Pushing it. I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are.
Some of my best friends are dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestled with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
Today we're talking about South Africa, another deeply divided and unequal country.
No kidding. We are going to discuss how successful South Africa has been in its attempts to address its history of apartheid.
Let's do it. I had never been to South Africa until a few months ago, and I was really looking forward to it because my dad had gone many times to cover like the elections there in the nineteen nineties. I went to actually study how they memorialize the history of apartheid and how they've addressed it since it ended.
I mean, this is a really big, important, meaty, heavy issue because if we are in the United States to figure out how to reckon with our own past, it's definitely the case that South Africa has been a model for a lot of places, including people here talking about what we should do. So that's what I went there to look at up.
Close, no doubt. And when you said your father was there looking at the elections in nineteen ninety four.
He was shooting them. He was a journalist.
Yeah, I was there in nineteen ninety four. He and I hung out because I was there on a full bright to go to graduate school at the University of Cape Town. And so I was there at the birth of the country's democracy, its first all race election. And so to think about all these years past to talk to you about, you know, what's happened since then. I'm
really excited for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it, and we've been kind of saving it, not talking about it because we're saving it for right now.
So let's do it, all right, Well, let's get to some history. Let's talk about the basics of what happened in this country so we can figure out how this country is or is not moving forward. So A Part eight starts when the Nationalist Party is elected an Africana
Party Dutch descendant settlers in nineteen forty eight. And this is the moment when every kind of you know, like the shittiest way that you could imagine separating white and black and giving black people the worst of everything in white people the best of everything comes into law.
Yeah, the closest thing for us is segregation in the South in the United States, except in South Africa, the population is overwhelmingly black and you have this small minority controlling power, control, owning land, all the resources.
Yeah, no, it's remarkable. Someone told me. The interesting thing about South Africa is it's had every form of colonialism and slavery. You could imagine they had chattel slavery going back to the sixteen hundreds when the Dutch first settled the Cape Town region. Then they had indigenous dispossession. They removed the Khoi and Sun indigenous populations from their land, and then for the Bantu populations which spanned from Zulu to le Soto to Kosa and many other you know
what they recognize as indigenous tribes to the region. They were dispossessed from their land, mostly after the discovery of gold in the late nineteenth entry. So part of the story of A Part eight is really building on a long history of European settlement in what is today known as South Africa and the British had a big part in it. The Dutch, of course, you know, have been there a long time, particularly since the Africana population is
descended from it. And the thing about A Part eight when it formalizes in nineteen forty eight is it's so systematic people have to carry passes to identify which township they come from. It limits their mobility and their ability to come and go. Because of course South Africa is also about labor extraction. There they're using black people to make money for white people, largely in doing gold mining, diamond mining, and other forms of hard labor.
You talked about how systematic it is. It's also messy in the ways that you just said too, because a vast majority of the population are also working for people working the minds of working at homes. So there's also
all kinds of interaction. Part of the laws that are about sort of separating even more relationships sex and marriage, removal of people from neighborhoods onto homelands, and bantu stands like actual physical removal of entire neighborhoods to try to try to keep that separation even more.
That's right and partly what is so powerful in seeing the country today. When you define a country's natural resources, its land, the things that make the country wealthy, like its gold and diamonds, and the people themselves, when you restrict them the eighty seven percent of a population a giver take to about twelve percent of the land, you can imagine how fundamentally traumatic and delimiting and ultimately dehumanizing
that's been generation after generation after generation. And one of the things that's really fascinating about, like thinking about the United States and its own process of segregation, like black
people were only thirteen percent of the population. But if you take the worst thing you think about, Jim Crow, and then say do that to eighty seven percent of the population, then you really do get a sense of the visceralness of a part eight and how powerful a way of controlling the population it's been all these years.
Yeah, and also this sense of almost like holding back a damn a flood because there was always resistance against it too.
