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From racial to class apartheid: South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom
Monthly Review, March, 2004 by Patrick Bond
Pretoria's repressive streak continued during 2003. Leading activists in the black townships of Johannesburg and Cape Town were repeatedly harassed and detained by police--mainly illegally (resulting in high-profile acquittals)--for resisting evictions, electricity and water disconnections, and the installation of prepaid meters for services. As for the global campaign to make AIDS medicines available, Pretoria infuriated local treatment activists by withdrawing the main drug for pregnant women, Nevirapine (on grounds of irregular testing several years earlier in Uganda), just days before Mbeki's Malaysia remarks. When reparations for apartheid-era profits were being demanded by South African activist groups in the U.S. courts in mid-2003, Mbeki and Justice Minister Penuell Maduna formally requested that the cases be thrown out, and later revealed that this was done due to the prodding of Colin Powell.
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Such incidents have alienated a huge proportion of the progressive movements and the low-income population. The independent left's main grassroots campaigns are the struggles for antiretroviral medicines to combat AIDS, free lifeline water (50 liters per person per day) and electricity (1 kilowatt hour per person per day), land reform, an end to housing evictions, a Basic Income Grant, debt repudiation and reparations for apartheid-era profits by foreign and domestic capital, and security from domestic violence. Protests are regularly mounted against high-profile neoliberal events such as the World Economic Forum. Occasionally the pressure rises to such high levels that Pretoria concedes, as with a long-delayed plan to roll out antiretroviral medicines in November 2003 that followed court battles, periodic protests against pharmaceutical corporations, and a civil disobedience campaign targeting Mbeki and his health and trade ministers. The Sowetans who illegally reconnected electricity beginning in 2000 were rewarded in April 2003 by having their accumulated debts written off, as the minister responsible for privatization unsuccessfully attempted to undercut township militancy. More recently, the government has embarked upon a systematic campaign to weaken grassroots militancy through judicial harassment and even extra-legal police repression.
Reflecting the lack of cooperation between the independent left and the ANC Alliance, the former organized intensely in 2003 against the Bush administration. Its 300-member Anti-War Coalition repeatedly drew many thousands of supporters to major demonstrations in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria--far more than attended ANC-COSATU-SACP-church-organized protests. While strident anti-imperialist rhetoric characterized ANC antiwar posturing, the Anti-War Coalition pointed out these hypocrisies: the arms agency Denel sold $250 million of high-tech munitions to Bush and Blair; warships docked at Durban on their way to the Persian Gulf; and in July 2003, Bush was received warmly by Mbeki for discussions over future military and economic cooperation. Bush responded in kind, calling Mbeki his "point man" on the Zimbabwe crisis. Bush's Africa hand, Walter Kansteiner, termed the New Partnership for Africa's Development "philosophically spot-on." At the same time the Zimbabwean progressive community and their international allies (including the U.S.-based Africa Action solidarity movement) remain appalled by Mbeki's repeated apologetics on behalf of Robert Mugabe's oppressive rule.
