RED SAND AND RED DUST

Aug 03, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I heard that someone said that Guyana needs a Nelson Mandela. I do not know if any reasons were given for such a suggestion but I can only surmise this has to do with Mandela’s personal integrity in recognizing his limitations.

Mandela’s worth of South Africa has always been what he symbolized rather than what he has ever achieved politically.

For the twenty-eight years he spent behind bars, Mandela was nothing more than a symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle. He symbolized the struggle against apartheid.

His was the international face that was used to galvanize and highlight the struggle which was being waged by his party, the African National Congress, both within and outside of South Africa.

Mandela was to later negotiate the reforms that eventually resulted in majority–rule in South Africa. For this, he was to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In the process of negotiating a new South African constitution as well as political reforms, Mandela and the ANC entered into a process that I believe Guyana can benefit from.

It was a process by which the white South African apartheid regime conceded political power but ensured guarantees for their minority grouping.

It was the willingness of the ANC to negotiate that is worthy of praise. However, the ANC made a great many mistakes in those negotiations, mistakes which are now coming back to haunt them.

They got a deal that assured political power but, as they are now discovering, political power under the existing constitutional arrangements that gave guarantees similar to what Mugabe gave when he signed the instruments of Independence, which was not sufficient to deliver the sort of change that poor South Africans expected when their country achieved majority rule.

In the first term of the ANC, Mandela became yet again another symbol – the symbol of reconciliation. The Truth and Reconciliation process that South Africa tried, I believe, is deeply flawed, and does a great deal of discredit to outstanding anti-apartheid voices such as Bishop Desmond Tutu. More importantly it achieves a perverted kind of justice.

There was a movie that was made about this process. It is named Red Dust and stars Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejifor.

It tries to reveal just how contentious, controversial and problematic the process of Truth and Reconciliation can be.

It also tries to leave behind the moral that this process is helping to bring the peoples of South Africa closer together. The movie succeeded in the former but failed in the latter.

It is a movie that should be seen by those interested in understanding the political missteps of the process negotiated by Mandela who became South Africa’s first Black President.

His record as President is far from impressive and from a foreign policy perspective it was a disaster. In the end, Mandela knew that he was not the man for the job, knew that he has been imprisoned for too long to become the face of the new South Africa and in an act of supreme personal integrity he gave way to one of Africa’s finest, Thabo Mbeki.

Mandela was a symbol, first for the fight for an end to apartheid and then for Truth and Reconciliation. The unity government that he engineered flopped. The guarantees that he gave today to the Whites stand as a major obstacle to improving the lot of his people in South Africa.

However, it is the mechanics of the process which Guyana should benefit from. That was a process of give and take, of finding common turf, of trying to understand the insecurities of both of the major groups and thence trying to build legal guarantees to take care of the individual fears of both Blacks and Whites.
Guyana has twin ethnic security dilemmas. There are fears on both sides.

On the side of the Africans of Guyana, there is the fear of domination, a fear that is not just about the loss of political power but about the perceptions about what such a loss can result in, a fear of dispossession, discrimination and loss of economic space.

On the other side, the East Indians of Guyana also have their insecurities, conditioned by their experience. Their fears are related to the physical security, physical elimination, arbitrary dispossession, victimization and discrimination.

Guyana can better South Africa by initiating a peaceful process of political reforms that aims to take care of these fears.

The Mandela-De Klerk process has left South Africa still deeply divided and with virtually two different countries in one territorial space.

Guyana has the opportunity of learning from this process and of not committing the same mistakes. If it is to succeed, it will require the same type of personal integrity and Statesmanship that was present in the case of South Africa.

Guyana has to look, however, to the future for that process. There is no way that process is going to begin under the present government.

However, by identifying a political leader with the requisite political experience and qualities to purse a process of political and legislative compromise, Guyana can outdo South Africa and in fact achieve the success that has so far eluded that country.