S. Africa’s Leader Is in No Position to Lecture Others

Re “South Africa Must Pressure Mugabe,” Commentary, June 29: Adam Kushner and Geoffrey Swenson make some good points. One should have nothing but contempt for Zimbawbe President Robert Mugabe, a former liberation hero, for leading a violent campaign against white farmers and an even more brutal campaign against his black opponents. They also rightly chide South African President Thabo Mbeki for his government’s dithering in the face of Mugabe’s despotism.

However, not only does the piece expect too much from Mbeki, it also displays a lack of knowledge of the domestic and regional context for Mbeki’s decisions: the meaning of Zimbabwe inside South Africa. However much one deplores Mugabe’s cynical exploitation of the land problem, it is very real, and South Africa has one too. Under apartheid, whites occupied 87% of the agricultural land. By the end of 2001, less than 2% of land had changed hands between whites and rural, landless blacks. It is a disparity that will haunt the “new South Africa” as long as it remains unresolved, and one that would make it very delicate, at best, for the South African government to appear to be intervening on behalf of white landowners in Zimbabwe.

What’s more, the South African government under Mbeki has not dealt adequately with racial disparities of wealth in its own country: In “South Africa: Human Development Report 2003,” released in May, as reported in African Business magazine, the U.N. Development Programme calls South Africa “one of the most unequal societies on the planet,” adding that “inequality has worsened over the past decade within all racial groups, but comparatively less so within the white group. Significantly, the average income in 2001 of a white household was six times more than that of an African household.” If Mbeki must do any speaking up, he needs to start inside South Africa.

Sean Jacobs

New York City