To me oppression is oppression whether by one group of blacks against another, or whites against blacks.
No one here is defending black-on-black gang violence in SA, or whatever it is you’re talking about.
What’s happening in South Africa politically and socially right now by no means comes under the heading of “oppression” for anyone.
But what about “constructive engagement”?!
I assume you’re using the puzzlement smiley sarcastically?
Actually, I seriously want the (black) South African take on it. Never seemed to hear that back in the '80s, when “constructive engagement” was being debated here, Admin officials and Congresscritters were saying it with a straight face, and college students were demanding sanctions and screaming “X University must divest!” (And I wondered at the time and I wonder still whether any of the American pols who touted “constructive engagement” as the best way to end Apartheid sincerely believed that, or were just being cynical and watching out for the bottom-lines of American investors in SA. But I heard a lot of arguments for it that sounded pretty sincere.)
Well, Tutu is a Black South African, I think his words sum it up nicely: “constructive engagement is an abomination, an unmitigated disaster.”
Some may have been sincere in believing it was the best way to engage, but others were quite upfront about the fact that they were mainly doing it as Cold War realpolitik, I think. Others were no doubt racist scum.
I do recall Jesse Helms ranting on the floor of the Senate that the end of Apartheid would not usher in majority rule but “minority rule – that is, Commyernist rule!”
The ANC was never a communist party, though. The irony is that they turned to the USSR for money and military training, and forged a closer alliance with the South African Communist Party, chiefly because they were branded terrorists at the urging of the apartheid government (and friends), and received short thrift from the English and US governments when Tambo moved to the UK. Remember that the SA government defined Communism as [
](Suppression of Communism Act, 1950 - Wikipedia) and their overseas supporters were willing to go along with that because …well, I don’t know why. Because they didn’t trust that if they supported majority rule, the resulting government would automatically see itself as beholden to them, I guess. Remember that the ANC was initially an African Nationalist movement, not a Communist one. And that Oliver Tambo started out as a strict Ghandi-style pacifist, and had to be talked around to the switch from nonviolent to armed struggle.
Basically, US and UK (and others - the SAAF flew for-their-time state-of-the-art Mirages in the 70s, for instance) support for the apartheid junta stretched out the era of apartheid artificially, and made for a couple of particularly bloody wars in Southern Africa. “Constructive engagement” was just the last-gasp smokescreen name for a policy that they’d followed for decades anyway.
So far, so relatively good. SA has not been perfect but it has not degenerated into a total c********le.
Stop bumping old threads unless there is some substantive update.
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