As a student of revolt I sat transfixed last week before television and computer screens, imbibing a riot of Egyptian coverage. In Cairo, Alexandria and Suez hundreds of thousands - first the youth, but embracing older folk, Islamist and secular, middle-class and poor people - poured onto the streets, into the face of beatings, bullets and tanks. They were there to resoundingly reject the rule of their dictatorial President, Hosni Mubarak. These were unprecedented scenes in a country governed with a granite fist for thirty years by a Pharoaic ruler. The Mubarak decades were an era of growth for the elite and stability for the loyal. For the rest, the cost was high. Domestic opposition was crushed, personal liberties whisked away in unmarked cars, corruption not only entrenched but flaunted, and all the while over 40% of the population descended into the kind of weary poverty that comes from surviving on less than $2 a day.
By 1 February 2011, a mere week after the first disturbance, a few hundred thousand Egyptian citizens gathered on Tahrir Square in Cairo to put the finishing touches to their revolt. The Mubarak regime was wobbling precariously, its hated al-shurta police were routed and its Western sponsors distanced themselves apace. Peoples' power shifted Egypt momentarily but fundamentally in the direction of democracy and freedom. Nowhere was this made clearer than when the army declared it would not fire upon peaceful protests, which it proclaimed ‘legitimate'.
The next development was crucial from the point of view of a counter-revolution that took some time to rally. A Third Force entered the equation. Pro-Mubarak protestors, some drawn from the security establishment, confronted the thousands in Tahrir Square with rocks, whips, a supply of Molotov cocktails and, improbably, camels. The army stood by.
The onslaught lasted hours. I went to bed, depressed, as a few hundred held their position at 2.30 in the morning, walking wounded, sheltering behind burnt out cars and sheets of corrugated iron, warding off surge after surge of pro-Mubarak assault on three fronts. They were surrounded. There was no way they would last, I thought, remembering other public squares like Tiananmen, Haymarket and Amritsar.
Against all odds, in the morning, rocks and glass strewn everywhere, Cairo's braves still held Tahrir and their assailants were reduced to shouting from the fly-over.
The stirrings of civil-war will deprive the revolt of some of its elegance, confidence and momentum but change has come to Egypt. Whatever the precise outcome of the uprising and however long it still has to go, this much is clear. President Mubarak, his son and heir-apparent, Kamal, the National Democratic Party which he leads, and the coterie of businessmen directly living off his patronage will soon be swallowed up by this sandstorm of Egyptian history.
The repercussions in the rest of the Middle-East, the toughest neighbourhood on earth, could be massive. Egypt is the political, military and intellectual lodestar of the Arab region. The course it sets on a range of issues heavily impacts an international balance of forces that has its pivot in Jerusalem, but stretches as far as the nuclear reactors of Iran, the situation room in Pennsylvania Avenue and indeed to every port that receives goods from containers chugging cheaply through the Suez canal.
Throughout his term Mubarak aligned with Western designs in his own backyard. So valuable was Egypt's securing of these that its army received a staggering $1.5 billion a year in U.S. aid. Till now, this pay-off went to an obviously dictatorial regime. The burning question on White House lips is, will a democratic Egyptian government accept the same quid pro quo? The uprising along the Nile, uncapping as it has significant tributaries of anti-imperialist and Islamist feeling, puts this in doubt.
There is much to be praised about the revolt considered as a political artifact. This includes the popular breadth and reach of it into the hearts of millions of diverse Egyptians. It includes the speed with which its lines raged through police teargas and the nimbleness with which it flowered between army tanks. It also showed a certain intricacy in using social networking sites to spread the word but did not shy away from more belligerent tasks like spawning street defense committees when looting and provocation broke out. Protestors additionally set up field hospitals and barricades, managed to convene a general strike and maintained unity in rejecting superficial concessions by the government.
In spite of these admirable and encouraging qualities, the ability of the revolt to produce meaningful change is a precarious thing. And although there are many historical and geo-political differences, severe lessons from South Africa are to be kept in mind by Egyptians pressing for change in the formative few weeks and months ahead of their own transition to democracy.
