Nelson Mandela went to jail for the highest principle.
He wanted a South Africa where anyone could achieve anything their talents could propel them to reach regardless of race, freed from an evil system "apartheid" which institutionalised racial prejudice.
A COUNTRY STILL SEETHING WITH HATRED
Now the heirs of his amazing legacy of self-sacrifice have not only chased many of the best and brightest whites from the country due to collapsing law and order, they are now violently and brutally turning on recent immigrants to that country from elsewhere in Africa in what some are calling ethnic cleansing, one horrific incident shows how low they have descended:
The man they called Mugza had come to Johannesburg in search of a job and dignity. Instead he was burnt alive in broad daylight last Sunday. His only crime: being a foreigner competing for low-paid work in a city swept by hate and xenophobia.
Today Mugza lies in Johannesburg’s Germiston morgue, his hideously charred body unclaimed by friends or family. In 28 days he will be buried in a pauper’s grave...
The dead man, a thirty-something Mozambican, had worked as a casual labourer on a nearby construction site. He seemed very poor: he slept on a borrowed mattress and owned little but a duvet, some clothes and a picture book entitled Karoo Blossoms.
A neighbour in the shanty town, a Zimbabwean refugee named Joseph Mugashi, said that trouble began last weekend when a preacher began agitating against foreigners, whom he accused of stealing food from South African mouths. Mugashi’s tiny shop was attacked by a mob that held him at knifepoint while his shelves were ransacked. He fled.
Neighbours advised Mugza and his housemate to follow suit, but they decided to hang on. Over the next 36 hours, small groups of vigilantes roamed the warren of shanties, picking off foreigners one by one.
On Sunday, said a witness named Alfredo Tembe, a throng of locals, many “redeyed and reeking of liquor”, and armed with sticks and machetes, gathered at a crossroads where they skirmished with police and set fire to barricades. Mugza and his housemate chose this moment to make a break for freedom.
Witnesses say the two men ran for their lives, but it was too late. The mob hunted them down. The housemate was stabbed and knocked unconscious. Mugza was bludgeoned to his knees, his head dangling. A rioter took a blazing plank from a nearby bonfire and doused Mugza with paraffin. As he burst into flames, someone dumped his precious duvet on top of the pyre. In local parlance, Mugza had been “necklaced”.
Eventually, a hefty Boer policeman appeared with a fire extinguisher, but for Mugza the rescue came too late.
The situation has gotten so bad that President Thabo Mbeki has deployed the Defence Forces to stop anti-foreigner violence which has led to as many as fifty murders and tens of thousands of people being forced from their homes. It is the first time the army has been ordered into the townships since the time of white minority rule.
South Africa's biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times has been strongly critical of the government and this Sunday didn't miss Mbeki, calling on him to resign for not taking this ugly situation seriously enough by suspending his overseas travel schedule:
Throughout this crisis — arguably the most grave, dark and repulsive moment in the life of our young nation — Mbeki has demonstrated that he no longer has the heart to lead.
South Africa has fifty million people. Five million of them are immigrants. Three million of those have fled Zimbabwe looking for a better life.
With a resources boom rising tide lifting all commodity-rich nations' boats, South Africa has so much promise if its people can stop robbing, raping and killing each other. One commentator writes:
South Africa today is like the American Wild West circa 1881, the year of the gunfight at Tombstone's OK Corral. It is a land of tremendous dynamism and opportunity - and brutal, rampant lawlessness. When people from the African countries to the north ponder migrating south, their minds turn on the former vision, not the latter. They go to South Africa for the same reason that other Africans go to western Europe, or Mexicans and Salvadoreans go to the United States. South Africa is the continental superpower; Johannesburg, the most prosperous city in the whole of Africa. In terms of macro statistics, South Africa is one of the more impressive emerging nations. The management of its financial affairs never ceases to impress at the gatherings of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Also impressive is the degree to which a hefty black middle class has arisen out of the ashes of apartheid, extinguished in April 1994, when Mandela was elected President.
A recent New York Times editorial is much less kind about Mbeki:
If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors...South Africans and all of Africa need and deserve better.
Someone told me today that Martin Luther King had said that "in the darkest sky, you can see the brightest stars." I collect such optimistic but truthful quotes for bleak winters to fuel our fight against leftards, bigots and other foes. And I hope it's true too for South Africa, that at their nadir they can find a future of which Nelson Mandela can be proud.
Game on.
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