That's right, well, talking about resistance. I mean, so listen, everyone knows that Nelson Mandela is the most famous freedom fighter in terms of the history of a parteit And the thing about Nelson Mandela is, you know, he's part of a political resistance organization called the African National Congress that by the nineteen forties, Nelson Mandela, who is a young lawyer, gets involved and begins to organize with A and C leaders, and their goal is to end A
Part eight. They're going to build a movement kind of in the tradition of the Civil rights movement, particularly in DOAACP. There's a lot of borrowing in fact between these two movements, because by nineteen forty eight, the civil rights movement hasn't yet taken a kind of grassroots dimension. But over the next ten years, in nineteen fifties, these movements are going to grow just.
As interesting that borrowing from the United States happens even more by the nineteen sixties, the black resistance movement in South Africa is borrowing from black power movement in the United States. I've seen this as a model for a change, yeah.
Absolutely. And it's sometime in the mid nineteen sixties that Nelson Mandela, who's on the run for his political resistance, there's this moment when the A and C decides that it's going to have to resort to violence as a way to make change. They see this next phase as a resistance movement, and they began to plan for bombings and other forms of violence. You know, this is the kind of thing we saw in Northern Ireland during the
Troubles for people resisting the British colonialism. So violence by the mid nineteen sixties is a part of a liberation strategy.
I will say also in response to extreme violence by the government. Absolutely that they are these dramatic moments in history of sort of these massacres of different sorts and tamping down on even peaceful protest that lead to this violent resistance as well. Yeah. So by nineteen sixty three, Nelson Mandela is imprisoned and he spends the next twenty seven years in prison. He's not freed until nineteen ninety when he's in his seventies.
So yeah, Vin, I mean, you just talked about the end of Nelson Mandela's incarceration, which itself grew out of really powerful student led movement by Winnie Mandela in the nineteen eighties while Nelson was still incarcerated, but by the early nineteen nineties. By nineteen ninety one, South Africa's president FW de Clerk decides that he's going to have to basically usher in a transition moment to end the party and here you are showing up just about this time.
So so what was it like just just landing there and being part of that moment?
Yeah, I mean it was. It was incredible. So you're right, like, there's this there's this hope for a peaceful transition to majority rule, but it also feels really precarious and uncertain at the moment. I'm there, I'm there before the election, and you know, is there going to be a civil war? There's this scramble for power. Is the election going to go off peacefully?
Yeah?
It feels sort of like, you know, like at the start of a democracy of a history, like at the United States after the Revolutionary War, you know, like like what's going to happen to this country?
So it felt I have a question for you. So it felt it felt like that rather than being there at the moment when the civil rights movement achieves its legislative victories, like you were thinking about a new country altogether, not just fixing an old one.
Yeah. I think I think it felt like something radically new. I remember the election day. It was also I remember that it's your birthday. It Pril twenty seventh and so nineteen ninety four, and in Cape Town, where I was this beautiful city, you know, framed by these mountains. It was rainy and overcast and just like this eerie quietness, and the lines stretched for miles and miles of people voting. Yeah, but it did feel like the start of this of
a new country, an entirely new country. And I know that, I know that's imaginative, but countries are imaginations, like a democracy or something. I mean, their laws and there's going to be a constitution. But this sense, this thing actually went off without without violence, that the country didn't fall apart, they were able to hold election.
Yeah. Well, you mentioned the constitution, and I have to say that that's one of the shining prideful consequences or legacies of this transition moment. People in South Africa do
this very day. The people I got to spend time with and talk to, you know, they are very proud of the constitution for its ability to express their shared commitments to equality, which is one of the reasons why some of the failures of this vision of South Africa's future from nineteen nineties to the present is really less about what the constitution promises, and more about the failures of the country to come to terms with reckoning with that past, as well as reparations, which is a huge
and controversial issue to this day.
So making a democracy is different than dealing with generations of extreme inequality and enforced inequality and segregation. And so yeah, I want to hear what you saw on your trip about how the country has reckoned with this past, what you learned.