By all accounts, the uprising in Egypt was a leaderless and spontaneous event. Indeed, what sparked it occurred in another country a month before when an unemployed Tunisian graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself alight in protest against joblessness and his additional humiliation by callous police harassers. Sympathetic mass protests against corruption, oppression and poverty in Tunisia broke out, which culminated, to almost everyone's surprise, in Tunisian strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, being deposed four days later. So alike were social and political conditions in the two Arab countries that, by regional analogy, Bouazizzi's harrowing lament was taken up by the first Egyptian protestors too. In Cairo streets chants rang out, "Yesterday Tunisia, Egypt, today".
The struggle for democracy in South Africa too had a vibrant, internal component. Our Bouazizi was probably Hector Peterson, a scholar shot by apartheid police in a spontaneous revolt against the humiliations of apartheid in 1976. South Africa's struggle took many years to reach insurrectionary intensity but, by the mid 1980's, our own Alexandras were as ungovernable as Egypt's Alexandrias are now.
The problem with revolts against a state is that, no matter how popular, sooner or later, they must register and consolidate their victories in the institutions of that state. It is here, where popular protest becomes political representation, that power narrows and deviates dangerously. While the brave Egyptian youth, poor and intellectuals continue to rally in their thousands in the open, already the search for and positioning of a political opposition is happening more or less in secret, involving only dozens. To assume otherwise is massively naïve. A range of powerful and moneyed forces are scurrying about making running repairs to the breach in national, regional and international workings of power that the imminent fall of Mubarak represents. Who is there to talk to? Who is there to fund? What policies will be maintained? What pressure may be brought to bear? Communications to this effect will be much more closely guarded than in the recent past but diplomatic cables are certainly flying back and forth across the Mediterranean and Atlantic, composing an Egyptian opposition capable of delivering an ‘orderly transition' to democracy.
The emergence and presentation of long-term exile, Mohammed ElBaradei, as a credible and unifying alternative figure to Mubarak is precisely such a moment and such a danger. It is increasingly into backroom meetings between U.S. envoys and a range of Egyptian ‘opinion-makers' that the power of the Arab street is being funneled. There are no doubt similar meetings with confidants dispatched by Moscow and Teheran too. The point is that destiny is shaped in these end-game meetings. The young protestors must be afraid. Very afraid. Not only of Mubarak but of that class of person who would stand at the head of their own kinesis, but who are actually inherently afraid of mass movement, eager to don suits, have the doors of German cars opened for them and to scribble their names to ‘realistic' deals. History shows that often persons enter to finish revolutions that did not start them.
Seeing the vapid formal political opposition of Egypt dodder in and out of board rooms and hastily convened press conferences, with Hillary Clinton waiting on one line and Ban Ki Moon on another, I am reminded of how thoroughly out of their depth our own liberation leaders were when F.W. de Klerk decided to relinquish minority rule. I am reminded of how dependent on foreign expert-advice and how eager to be thought of as gentlemen and ladies most of them were. These qualities caused serious missteps in the first moments of democratic policy-making. For example, before the ANC even took power it agreed to honour the odious apartheid debt. The sinews of the new South African government became accustomed to this consensual posture. As some of those who fought for social change in South Africa contend, the venerable figure of Nelson Mandela and the discourse of reconciliation and statesmanship that enveloped him in 1994, came to foreclose upon opportunities for more thoroughgoing transformation. A well-ventilated complaint by activists involved in internal agitation in the 1980s is that the ANC captured, and to a great extent disciplined the spirit of revolt fostered by unions and student and civic organizations against apartheid. Exiles and aged political prisoners descended from on high to claim a victory they only very partially made.
This is not to pick on ElBaradei. Protests that began with a set of domestic social demands have contracted into a singular front demanding that Mubarak step down. Such a struggle will naturally concern itself with determining a replacement. But with this being the case, we must see the strategic objective of the protests for what they really are. Protestors are angling for the same occurrence that caused Tunisia's Ben Ali to flee. This is not a successful social revolution but rather a quiet coup d'état and installation of an interim government thereafter. For it was only when the chief of the Tunisian army withdrew his support and refused further repression, that the Trabelsi family's game was over. There was, in truth, only a Jasmine coup, no revolution as yet.
