Word: ances
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Struggle The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white...
...those early years, with Mandela presiding as the founding father of what Tutu dubbed "The Rainbow Nation," diversity, it was said, was no longer a source of division, but one of strength, hope, even beauty. Mandela's embrace of the new vision hid the fact that many in the ANC rank and file were struggling to discard their old monochrome view of the world. The ANC was - and still is - confronting the same dilemma that faces all liberation movements once in power. Simply put: good revolutionaries often make bad democrats. Revolutionaries plot in secret, follow orders and serve the people...
...revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution - some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office only when another revolutionary...
With its own war won, the ANC also found itself a revolutionary movement without a revolution. Not only did it have to fix the monumental inequalities that the apartheid government had created, it had to do so using the instruments of state power - government, law, the police - which it had spent years fighting. One way in which this identity crisis is expressed is in the modern ANC look - the mix of bling and camo worn by the Prada proletariat on display in East London. At a more serious level, while business, civil society and the press provide far more...
...fair, the ANC is far from the worst example of a revolutionary movement lapsed into self-enrichment and autocracy. But because South Africa is the continent's biggest economy and natural leader, the ANC is a role model and has influence beyond South Africa's borders. That's not always been a good thing. Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as President in 1999, tried to forge a middle way between revolution and democracy by calling on the ANC to embrace a "democratic revolution" in government. The approach proved schizophrenic. Mbeki the democrat adopted liberal economics, oversaw impressive growth and won plaudits...