Freedom Brings Few Jobs, But the ANC Still Rules
OUDTSHOORN, South Africa — President Thabo Mbeki betrayed himself with an impish smile from his perch in a regal red leather chair set in the middle of a huge elevated stage, savoring a sweet personal and political triumph. Two weeks ahead of his near-certain reelection as president of South Africa as a result of national elections on April 14, he'd been offered Oudtshoorn's highest honor, "the freedom" of the town. Oudtshoorn is an Afrikaner redoubt in the Western Cape, the only province in South Africa where blacks are outnumbered by the country's minorities -- whites, coloreds, Indians and Asians.
Next to Mbeki sat Oudtshoorn's white mayor dressed in a colonial-era robe. He proclaimed his black president "a free man of Oudtshoorn." One of the other speakers at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival cited the honor as proof that the town was now irrevocably part of "an Afrikaans world where apartheid is totally gone." Gone for good perhaps, but certainly not forgotten. As the third national democratic election in South Africa was winding down, observers of Mbeki's campaign might be forgiven the impression that the bad old days had passed far more recently. The president had mounted a campaign against his chief opponents as if Nelson Mandela's triumph happened yesterday. In a "Letter from the President" posted on the African National Congress website, Mbeki ripped his challengers as virtual saboteurs of the country's transition from white rule.
He'd also led an astonishing hamlet-to-hamlet campaign sweep of the country in which Mbeki and other top national party leaders criticized the performances of local officials, promising "to do more, better." Mbeki stripped to his shirt sleeves, posing as a populist insurgent holding his own government to account. "If the ANC could only govern as well as it campaigns, the country would be an amazing place," one South African remarked.
A scan of the Oudtshoorn audience helped explain Mbeki's tack. The presence on stage of members of the country's emerging multiracial middle class was evidence of undeniable progress. But the lives of blacks penned behind rows of cyclone fences on the far side of the stadium told the rest of the story. These people are part of a continuing mass migration from rural areas to burgeoning townships on the outskirts of towns and cities across the globe.
