South Africa is just another African country – tell the ‘clever blacks’, by Prince Mashele, who is a black South African.
Many people are wondering if we have come to the end of South Africa. …
What [President] Zuma has done is to make us come to the realisation that ours is just another African country, not some exceptional country on the southern tip of the African continent.
During the presidency of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, some among us used to believe that the black people of SA are better than those of other African countries.
We must all thank Zuma for revealing our true African character; that the idea of rule of law is not part of who we are, and that constitutionalism is a concept far ahead of us as a people. …
In a typical African country, people have no illusions about the unity of morality and governance. People know that those who have power have it for themselves and their friends and families. …
The idea that the state is an instrument for people’s development is a Western concept, and has been copied by pockets of Asian countries.
Africans and their leaders don’t like to copy from the West. They are happy to remain African, and do things “the African way”. …
Asking a ruler to be accountable is a foreign – Western – idea. In a situation where there is conflict between a ruler and laws, Africans simply change the laws to protect the ruler. …
The problem with clever blacks is that they think they live in Europe, where ideas of democracy have been refined over centuries. …
What we need to do is to come back to reality, and accept that ours is a typical African country. Such a return to reality will give us a fairly good idea of what SA’s future might look like.
This country will not look like Denmark. It might look like Nigeria, where anti-corruption crusaders are an oddity.
Being an African country, ours will not look like Germany. SA might look like Kenya, where tribalism drives politics.
Culture, and yes genes, matter. Obviously this isn’t politically correct, but it is real. The PC dream of a modern, advanced, Western-style South Africa run by blacks is floundering, just like the PC dream fifty years ago that decolonization would unleash dynamic African economies. While many exceptional individuals exist, national politics is an expression of group dynamics, of everyone in the group, of culture.
hat-tip Peter