As diverse and impassioned as the uprising is, there is a similar calculation made by those pursuing change on the banks of the Nile. To secure a new Constitution and to provide for democratic elections, they essentially need the generals to tap Mubarak on the shoulder. It is no longer a tactical matter, this handing out of flowers to tank commanders. It is a seditious chant, "the people and the army are one". At its most complex and delicate, coup-seekers probe army barricades and curfews with their defenseless chests, waiting for that most crucial rank, the colonel, to refuse standing orders to maneuver soldiers into crackdown. Generals who survive popular social upheavals, such as Tunisia's Rachid Ammar, do not side with the people so much as avoid mutiny.
If the generals step in it will further underscore the army's prestigious role in the narrative so far. It will survive as an institution with an efficient and intact chain of command. This means it will play an enormously influential role in determining both the process and the parameters of change going forward. In the run-up to distant democratic elections all social forces will have to pay homage to the idea of a benevolent peoples' army, as it will pay homage to the idea of the peoples' will. But the moment Mubarak steps down, the army will require Egyptians to hand in the power they currently hold on the street. Demobilisation shifts power once more into elite spaces and processes and the age-old post-revolutionary question of how to maintain pressure raises its very disappointed historical head.
Additionally, as we discovered in South Africa in the months leading up to the scheduling of elections, with the old guard's hands still essentially on the levers of power, an unofficial, low-intensity warfare was pursued against national liberation movements and ordinary citizens alike. Stoked by remnants of our own al-shurta secret police, the Civilian Co-operation Bureau, and the five elite Reconnaissance Regiments, over 3000 civilians were killed in ‘Black-on Black' violence between 1990 and 1994.
Informal repression will not be enough for Egypt's reactionaries though. They are going to need a social base, with the army and government posing as the necessary buffer between two camps. Owing to its racial dynamics, the outgoing National Party did not need to invent a right-wing threat. Reaction had genuine and self-funding support among a large part of the population. On the cusp of democracy in 1993, groups such as the Afikaner nationalist, Conservative Party and the neo-Nazi AWB had roughly one million people to call upon for support. It was from within the ranks of these social forces that assassins surfaced to murder key leaders within the pro-democracy movement, such as Communist Party supremo, Chris Hani.
Even within the Black poor there were those prepared to kill their compatriots and thwart the momentum of change. Members of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a pro-capitalist, ethnically-chauvinist group with a base in rural Zululand, were involved in the biggest massacres of their fellow South Africans. The language coming from the pro-Mubarak side now is the same as Inkatha's then. Both emphasized stability, order and the country's reputation. But for the right to vote, they stood for the continuation of existing social relations much as they were before.
Like political Islam is the bogey-man invoked by the status quo in the middle-East, so was communism during South Africa's transition. In Cairo, clean-shaven protestors who stood shoulder to shoulder with their bearded allies in battles against the police are going to have to weather a wave of divisive propaganda in the weeks to come.
To overcome physical attacks, the liberation movements in S.A. formed armed, self-defense units (SDUs) in Black communities throughout the nation. While they could not ward all danger off, they were effective. It is something Egyptians might need to consider themselves in the months ahead and, in this regard, one trusts they will have full and principled 2nd Amendment support from the Republican controlled Congress in the U.S.
It is a depressing list of pitfalls to contemplate with running battles to oust Mubarak still raging in Tahrir Square. Egyptian democrats are, to some extent, victims of their own swift success. On the brink of bringing down their dictator, they have but two weeks of non-clandestine organizational experience on which to draw. Barely born as a social force, protestors will soon be called upon to entrust the fate of their insurrection to a political process and to political institutions that, South Africa's history has shown, are terribly susceptible to elite-pacting, unauthorized compromise and co-optation.
This is only on the domestic front. The danger for all popular revolts is that powerful external forces will also seek to limit the decisions a new democracy may take. The limit being set by the West is that the Egyptian transition must be ‘orderly'. This is essentially a request for the transition to be spread over sufficient time and to be inclusive of a sufficient chunk of the old order so that Western governments have an opportunity to reconstitute with the democratic crowd, the client relationship they cultivated with personnel in Mubarak's Egypt.
