(Reviewer: Ralph Zulman, Vol. 67, No. 1, Pesach 2012)
Born in 1943, R W Johnson describes himself as “a working class kid” who grew up “in a house overlooking the Mersey Docks”. He was educated at Natal and Oxford universities and was for 26 years a Fellow of Magdalen College at the latter institution. He has lived in South Africa since the late 1990s, working as a journalist as well as being, until 2001, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation. He has written several books, the most recent prior to this one being South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation. He is well known as an analyst of South African history and politics and, latterly, as a severe critic of the ANC government.
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid, first published in 2009, is Johnson’s latest book. In his review in the Daily Telegraph, author and academic Andre Brink described it as “a massive volume in which in its attempt to leave no political stone unturned confronts the reader with an avalanche of information”. The book is 702 pages in length, with illustrations, abbreviations, a preface, some 15 chapters of text, notes and a comprehensive index.
Johnson expresses the somewhat controversial view that there never was a Mandela miracle – the “real miracle”, he contends, was how President FW De Klerk “led the white minority to surrender its power peacefully”. Mandela, for Johnson, was little more than a “charismatic pawn for the Marxist-Communists who had hi-jacked the ANC in exile and who were really only interested in getting their snouts in the trough.” In his review inThe Independent, Ivan Fallon describes Johnson as “one of nature’s (or certainly South Africa’s) great pessimists, a man who has looked very closely at modern events and seen little to please him.”
In Johnson’s assessment former president Thabo Mbeki, who he sees as the real power behind the throne during the Mandela years, would “give Hitler or Stalin a good run for their place in history. Mugabe, who plays his part, is a minor villain by comparison”. Fallon writes:
Johnson sprays his venom fairly generously across the ANC, but the bulk of it is reserved for Mbeki, whom he pictures as obsessed by race and racism, violently anti-white and paranoid, amidst a myriad other failings. His contribution in Johnson’s view has been worse than disastrous, particularly on aids and Zimbabwe but also on lots of other issues as well. He surrounded himself with sycophantic cronies, including the “awful” Manto Tshabalala-Msimang who made South Africa a world laughing stock with her Aids policy and mismanaged the country at every level, causing crime and corruption to blossom, irreplaceable white expertise to leave the country, the public health system to break down, and infrastructure and power-generation to run down. A vibrant and potentially incredibly wealthy country has been brought to the edge of ruin. And it has been done in a secretive and sinister manner, driven by a twisted and racist Marxist ideology.
Johnson describes the late Kader Asmal as “witheringly, passed for an intellectual within the ANC, but clearly wasn’t up to much as he rushed around the country opening water schemes while local women ululated and photographers snapped.”.. He had failed to grasp the task of government and “presided over many blunders”.
As Fallon points out, the book “is laden with similar glancing insults of ANC figures, some of whom deserve all they get, others who do not. Between them, Johnson argues, they have “created a society in meltdown, where ‘things fall apart’ in the apocalyptic Yeatsian sense.”
Ironically, as Johnson writes, Mbeki’s enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause created a major foreign policy debacle in 2001, with the hosting of the now notorious antisemitic United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban that year. The previous year, at Mbeki’s instigation, the South African Human Rights Commission held an anti-racism conference, “a veritable festival of white-bashing, to give vent to Mbeki’s inclusive vision of a rainbow nation”. Johnson comments as follows on former judge Richard Goldstone:
An extremely able lawyer, Goldstone had attracted criticism within the legal profession even on his way up as an advocate, when he had socially entertained at his home the attorneys who might bring him cases. Such behaviour, seen as touting for custom, was greatly frowned upon. Throughout his career he had been criticized for his sheer ambition… it was rumoured that he saw himself as succeeding Boutros Boutros–Ghali one day as UN SecretaryGeneral, leading to his nickname ‘Richard Richard-Goldstone’. Unlike other judges in the Constitutional Court, he had been careful to avoid anti-apartheid activism. Indeed, his decision to take silk in 1980 had drawn criticism from liberal circles, for many anti-apartheid lawyers refused promotion to the judiciary, where they would have to apply apartheid laws.
Under De Klerk, however, Goldstone made up for lost time, heading up the high-profile Goldstone Commission into the causes of political violence. The most remarkable fact about the Goldstone Commission was that while it was supposed to investigate all armed groups, it simply failed to investigate MK or any form of violence organized by the ANC. Writes Johson, “Then, just weeks before the 1994 election, Goldstone dramatically reversed himself, pointing to a systematic and silent war waged by the police from a farm called Vlakplaas against the ANC and its allies.”
Johnson deals with two other Jewish judges. He describes former Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson as a long-time ANC supporter who had helped to defend Mandela at the Rivonia Trial. Albie Sachs is categorized as “a Communist Party apparatchik “who bore a “badge of honour” in the new South Africa through having had his “blown off in the struggle”.
Brink compares the book to that of Mark Gevisser’s biography of Thabo Mbeki. He comments that Johnson, unlike Gevisser, “is more concerned with data than interpretation. Consequently in spite of its great length, it is rather a survey of the already–known, gleaned mainly from newspapers than a treasury of new insights and diagnoses.”
Other reviewers are complimentary. In the Evening Standard, Antony Sampson wrote, “Johnson shows his mastery of both the broad sweep and the complexities of history without bias” while the reviewer in the Economist wrote, “Johnson is a historian, but also a polemical journalist, and he writes with passion about the present. He provides a robustly liberal critique of the new South Africa”. Justin Cartwright in the Daily Telegraph is equally complimentary, commenting, “This is a well-written and necessary book which challenges the myths draping the Rainbow Nation”.
All I can add, echoing Christopher Hope in the EnglishSunday Times, is that the book is “essential reading”.
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid by R W Johnson, Allen Lane, Published by the Penguin Group, 702pp, photographs, index, endnotes[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Mr Justice Ralph Zulman, a long-serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs and a frequent contributor to its Reviews pages, is a former Judge of the Appeal Court of South Africa.
