evisiting the politics of South Africa: a critical counterpoint to the King's Gambit

COUNTERPOINT: Revisiting the politics of South Africa: a critical counterpoint to the King's Gambit

My friend Ayanda Mdluli has written a thoughtful and elegantly argued piece under the heading "Chess, not checkers: inside the King's Gambit of SA politics."

I read it with the respect due to a serious commentator attempting to impose coherence on the chaotic manoeuvres that currently dominate our public life. However, I disagree with him fundamentally, at almost every level of what he advances, and I write this as a critical counterpoint.

What he interprets as high strategy, as cold realpolitik and intentional vulnerability in the service of positional advantage, I experience as something far more familiar, far more base and aggressive: the same old self-interest dressed up in the false sophistication of so-called chess metaphors. It is the politics of the stomach, of self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment by a small elite, not the politics of principle.

I write this very much from my personal perspective, as someone who has always believed that the only politics worth pursuing are conviction politics. I speak from the historical perspective of my own experience in politics over more than fifty years — through prison, in my own case, and exile, in the case of many of my fellow liberation fighters. I have watched, participated in, and been shaped by the long arc from the underground struggle, through the negotiations, through the early years of democracy, and into the present disillusionment. Some moves that various commentators once celebrated as brilliant tactics eventually backfired, with devastating consequences for the majority of our people.

When I look back at the politics of the African National Congress after it returned from exile and entered engagement with the National Party, I am struck by the particular axis of elites that developed, as represented by the relationship between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer.

The many compromises made in those years were presented with the apparent intention of ensuring a relatively peaceful transition of formal political power into the hands of the black majority. National and international political commentators and analysts — among them Allister Sparks, Patti Waldmeir in Anatomy of a Miracle, John Carlin, and liberal voices such as Ken Owen and Stanley Uys — celebrated Mandela's strategy and the concessions the ANC made, particularly through the Ramaphosa-Meyer channel, as clever politics and sophisticated statecraft that would eventually deliver the best possible outcome for South Africa. They portrayed the negotiations as a masterclass in pragmatic compromise.

I followed these developments closely. At one point I myself believed that certain of these compromises could serve as a strategic bridgehead. The thinking was that once the former liberation movement held state power, it would be able to use the space created by those compromises to advance further fundamental change. But how wrong I was.