All right, we're back from the break, Ben. I want to tell you about a couple of places we visited, like places we spent time and seeing up close. One of these places is called Constitutional Hill. It's in Johannesburg. It is it is home to today's Constitutional Court, which is their equivalent of our US Supreme Court. As we were approaching it, though, I asked, I asked our host what was going on? Because I was confused about where we're going?
Court?
Is the labordated.
Question?
It will become a pedent to you.
It used to be.
So they chained that. Yes, interesting, damn one. You know now you were always going to say the thing, man, You're always going to be like, why is this so messed up? Why does it look like that? Too. It used to be a prison man, so their court used to be a prison. Is that purposeful, like in terms of meaning or is it practical in terms of like we need to repurpose that building and we got limited funds.
No, it's very purposeful in terms of meaning. This is one of the ways that South Africa is doing a good job, a very good job of reckoning with its past, of a form of truth telling about the system of a party. And indeed, the Constitutional Court sits at the apex of what was once considered the Old Fort Prison complex. It was in many ways the most productive site for incarcerating political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela who spent time there.
Prisoners were brought in stripped, naked, humiliated, beaten, starved, placed in solitary confinement. The actual prison for or tells this story and shows you the actual grounds there. They're still maintained. That's why it looks dilapidated, because it looks exactly like this place purpose has always looked. Ok. It's a place that is that is there to help remind people of how precious their democracy is in relationship to this past.
It's a very powerful undertaking. And then being in that place I mean being on Constitutional Hill seeing the prison and a memorial to the Constitution itself. It's like you also are reminded that they had this Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They began this process of bringing the country back together.
So the truth, truth and reconciliation begins actually a couple of years after I leave, and it's a way for the country to in a legal way, to try to deal with this past, as you said, of murder and torture.
Yeah. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in nineteen ninety six, was to allow for people who could prove they have been victims of mostly police violence in the period between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four could make an application to appear before the Commission, at which time they would tell their stories and they would identify perpetrators, who would
then be subject to prosecution under those terms. Perpetrators, on the other hand, could apply for amnesty under the condition that they would also tell their stories of the terrible things they did to people, including murder, and that they would receive amnesty. They would not be punished for participating fully in that process. The idea was that if enough
stories were told on both sides. It would create a path for healing and reconciliation for the country, and it's a really important first step for the African National Congress to begin to create you know what Nelson Bendela called this rainbow nation, like you know that we're all going to come together, This multi racial democracy is going to be real. But we have to have this truth reconciliation process to achieve that.
Yeah, yeah, a kind of restorative justice, which we've talked about before.
Yeah. Well, well, first of all, we were trying to make sense of how successful it was. I mean, the whole point of our trip to South Africa was to study the degree to with truth telling practices like a truth commission is a useful way to reckon with the past for a state or for a country and to
determine what are the ingredients for success. Some of this I was reading, but a lot of my new learning came with interviews of a number of people who were either state actors, meeting public officials, or people who've been responsible for enacting the commission itself. I actually spoke to a commissioner or talk to people who were activists who are doing some of the work today to support the goals of the Commission that have never really truly been realized.
I mean, this thing went on for only two years between nineteen ninety six and nineteen ninety eight, about twenty two thousand people participated. But obviously you know that millions of people suffered out of our parteip So some of the basic limitations of the process itself have created this movement that is called the Unfinished Business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
So you have ten tens of thousands of victims of crimes who get to get to give testimony and they're heard, and you have thousands of perpetrators who also get to talk and apologize and they can possibly get amnesty if they present honestly and so on and fully and so so, yeah, tell tell me more like about this. You know the sense that this is obviously that's only it's only like representative. It's almost like symbolic for the rest of the country.
And you couldn't you couldn't do every better, right, and so why couldn't that work as a sample size of what a country needs to do to move forward in this fledge link democracy and sort of to try to live together in a sense.
