Still in his late 20s, Andrew Feinstein returned to his native South Africa in the early 1990s after years of studying at Berkeley and Cambridge. He had left to avoid being drafted into the apartheid state's military -- then engaged in a dirty war on its northern border -- but with the release of Nelson Mandela, he threw himself heart and soul into the process of transforming the stricken nation into a multiracial democracy. Joining Mandela's African National Congress party, he found himself involved in some crucial situations leading to the transfer of power. After South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, he became a legislator, first in Gauteng province (which includes Johannesburg, Pretoria and its environs) and soon in the national parliament in Cape Town.
'After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future' by Andrew Feinstein
BOOK REVIEW
A former legislator in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress recalls its heady early days and the crushing disappointment that followed in this heartfelt, hopeful memoir.
In "After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future," his honest, revealing memoir, Feinstein captures the immense excitement he felt at participating in such epochal events. The tone of his account might best be expressed in the marvelous lines Wordsworth wrote recalling his hopeful feelings about a revolution two centuries earlier:
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! - Oh times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!"
For Feinstein, this euphoria lasted for several heady years as his party and his government -- indeed, the whole country -- did much under Mandela's leadership to, in Lincoln's words, "bind up the nation's wounds" and try to deal with problems lingering from apartheid and new ones natural in an evolving society. He shows that this was not just a matter of inspiring examples and speeches from the top but a lot of nuts-and-bolts work on the part of foot soldiers like himself and his colleagues.
But once Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, governed South Africa, Feinstein became so disillusioned with the acceleration of corruption, inefficiency and betrayal of core principles he witnessed that he felt there was no longer a place for him with the ANC. After resigning his seat in protest in 2001, he once again exiled himself from South Africa only a few years after his joyous return home.