Best-case scenario for them is a care-taker government under newly appointed Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, while the U.S. diplomatic machine either marginalizes election front-runners, the Muslim Brotherhood, or extracts concessions from them on peace with Israel and the border with Gaza. As transition is drawn out, a low-intensity warfare will be fostered neutralizing any ‘spoilers', especially radical Islamists and intellectuals. All the while money and international standing will come the way of secular alternatives such as ElBaradei, who may or may not have to mouth superficially anti-imperialist sentiments on their path to the Palace in Heliopolis. The army, wallowing in the unearned legitimacy it enjoys for simply not massacring its own citizens, will serve as Plan B.
These limits, although substantive in nature (such as to honour the Camp David Accord, or not redistribute wealth) are almost always set by the form in which a transition to democracy occurs. In South Africa it was the manner of the transition as much as the values that informed its new Constitution that effectively froze pre-existing property relations in place. Bluntly, the national ‘revolution' was unable to bring about fundamental change not because the principles that informed it were too mild but because the manner in which liberation was achieved did not shake up society enough. The ‘revolution' never nationalized and it left too much for liberal democracy to still achieve through law and economic growth.
The same happened in Zimbabwe in 1980 and existing inequalities in land ownership were only reversed (if not simply reproduced) with much violence and unpleasantness twenty-five years later. Sadly, the sacrifice, nobility and militancy of a struggle that brings about parley with an authoritarian regime is irrelevant to the shape the new society will take. Rather, it is the efficiency of the broom that sweeps the old order out that counts. In general, ‘peaceful' transitions are those in which many compromises with - and guarantees to - the old order are given, whether or not these lay the basis for a just and sustainable society in the future. However, before ‘peace' is blithely chosen in the manner Mubarak and his government is unseated, the long-term effects of the ensuing compromises must be squarely considered.
A related, longer-term question from South Africa for Egyptian patriots is what kind of change parliamentary democracy typically brings to societies who have sought to transform themselves this way? Answering this question in South Africa along the political axis will give encouraging answers but along the socio-economic axis, not so much. It will seem churlish to say anything to deprive the faces of ordinary Egyptians, oppressed under a monarchy until the 1950's and then again under successive military regimes, of the fervent smiles of achievement they carry after their recent democratic successes. However, democracy has not solved the most pressing of our own social contradictions, they have become worse.
So what then are those pushing for radical change to do? How does one maintain the integrity of a revolution? This question mocks all those sincere revolutionaries who tried to better their societies through decisive rupture with the past, from 1848 through to the present date. Some may say that the democratic space to protest and freely express opinions opened up by the Egyptian uprising will ensure accountability and responsiveness by a subsequent regime. This is true and those gains are real. However, as we have learned in South Africa, those first generation rights are somehow hollowed and drowned out in a bourgeois democracy. Never again is a people's rage quite so righteous, unifying and potent as when it confronts a dictator. Indeed, the notion of ‘the people' itself disappears in a democracy into fractured interest groups and parties. As much as the space to protest is available, it is very hard to keep high levels of popular mobilization and unity going.
With near on seventeen years under the most progressive Constitution in the world, South Africans have as high an unemployment rate as Egypt, far greater income inequalities (we are 2nd most unequal, Egypt is 90th), a lower life-expectancy and, on the face of these statistics, just as powerful a reason to be blockading Sandton Square. But for a democratic surplus, that is, and the procedural rights and freedoms South Africans enjoy, such as assembly and to vote for whom we choose among contesting elites. It is the absence of an out-and-out dictator, it seems, that keeps South Africa's poor and discontented in their place.
Winning the first democratic stage of a struggle in high spirits is no indication that the second stage of economic transformation will ever be met. The almost childlike glow with which adult Egyptians and Tunisians walk about public squares with posters around their necks proclaiming a new day is certainly touching. In the context of their oppressive recent history, the novelty (and bravery) in exercising this elementary right is something one can appreciate. Under the coming democracy it is simply not going to be sufficient to make a difference in how they are governed and how wealth is spread around. There is an old adage: "when reform is impossible, revolution becomes inevitable". It may easily be inverted, "revolution is impossible when reform is inevitable". The ‘inevitability' of change, (yes, we can) merely a free and fair election away, is one of the neatest tricks played by representative democracy in more or less keeping things the same.
The loveliest image for me so far of the protests was the girl on the skateboard, seven or eight years old, in Liberation Square, wending her way through stones, waving the Egyptian flag. What is the best-case scenario for her? It is the job of counter-revolutionaries to ensure that things get so ugly in Egypt, that its people feel so paranoid and insecure that the answer to this question is an orderly, if highly compromised and scarcely progressive, transition. This would be a transition in which the army high-command, Mubarak's chums, are those to whom the people turn. The only way to convince anyone who cares for that young girl to choose hope and change over these dark and paralyzing fears is with the decisive defeat of the counter-revolution.
Egyptian democrats would need to make clinical assessments of their chances of defeating the goons in the streets and thus stripping the status quo of its ability to attack them via proxy in the months ahead. This may mean a temporary turn from the peaceful orientation the pro-democracy camp has fostered so far and isolating and targeting those who attack in the name of Mubarak. This is because incipient fascism yields neither to reason nor pathos. The choice is between confronting them or compromising the future. In South Africa in 1994, a group of white right-wingers formed a convoy and tried to invade a space in the west of the country effectively liberated by democrats from its local governor and apartheid puppet, Lucas Mangope. And so we come back to the question of force and the army. For it was a group of junior officers and soldiers, together with self-defense units, who met this convoy head-on and without authorization or much mercy, stopped it. In many ways, that was the symbolic end of the right-wing. Revolutions need their Hector Petersons and Mohamed Bouazizis. But they also need their Boputhatswanas, their little mutinies and, something still to occur in Egypt; an actual, not merely branded by a well-meaning Al Jazeera, ‘day of rage'.
The flow of lessons is not only from the Limpopo to the Nile but also the other way. On 25 January, a group of protestors, numbering about ten thousand, attempted to cross the April 6 bridge in Cairo. Up until then, Egypt's police enjoyed a reputation for brutal omnipotence. Teargas and rubber bullets flew. Armoured vehicles rammed into people and finally live shots were fired. People died. But still, ribbons of youth pressed forward, until, suddenly, the police line broke. After the bridge was crossed, there were further battles but the fear was gone. By nightfall, many other psychological bridges were crossed and many other police-lines broken. The army took to the streets and the riot police slunk away. The brittleness of the apparatus of power was amazing to see. This brittleness, exposed in riot, is something Africans south of the Sahara can easily relearn. They knew it once.
Social movement and union marches post-apartheid seldom expose this brittleness because they take place as lawful events in South Africa, staged and marshaled as set-piece moaning sessions. A riot releases a qualitatively different element of political alchemy. It makes no demand. It constitutes itself as power rather than asking for stuff from the state. People in this mode have a burst to them that ranks and ranks of police cannot hold. Cairo, city of victory, showed again what is necessary to attain it.
Another lesson flowing Southwards is that demands to end corruption mobilize as much intensity as the more traditional demands triggering and informing popular uprisings. The top two of these historically are bread prices and repression. Arab politics has defined a third distinct motive to revolt, one flowing from the form of state arisen in a privatized, globalised, late capitalist and kleptocractic era. It is discontent along three lines - poverty, corruption and lack of freedom (both personal and the ability to affect government) that have fuelled anger in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and the U.S/Israeli protectorate of Jordan.
South Africa is chronically affected by two of the three causes of Arab uproar and, at times in 2009 during ‘service delivery' protests, has stood but a Mohammed Bouazizi away from all three. And while Zuma is no Ben Ali, the hatred of the latter's family also started with shares in companies being handed out to his extended family.
The demographics of Egypt and Tunisia reveal a bulge of young people under the age of 30 who, more than any other section of society, are jobless (90%), poor in the midst of steady growth for a conspicuous elite, and increasingly politically restive. As Oliver Meth points out, the desperation of youth in a society with no real place for them sounds very South African.
Egypt is also an example of a country that decolonized very early and whose nationalist leaders enjoyed much prestige for their role in winning independence and keeping sovereignty. These struggle credentials and symbologies, such as they are, do not last. A second wave of post-nationalist, Arab liberation struggles are patently taking place now with a coherent and infectious set of ideas informing them. It is ironic that the space most being fought over is Tahrir or Liberation Square, so named to celebrate independence over colonialism but now the epicenter of the opposition to what became of the original liberators. It is not hard to imagine, ten or twenty years from now, when ANC Youth League tenderpreneurs are in power, that they will be as crass in resorting to the state apparatus as they currently are in their ordinary discourse, confronting a generation who owe them no emotional or political allegiance at all. The same potential exists for a second wave of struggles throughout the rest of southern Africa, and the example from the Arabic north may just hasten things a bit in the Bantu-speaking south.
What South Africa lacks but Egypt has in abundance is a broad, sometimes lurid, but strong ideological content to its politics. I speak here of political Islam whose certainties, tenets and sacred duties far exceeds, in its ability to move people, anything that communism or Africanism provides in South Africa. Freely conceding that it played no role in starting the protests, the Muslim Brotherhood, as a part of Egyptian society, and one that has drawn terrible repression from the Mubarak regime, joined the democracy movement in numbers. The Muslim Brotherhood is a popular, non-violent, trans-national movement. Its brand of politics aspires to a caliphate - but does so, perplexingly for liberals, by pursuing democratic reforms so that its views may be voted upon and not theologically imposed. It is going to be a force to be reckoned with in a new Egypt because its ideology (they would say faith) has such a driving cultural, psychological and political affect.
It is easy to be cynical about Islamist movements involved in democratic uprisings after the experiences in Iran in the late 1970s. Certain Islamist factions have a one-person, one-vote, one-time orientation towards democracy. However, there is little to suggest that the Brotherhood, despite the mildly sinister cadences of its name to my own secular ears, has anti-democratic designs on the course of the current revolt.
The existence of such a lived vein of ideology, indeed faith, within the Egyptian body will give it the ability to play a decisive, principled leadership role on important international questions. South Africa has failed dismally on this score. It is difficult to discern what the content of the Muslim Brotherhood's domestic economic and legislative agenda will be. Preoccupied with the weightier matter of the political unity of the Ummah, they are underdeveloped in this area. But where the Brotherhood has very definite ideas and where its inclusion in government will have dramatic effects is on Egypt's relations with Israel. It will almost certainly press for a renegotiation of Sadat's peace. Indeed, Hamas, which controls Gaza just across the Sinai Desert and which is considered a terrorist organisation by most Western governments is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. One cannot see a future Egyptian government with significant Brotherhood participation, enforcing the blockade on Gaza any longer.
To many whose focus is regional, this is a big reason why changes in Egypt that would strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood's hand are to be welcomed. It is not for what it will do for Egyptians per se, but for Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. (The liberals will be useless here). One can only imagine the migraines in Washington that will be caused should Saudis take to the streets against their vile and vampiric sheikhs. If democratic clamourings, fuelled in part by political Islam, mean Mubarak must go, how much more so among other propped-up U.S. allies in the region? The speed and timing with which Yemen's leader announced he too would contest the presidency no more and Jordan's King Abdullah sacked his government and promised reforms of his own, is nothing short of comedic. But a dark comedy it is. For with the pro-Zionist U.S. tugging at a $1.5 billion string over the army on the one hand and the commitment of the biggest political party in Egypt to the liberation of Palestine on the other, and in between all of this an outpouring of un-dreamed of freedom by ordinary Egyptians, a remnant Third Force of Mubarak supporters, and tetchy Israeli war-planners watching the radar screen, this is no longer only the toughest neighbourhood on earth but also the most significant to the parlous course of the early 21st century.
As Egyptians lurch towards democracy and South Africans lurch within it, one can only hope that lessons in overcoming reaction and social exclusion flow from Cape to Cairo and the other way around. Fast.
© Heinrich Böhmke. February 3 2011
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