Yeah, well, that's that's an interesting way to put it, because in some ways, Desmond Tutu, who chaired the commission, thought of it like a kind of sample, kind of awn sample of reconciliation that it only could be. But in the end, part of what led to frustration was this arbitrary notion that there were very limited definitions of what was a crime in the apartaiit understanding of the TRC, meaning you know, police officers who killed people, or even
A and C members who killed people. Oftentimes members who were fighting against A Part eight might use violence to discipline and or execute someone who was an informant for
the state. So one of the ways to sort of appreciate this challenge is that one, if it's only about state violence, then you ignore the suffering of people who led lives of destitution and desperation, who were victimized by every form of inhumanity that a state can dole out, including not having clean water, including eighty seven percent of the population living on about twelve percent of the land,
and so on. The other thing that is a source of current tension and frustration that we heard from people when we talked was that more A and C members were ultimately punished under this system than actual white ringers, meaning you know, people who were avowed white supremacists, that were far fewer of them, because in the course of the prosecutions, when names were revealed, it was up to the state to actually go after people, and the state ultimately,
that is the Black A and C government that's been in charge since the end of A Part eight, failed ultimately to follow up on prosecutions of people who who were known to meet the definition of political violence again committing a crime against the Part eight. Yeah, totally, totally.
I want to go back to something. I want to go back to something you said, because I think it's really fascinating. You said that it could only the TRC in its in its purview, could really only deal with people who are victims of political crimes. But it couldn't. It can't. It can't address people who are victims of the vast inequality and suffering and structural problems in a country.
That's right.
That's fascinating because you know that is changing the entire sort of economic system of the country, which is the country has failed to do.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
So if we're twenty eight years since the end of A Part eight. The basic infrastructure of a PARTAIT that was never designed to accommodate a quality of life standard for everyone means that today something like electricity and power does exist universally across the country. But today in a free post to Parte South Africa, they have to manage electricity. And the first thing we saw when we got off the airplane was a blackout community. The hotel we were
staying in actually was surrounded by darkness. And of course this hotel had generators to accommodate its overwhelmingly privileged guests like ourselves and white people who are visiting the country. So it's a mess, man, It's just I mean, we heard from people who literally said in some ways their lives were better under PARTEID, which was just devastating to hear. So when we were at the Constitutional Court, I mean, there were like sixty people there protesting, most of them elderly,
most of them black. But they are chanting a song where they're calling out Cyril Rama Pulsa, who is the current President of South Africa is the fifth president since the end of A Part eight. They're basically saying we helped get you elected, We gave you a helping hand. We want your support. Now we need you to support us to bring reparations to our communities.
Yeah, we put you in office. Follow up on your promises you owe us.
Yeah. So I ended up talking to one of the protesters and her name is Nomah Russia Bonase and Noma Leeds an organization called Kulamani. Now Kulamani is focused on a whole range of issues. They had huge signs out because they wanted people to understand they're at their Supreme Court, what kinds of issues they're facing. One of their signs said, today's disasters are worse because of a PARTEP. Victims have
no redress. They talked about COVID, they talked about flooding, they talked about gender based violence, about poverty, crime, inequality. They basically saying, like, you know, our lives are worse off when these terrible things happened because we've never actually addressed the problem of a PARTAI. And they were calling for reparations. They were making reparations the cornerstone of their organizing.
And so in the TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I think people who testified they could get a small lump sum of like thirty five hundred dollars.
It was thirty thousand rand, which Noma, the head of the protest, told us had been one hundred and twenty thousand rand when it was first proposed and recommended by the TRC, But Tabo and Beck, the second president after Mandela, had reduced it to thirty thousand, and they were basically saying without any community input, it was just a unilateral decision.
And that would also only be for people who gave testimony to the TRC. Correct, where is the country on that in terms of reparations, economic reparations for the economic system under a part EID that has created a two class system that the vast majority is living in poverty and the minority is living well.
That's right. That's a great question because one of the recommendations fell under a rough category of community reparations. This was an idea that you wouldn't necessarily pay individuals a lump sum of money, but actually you would address entire communities. Outside the Constitutional Court where Noma was protesting, she told me there were other promises too that weren't met. Promises to individuals.
