After Mandela

In the miracle year of 1990, everything seemed possible. The Berlin Wall had just been torn down, Mikhail Gorbachev was presiding over the end of the Soviet Bloc and in Czechoslovakia the dissident philosopher playwright, Vaclav Havel, was installed as president in the castle that was the setting for one of Kafka's greatest stories. But the jubilation wasn't confined to the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and began negotiating the end of white minority rule in his country.

The ensuing years have shown that when dreams come true, nightmares may follow. Meanwhile, far from being the vengeful old firebrand some had feared, Mandela exceeded the wildest hopes of his supporters in the West, who endowed him with a rock star status few politicians enjoy on the international stage. Pragmatic, forbearing and compassionate, Mandela pursued an enlightened course of reconciliation, urging his countrymen to transform South Africa into a just society, a model for a continent that had known few good role models in the last century.

But after Mandela stepped down, South Africa's direction changed again. In recent years the Western media reported that his successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, denied the existence of the AIDS epidemic, and that his newly elected replacement, Jacob Zuma, is an accused rapist under a cloud of corruption. Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa from Mandela to Zuma (PublicAffairs) puts developments in Africa's most powerful state into an intelligent perspective.

The author, Alec Russell, offers an eyewitness account. As South African correspondent for Britain's Financial Times and TheDaily Telegraph, Russell cultivated sources, interviewed people from many walks of life and enjoyed relatively open access to key figures in Mandela's party, the African National Congress (ANC). Mandela was a remarkably magnanimous figure, dignified yet given to humor, almost saintly in character. Neither of his successors possessed his scope.

Mbeki is a Shakespeare-quoting intellectual, the product of long years in British exile, with a chip on his shoulder that became a dangerous fracture once in power. While winning praise for his pro-market policies from the Davos gang, the international crew of financial mismanagers, conditions for most black South Africans actually declined during Mbeki's term and many white professionals found themselves sidelined by ill-directed affirmative action programs. When AIDS reached his country, Mbeki claimed the pandemic was both a conspiracy by Western pharmaceutical giants to sell expensive, ineffective drugs, and a foreign campaign to demonize Africans. The larger truth escaped Mbeki's notice. His steadfast obstruction against anti-retroviral drugs resulted in the deaths of more black South Africans than 40 years of apartheid.

Mbeki's foe, Zuma, is his temperamental opposite. Rising from a humble background and with little education, South Africa's new president is gregarious where Mbeki is reticent, a tribal traditionalist where Mbeki is cosmopolitan. Like many ANC leaders, Zuma enriched himself with the proceeds of power. More disturbing is the party's tendency, already manifested by Mbeki, to brand all opponents as "counterrevolutionaries." Zuma's respect for the rule of law seems shaky at best.

South Africa is not a one-party state, but the ANC's dominance allows for the possibility of dictatorship, and the party's post-Mandela path toward ideological purity bodes ill. Russell identifies many bright spots, including the persistence of independent newspapers and judges, along with the growing danger that populism and an appeal to ANC's past as a successful liberation movement may become a smoke screen for entrenching a new elite, eager to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of the majority.