The last cracka in Africa

[Deleted]

The relationship between De Klerk and Mandela, as the former admitted during his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, could be fractious and was marked by bitter disagreements. Mandela accused de Klerk of allowing the killings of black South Africans during the political transition. De Klerk said Mandela could be extremely stubborn and unreasonable.

While some white South African’s accused de Klerk of “giving the country away”, many black South Africans would continue to view him with suspicion and his legacy would remain contested throughout his life, not least over accusations of involvement in state-sponsored atrocities committed on his watch, claims he always denied.

“If we had not changed in the manner we did,” De Klerk said in an interview with the Observer 11 years ago, “South Africa would be completely isolated. The majority of people in the world would be intent on overthrowing the government. Our economy would be nonexistent – we would not be exporting a single case of wine and South African planes would not be allowed to land anywhere. Internally, we would have the equivalent of civil war.”

De Klerk’s judgment on apartheid too was softer than many subsequently would have liked with many inside the country seeing him as a symbol of the failure of white South Africa to acknowledge the full horrors of the system and to bring perpetrators to justice.

That was underlined last year in a controversy over a television interview in which he was seen to be quibbling about whether the crimes of apartheid should be seen as “crimes against humanity”. He later expressed his regret for “the confusion, anger, and hurt” his remarks might have caused.

The FW de Klerk Foundation had announced in June that he had been diagnosed with a cancer that affects the lining of the lungs.

His death, perhaps inevitably, has been greeted with mixed responses. Julius Malema, the leader of the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters party, who had accused him of being “a murderer” during a visit to the country’s parliament last year, tweeted: “Thank you God,” followed by five dancing emojis.

The former opposition Democratic Alliance party leader Tony Leon tweeted: “Farewell FW de Klerk. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, he reformed the system he inherited in 1990. And if he had not relinquished power in 1994, likely SA would be Syria or Venezuela today.”

The former president is survived by his wife, Elita, two children, Susan and Jan, and several grandchildren.



I dunno, seemed to me the sanctions finally put the squeeze on him.

[tory]

Awkward and uncomfortable truth - Is South Africa any better off now than it was under Apartheid? Politically, of course it is as the country is a democracy and it is no longer an inherently racist country (as laws regarding racial segregation have been rightfully abolished). But economically and socially? I'm not so sure, as tragic as that may be.

Some of that is down to the inherently unequal society that had occurred under Apartheid, but there has been some staggering corruption under Zuma. There are parts of South Africa that are pretty much no-go areas.

Booker prize winner Damon Galgut - “The Promise” is told by a slyly humorous narrator who flits among characters, revealing the inner thoughts of people and even animals. The effect is a rich tapestry of South African voices.

“The notion that any one single voice can speak for South Africa is false,” he said. “We’re a chorus — a very dissonant, discordant chorus, but we are a chorus.”

There’s one exception: Salome, whose thoughts readers never hear. Galgut is aware that could be seen as marginalizing a Black character who should be at the center of the story.

“The vast majority of South Africa’s dispossessed or poor citizens are still the people who were made poor under apartheid, and their position has not changed,” he said. “So it seemed important to me that I convey to the reader the sense of silence that surrounds a character like Salome, and I made the decision, rightly or wrongly, to do that through making her a silent presence.

“I thought I could make the silence speak, actually, but the only way to do that is to make the silence problematic.”

Open to English-language novels from any country, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming the lives of its winners, who have included Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel and Marlon James. Galgut won the Booker for his ninth novel, and on his third time as a finalist. He was previously shortlisted for “The Good Doctor” in 2003 and “In a Strange Room” in 2010.

He is the third South African novelist to win the Booker Prize, after Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, who has won twice. Galgut, who lives in Cape Town, is gratified the novel has “hit a nerve” in his home country, where its central theme of land and who owns is it “at the center of South African political life.”

But he’s despondent about his homeland, which he says is in “a state of moral exhaustion” amid a pandemic that has killed almost 90,000 South Africans and battered the economy.

“South Africa’s economy was in a pretty bad state before COVID hit, but it’s really dire now,” he said.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in public money earmarked to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa has been misappropriated by officials, according to investigators -- just the latest example of the corruption afflicting Africa’s most developed economy.

“There’s a general sense of dejection and aimlessness, which is kind of new,” Galgut said. “South Africans are fairly resilient and very given to the hope that we can change things, we can transform things. But that hope is in short supply right now.”

[DarknessFish]

Btw, I haven't read that latest book, but I've long thought that Damon Galgut is a seriously underrated writer. His prose is wonderful and distinctive, like a stark, disaffected Banville. Really visceral and poetic.