futility of a liberation that's also an oppressive annihilation of who you are. And with that comes the promotion of a Marxist belief of world history that is driven by a kind of suicidal instinct to create unbearable conditions, whereby the world moves towards an inevitable doom or revolution, which those who have most reason to fear do most to bring about.

Perhaps Roza Luxemburg was right in saying self-determination is impossible under capitalism. If that smacks of defeatism look around the world and see what do poor people live on except their hopes. Only in Iraq, since the majority is Islam, their hopes will be in a freedom that comes through the religious sword. We're all familiar by now, especially the Israelis, with that kind of instinct to fatalism.

Leaders who came from exile have a tendency of promoting the elective economic dictatorship of the West. Initially they pretend to carry the mandate of the people. Then something they call 'adjusting to reality' hits.

I called it, in my last piece here (The Face of My World), the loss of nerve in the ANC (African National Congress) government. In real terms this translates into government massaging the fears of world business and markets at the expense of the general hopes of the people. State assets are sold piecemeal to private companies, with little originality in our case, as opposed to the auctioning of the country happening in Iraq.

Take, for instance, the privatisation of our major and only landline company Telkom. Everyone who is a citizen is entitled to buy shares on it with some special concessions for the previously disadvantaged. The only problem is that those previously advantaged can hardly stay above the poverty line. This means the offer is basically meaningless to them as they can never afford to buy those shares. The offer stands almost as an insult, especially since they're the ones who'll bear the pinch of job losses most. To them the hoped-for democracy literally has betrayed their hopes. And since capitalism is said to operate at its best with a strong middle class the focus of its policies is on developing this class and letting the devil strangle the rear. At best the poor must live on imposed charity and pulverised human dignity.

In that sense we're ahead of the Iraqi people. For them, what adds insult to injury is that these policies are being imposed by an occupying force.

"How dare they not want to be liberated on our terms when we freed them from Saddam?" says my American friend. To me this is a typical statement of those who are with Bush. Perhaps Naomi Klein's article answers this question better:

Entirely absent from this debate [of how best to rebuild Iraq] are the Iraqi people, who might--who knows?--want to hold on to a few of their assets. Iraq will be owed massive reparations after the bombing stops, but without any real democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatization without representation.

Like us, soon the Iraqi people will feel against the rock and a hard place. Like Petronius who was encouraged by the mad Roman Emperor, Nero, to commit suicide. The peanuts are inside the trap cage. Freedom to the Imperium means living based on high consumption of material comforts; modes of permanent entertainments spreading all over the world to create cultural homogeneity and business for the Empire. To the American Empire it is entirely inconceivable that people might want to be free without necessarily adopting the American view of living.

I'm not so bigoted as to deny a certain shallow charm in the western kind of living, after all, very few of us do not crave instant self-gratification that's is the cornerstone of the American Way. There're even positive aspects in that western kind of living, like respect for human rights, not to mention the now quickly fading respect for the voice of the majority. Only, I think, it disgraceful that people should be impelled into adopting the American Way even against their will.

Western civilisation, as a fulfilled culture, is very difficult to transfer because it's based on past experience. In the actions of the present US government are rumours of things to come to the western kind of democracy if not checked. American avarice has become so sophisticated that even bandits can inherit power. Bush and his cabal have degraded the US government into a conspiracy of rich people seeking their own enrichment under the name of the commonweal. They've made it into a club government that has abandoned any basis in morality for the bland materialistism shown in their foreign policy. If their hidden agendas, their undemocratic performances are against their proffered democratic promises, doesn't it render nonsensical and artificial the democratic dispensation of the most powerful country in the world? How much damage will they do on small country like Iraq?

Nothing new in the world, it's been said. Thus the possession of power begets the lust for its exercise and its extension. It's always been the tendency of the West to cloak this lust with the plea of liberating ordinary people from their oppressive leaders.

That's why these new crusades of resorting to war as a means of imposing just societies come as a little surprise to us. The world, again, is bloated in propaganda and misinformation by extreme forces who accuse each other of being kingdoms of Satan. They use sentiments of liberty or religion to destroy freedom for others. Still the cure for our world stands in the universal aspects of our humanity. In the universality that respects the autonomy and diversity of our national and ethnic cultures. If our way to progress is not found through intergration it won't be found at all. You cannot liberate by subjugation.