Not Mugabe

Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie promoted and even committed violent acts against the Apartheid regime. Earlier this year , I summarized Tom Lodge’s review of Stephen Ellis’s External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 , which maintains that Mandela was part of a small group of Communist ANC leaders who wanted to launch a sabotage campaign. Some of the violence was pretty horrific: Blacks who “collaborated” with the white government were punished by necklacing them, encircling them with gasoline-filled tires and setting them alight. The ANC officially renounced the practice, but Winnie Mandela notoriously said that South Africa would be liberated with “boxes of matches” and “necklaces.”

The ANC used the same toolbox of terror that Mugabe had in Rhodesia, but that only sharpens the point: South Africa is no Zimbabwe. Given his past,Mandela’s conduct in power is something of a miracle. Max Boot writes ,

“I can remember growing up in the 1980s when there was widespread suspicion among conservatives in the U.S.including many in the Reagan administrationthat if the African National Congress were to take over, South Africa would be transformed into another dysfunctional dictatorship like the rest of the continent. That this did not come to pass was due to many reasons including F.W. de Klerks wisdom in giving up power without a fight.

“But the largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nationswhy, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption, and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighborsis the character of Nelson Mandela. Had he turned out to be another Mugabe, there is every likelihood that South Africa would now be on the same road to ruin as Zimbabwe. But that did not happen because Mandela turned out to be, quite simply, a great mansomeone who could spend 27 years in jail and emerge with no evident bitterness to make a deal with his jailers that allowed them to give up power peacefully and to avoid persecution.”