Hoping for healing in South Africa

Still in his late 20s, Andrew Feinstein returned to his native South Africa in the early 1990s after years of studying at Berkeley and Cambridge. He had left to avoid being drafted into the apartheid state’s military -- then engaged in a dirty war on its northern border -- but with the release of Nelson Mandela, he threw himself heart and soul into the process of transforming the stricken nation into a multiracial democracy. Joining Mandela’s African National Congress party, he found himself involved in some crucial situations leading to the transfer of power. After South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, he became a legislator, first in Gauteng province (which includes Johannesburg, Pretoria and its environs) and soon in the national parliament in Cape Town.

In “After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future,” his honest, revealing memoir, Feinstein captures the immense excitement he felt at participating in such epochal events. The tone of his account might best be expressed in the marvelous lines Wordsworth wrote recalling his hopeful feelings about a revolution two centuries earlier:

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! - Oh times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!”

For Feinstein, this euphoria lasted for several heady years as his party and his government -- indeed, the whole country -- did much under Mandela’s leadership to, in Lincoln’s words, “bind up the nation’s wounds” and try to deal with problems lingering from apartheid and new ones natural in an evolving society. He shows that this was not just a matter of inspiring examples and speeches from the top but a lot of nuts-and-bolts work on the part of foot soldiers like himself and his colleagues.

But once Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, governed South Africa, Feinstein became so disillusioned with the acceleration of corruption, inefficiency and betrayal of core principles he witnessed that he felt there was no longer a place for him with the ANC. After resigning his seat in protest in 2001, he once again exiled himself from South Africa only a few years after his joyous return home.

“After the Party” paints a searing close-up portrait of the corrupting force of power, leading to a fatal weakening of institutions and to autocracy and indifference beneath a veneer of comradeship and democracy. The author’s own experience echoes the eloquent words he quotes of South African Chief Justice Pius Langa, who “spoke of ‘leaders who became adept at listening to themselves and turning a blind eye or deaf ear to those who tell them bad news. They become equally impervious to the suffering of their subjects because pain is bad news and imposes obligations these leaders would prefer to ignore.’ ”

Unfortunately, the portrait in this book of South Africa’s recently elected president, Jacob Zuma, will provide scant hope for improvement in the new administration: “With more power,” writes Feinstein, “far greater responsibility requiring acute decision-making rather than pandering to every interest group, more sycophants surrounding him and, therefore, less contact with daily reality, it isn’t difficult to imagine Zuma being an even worse leader of the country than he currently is of his malfunctioning party.” How did things go so terribly wrong after the grand beginnings in the 1990s?

This underlying question of Feinstein’s passionate book written more in genuine sorrow than anger can be characterized by returning to Wordsworth, this time his agonized plea: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

Feinstein is a pragmatist as well as an idealist, and he knows that for the sake of his fellow countrymen, it is essential that their government “find strength in what remains behind.” It has been all too easy for those who have the difficult task of governing post-apartheid South Africa to reject criticism, but as the years since the demise of that terrible system lengthen into decades, excuses cannot suffice. Feinstein concludes his book with a series of specific recommendations for reforming the way the dominant ANC governs. These involve codes of ethical conduct and improved transparency intended to promote strengthened institutions and more open and accountable government, worthy of South Africa’s magnificent 1996 constitution.

If the ANC is to redeem any significant measure of its promises and make good on its noble vision of a truly democratic rainbow nation, it would do well to heed the advice in “After the Party.” It comes from one of their own, who, despite everything he has seen, still wishes them -- and the nation that is theirs in common -- well in their vital task.