Recently, I was invited to attend a conference organised by CIVICUS of civil society representatives from over 100 countries in Johannesburg, South Africa. Having heard so much and read so much about South Africa, having been inspired all those years by the struggles against apartheid, having always had the presence of Nelson Mandela (in the form of a poster in my room since I was a child), the opportunity to travel to South Africa was itself electrifying.
From the plane itself I saw that South Africa is a highly prosperous and well-organised society. Rural areas were highly geometrically organised. Urban areas are well-planned. Streets are wide. Traffic flows easily. The infrastructure itself makes you feel that you are in a European country. South Africa is not only one of the most developed countries in all of Africa, it is arguably one of the most developed societies at least in the Third World, if not globally.
As soon as we came out of the airport we were greeted by a giant billboard of Nelson Mandela stating: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestine.” As I discussed this message with my new South African friends I was quite surprised to discover that the one issue on which every major political party in South Africa is completely unified is the Palestine cause. For the South Africans, Zionism is no different than racist apartheid. Both are the products of a settler colonial population that wishes to aggrandize land and resources, and creates two sets of laws: one for the protection of the privileged minority and another for the original residents of the colonised majority. It seems almost ironic that in Pakistan we have never given Palestine much importance, and when we did give it importance it was only in order to protect various monarchies from the radical impulses of the Palestinian movement or to ideologically support Islamisation in our own societies as the supposed dialectical opposite of Zionism. But since perhaps the 1970s, Palestine is almost forgotten in our own imagination as one of the great anticolonial struggles in our own generation. It was wonderful to discover that this was not so in South Africa.
But while South Africa has made great progress against apartheid — historic progress, one may add — racial apartheid has been replaced by a class apartheid no different from the one that exists in the rest of the capitalist world. The best schools are too expensive for the black majority, the best healthcare is too expensive for ordinary working people, access to justice always remains a problem for people without economic resources and so on and so forth. Perhaps the reason why this is so jarring for South Africans is that the vast majority of people believed and were made to believe that the end of apartheid would also result in the end of class oppression and expectation. But that was not to be. That is why, while some blacks have certainly benefited enormously, their children now go to the best schools, they live in the best areas of town, enjoy the best healthcare, eat in the best restaurants in town and have prospered in every way, shape or form. Unfortunately, this is not true at the economic level for the vast majority.
As one meanders through the streets of Johannesburg, one discovers also the poverty and inequality. And towards the evening Johannesburg turns into one of the most violent cities, in terms of petty crime, in the world. Dirt poor working class black people turn perhaps to mugging as the only form of social equalisation. Perhaps it is better to compare it to a form of forced begging. Tourists and white people are always the primary target. In fact, when we were returning from a theatre performance late one night and hailed a cab, the cab driver was utterly shocked that we were walking around and had not yet been mugged.
But there is hope. We witnessed a vibrant cultural scene, music in the very bloodstream of that society, a labour movement that encountered supporters in the millions (the Congress of South African Trade Unions has a support base of 2.8 million workers and an office of 12 floors that competes with our Chamber of Commerce), and a tradition of fighting for democratic rights that stretches decades back into the 20th century. And much of this comes to the fore in the shape of the developing contradictions in the political landscape of South Africa. Both outside and inside the African National Congress (ANC), there is developing an opposition to the status quo. And although the ANC continues to count on more than 60 percent of the vote bank in the country, nonetheless, to paraphrase a song from the civil rights movement that I also heard on my trip to South Africa, “A change is gonna come.” When it does, perhaps the country that was one of the last to overthrow the remnants of colonialism in the last century may be the first to show us how to build a society both prosperous and equal.
The writer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at LUMS, spokesperson for Laal (the band), and general secretary of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP)