IS THE EFF THE PARTY OF FASCISM IN A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA? AN ESSAY.
"There are many who do not know they are fascist but will find out when the time comes". Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls.
INTRODUCTION.
Paul Trewhela, an author, essayist, political commentator and former political activist, opened up his Politicsweb article ‘Africa and the post-imperial British media and academic class', which appeared on 01 December 2014, with this beautiful and powerful paragraph:
"It's a curious thing, the post-imperial British media and academic class. One of its great phobias has been to investigate too closely the Cold War drama in southern and central Africa, to which it was emotionally, intellectually and often professionally transfixed. Commitment and engagement, yes! Proper investigative research, well, no...not the done thing, is it?".
Unfortunately, the latest offering from this questionable post-imperial British gift that never stops giving regarding southern and central Africa comes from none other that the former British High Commissioner to South Africa, Robin Renwick. His book ‘Mission to South Africa' firmly places him within, aligns with, and considerably extends this sordid emotional, intellectual and even professorial post-imperial British attachment to and morbid obsession with southern and central Africa, which are rightly and justifiably decried by Paul Trewhela.
Which is a sad thing to note, really.
You would have expected better from a British official who for four years observed South Africa's fragile political transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the comfort of the astonishing diplomatic opulence that is the gilded, chauffer-driven, golden-spoon-in-the-mouth and highly pampered life of a high-ranking British diplomat in a fellow Commonwealth member country of South Africa.
It is therefore the right thing to do to compliment Andrew Donaldson for his excellent review of Renwick's book ‘Mission to South Africa'. From the review provided b Donaldson, it does seem like Robin Renwick's book brims with some dubious and outlandish assertions, thinly backed by research or empirical evidence in some instances, about the political events and personalities during the era of our country's precarious transition from apartheid to democracy, whilst also distinguished by rare, penetrative and deep understanding of South Africa's political landscape at the time. (See Politicsweb article ‘Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid', 24 February 2015).
As the UK ambassador to South Africa, Renwick was but one of many personae dramatis in the drama about South Africa's transition to democracy. And for sure he was not a minor player. His role was unique and powerful as the UK's official representative to South Africa, given the UK's centuries-old and deeply troubled, as well as very bloody, colonial, apartheid-era and transition-to-democracy involvement in the turbulent periods of South Africa's history.
His assertions still carry a dramatic irony nonetheless. This should always be born in mind. But they certainly cannot be ignored by South Africans, by the Britons and by anyone interested in SA-UK bilateral relationship.
Perhaps the most outlandish and dubious of Robin Renwick's claims in the book is that the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or The Iron Lady as she became known to many around the world, was determined to see the end of apartheid. Now come on!
Donaldson quoted Renwick as writing about Thatcher that:
"She wanted to get rid of it, to help bury it", in reference to apartheid and Margaret Thatcher's attitude to it.
To tens of millions of then oppressed black and progressive South Africans, Thatcher came across as the West's biggest defender of the racist apartheid dictatorship and of the apartheid prime minister PW Botha and his predations and brutalities against blacks, especially with regard to Thatcher's indefatigable campaign to defeat any and all Commonwealth Summit actions against the apartheid rulers, and most infamously so at the Nassau Commonwealth summit. Any false pretense which Thatcher ever had that she "wanted to get rid of" apartheid, and "to bury it", was itself gotten rid of and buried by her sickening lone-wolf diplomatic determination to block any decision by the Commonwealth leaders to impose further punitive measures against apartheid rulers like PW Botha.
What Margaret Thatcher desired to get rid of and to bury was South Africa's anti-apartheid national liberation movement, for sure.
But where the overwhelmingly majority of South Africans, then and now, would agree with Robin Renwick's assertion in his book is in his surprising but welcome characterization of apartheid leader PW Botha as "someone who was in fascist territory".
Donaldson quotes Renwick as writing the following about PW Botha:
"I felt I was dealing with someone who was in fascist territory".
The overwhelming majority of black and progressive South Africans agree that in PW Botha, aside from his minor positive measures like abolishing the pass laws, Group Areas Act and the Mixed Marriage Act, as well as in starting secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela in prison, we were in fact dealing with not just a vicious political bully and a white racist thug; not just dealing with a military psycopath and a heartless, remorseless and openly provocative white racist sociopath; but that we were in fact dealing with and confronted by South Africa's own archetypical ruling white Fascist in a power position of ultimate executive authority, or "someone in fascist territory", as Robin Renwick put it, and confronted by some political lunatic forever thirsty to shed the blood of innocent blacks, including through constant, unrestraint unleashing of crude, brute military and securocratic might of the apartheid state, to uphold a white supremacist, fascist ideology..
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