A victim is going to get education for himself, for Hesan, for the children, the gren and Grenn and grandchildren's let is the recommended. There will be a proper housing given to the victims. There will be also a proper education because people were wounded, spirits, lati in their body and also mental. But now you did not to call on not saying anything even about the education.
She said that not only have reparations not been forthcoming, but we've had to demonstrate. I mean she's talking about she and all the people out there to hold the A and C government accountable. The Black government of South Africa, who is that government has failed to live up to these these goals that they set for themselves as a nation, and it's time that they give them what they deserve.
It's so interesting to think about reparations in terms of South Africa versus when the conversation comes up here because there's no man. These other protesters are saying, you know, you are us who are in power, and you're still not You're still not doing this, like you're still not thinking about how to make to to level an imbalanced playing field.
And that's a big part of the frustration that we heard from not just Noma and the protesters there.
What did you feel like, where did you feel in relationship to history? You know, is there some sort of analogy you would use to the United States?
If anything, I thought a lot about what it means to live in a country where black people are mayors of cities and we have a black Asian vice president and we just had a black president. My mind thought a lot more about the relationship of black power in South Africa to black power in the United States. And I felt very disappointed by understanding from Noma and from others how the current leadership of the A and C and the current president are failing to deal with the legacies of a Parteake.
Yeah, yeah, let's talk more about this after the break. Let's actually talk about Nelson Mandela. Hey, Khalil, so we are back. Yeah. I wanted to talk more about Nelson Mandela because in nineteen ninety four when I was there, I mean, I thought of him as a hero. He had survived twenty seven years in prison and here he is running this country and leading it through this peaceful transition. And I know he's kind of an icon in the symbolic sense that it doesn't have to do with necessary
his policies. But he has started this thing. He's jump started it, and he's everywhere. He is a sort of avuncular like grandfatherly figure. You know, he somehow is the embodiment of the new country and the sense that a new beginning and even of a peaceful new beginning.
Yeah, I mean, there is something miraculous about Nelson Mandela assuming the role as the first president of a free South Africa. I mean, I guess the closest equivalent would be if Martin Luther King Junior wasn't assassinated in April president of the Right and being Richard Brexitt and being
Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty eight. I mean, so, you know, this is this is a big deal because even to this day, I mean, most Americans myself included, prior to going to South Africa, just you know, had this had this imagination that Nelson Mandela was a figure beyond reproach whose legacy merits all of the adulation that people heap on them. But the truth is, the opinion on Nelson Mandela has changed. His image has changed over time.
Interesting because there's always this sense of both reconciliation and maybe conciliation in a negative sense, So tell me about it.
Yeah, yeah, there are statues of Nelson Mandela everywhere. Yeah, there are photographs, larger than life photographs in almost every public space. In fact, if you go to the Union Buildings, which is home to their parliament in Pretoria, which is north of Johannesburg, there is a twenty foot tall statue of Nelson Mandela with its arms outstretched looking over his country. Because the Union Buildings were built basically at the top of a hill, and his arms stretched nearly eight feet wide.
It is breathtaking.
I just want to say, I think I think of Nelson Mandela as both Martin Luther King, and it's more like and Abraham Lincoln. You know, he is the president. It's all those statues in one.
In the case of the statue at Union Building, this larger than life one, it did remind me of the Doctor King monument on the Mall, where he's emerging out of a stone of hope. After all, Doctor King is the only non president to be memorialized in the nation's
capital in the National Mall. However, in the same way that Doctor King has become a kind of whitewashed historical figure who believed only in color blindness and individual merit, and whose actual radical commitments to redistribution, to solving for poverty, to changing the structure of American societ Nelson Mandela has been turned into a similar saintly figure who had no radical edges and who ultimately is smiling everywhere you see him. In fact, we went to one of the wealthiest suburbs
in Johannesburg. It is home to more millionaires it's called Santon, than any square mile on the African continent. And there there's this massive mall called the Nelson Mandela Square. It's actually a really beautiful mall. The man I have to tell you. Down the hallways of this mall, you see images of life size images of Nelson Mandela smiling at you, almost in a coonish manner. I mean, I hate to say it that way, but that's what it felt like.
It felt like his image was being used to sign off on like hyper capitalism, like you know, make Nelson Mandela prout, spend as much of your money in this mall as possible. And that was deeply disturbing to me.
Hmm. And even when he got out of prison, I mean, he had been he was in prison so long, and he was he was old. He had this this grandfatherly manner.
Yeah. Well this brings up a really interesting point because I was able to talk to see young people and I asked them, in particular, how do young people understand Nelson Mandela's legacy? Uh? And dude, they were like, they were really critical, I mean so much so that they they basically said that Nelson Mandela sold out the country when he negotiated the post apartment apartheid agreements with the Afrikana Party. The generational divide, you can tell what generations
I want blom to how much they actually admire him. Yeah, the younger you get so what so what not messed with him at all? His Rainbow Nation.
You can see it was a it was a wrong.
The younger generation, they just straight up see it and they call it, especially the two thousand kids. Gensens are savage and they call him Nelli M. And you know how Africa in respect is Nelli M Nellie M. Yes, what does that mean kind of a well, kind of a euphemism for like some dude, right, like, oh yeah, that's Nelly M. Nelson Mandela. In other words, she was saying, for ging Zers, they don't see him as a revered
historical figure. In a way, the failures of the TRC have come home to roost in a younger generation who are very skeptical of the ruling party, the African National Congress, and they're skeptical of all of the presidents, including Nelson Mandela, who they essentially accuse rightly so, of truly a failure
to deliver. And just to make sure that I wasn't hearing this from just you know, kind of radical young people, I also asked our host, who's a generation older, what to make of what they call the failure of the Rainbow Nation. And here's what he said, No one cares allan if you critique that, yes, we know it failed.
So what so because we've spoken and we've spoken nothing. It's it's happening. So what's the point of saying, does people did us wrong? I mean, what you've done, what you're seeing now, it's a proper demonstration of why the truth and reconciation permission never both foot.
The inability of this country, through this democracy that's been held up in the world as like a shiny example of going from you know, a terrible system of oppression to having one of the best constitutions on paper, and yet people don't believe in it anymore.
I'm so glad you got to go there and do this. I'm jealous. And to think about this being there, I don't know, years into this democracy and to see it at this moment. Maybe I'll ask you one last question, because we started up by talking what you would bring back to the United States from this trip and think about our country and think about memorializing and so this young democracy and our much older one. What is it
that you brought back? What is the lesson that you think you learned from going to South Africa.
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think it's pretty straightforward that truth telling in many different ways has to happen. And although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a limited process and didn't tell the entire truth of a Parte eight only told a limited truth of a particular kind of political violence. The truth telling that needs to happen, both in South Africa and in the United States is the whole story. It's about colonialism. South Africa also hit
chattel slavery. All of these things to be told in a fulsome way, both in that country and ours, in order to even begin to have a conversation about the future.
And then the second thing, which is the one we've been talking about about reparations, is that you really can't have truth telling without some form of reparations, without some form of redistribution, because once people understand the fullness of the harm done to people, the oppression, the centuries of it, then their actual lived experiences have to be made better, have to be made whole. There's no way around it.
One last story, I just have to tell you this because it was one of the last things I heard, So I asked, like, where do white people sit in this story, Like, do white people do reconciliation work? Are they learning these histories in their schools, because a lot of white children go to private schools, not the public schools. And overwhelmingly, people said, by and large, white South Africans have opted out of telling the truth about a partake.
And so as we were leaving, I heard from this white guy who we were interviewing who said that basically he does the work of reconciliation with white people today and it's really hard, but he is committed to bringing white people to the table and white people along, no matter how heart or how long it takes.
Yeah, yeah, country like that, everyone becomes implicated in the atrocity. Thank you, man. I'm glad we finally had this conversation now, so now we can talk about it all the time. Now I can look at photos. Now I can well and maybe maybe we'll maybe we'll get to travel together.
Yeah, I hope.
So all right, love you.
Love you men. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil Dubron Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
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