The corporate controlled media lies about everything else. Thus I had no logical reason to assume they told us the truth about the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1990s. I should have known the fairy tale about local activism and international sanctions (driven mainly by campus activism) was too seductive to be true. Especially as I already knew the weekly demonstrations at the South African Consulate in Seattle – which went on for years without managing to close it down – were stage managed by a staff member in Congressman Mike Lowry’s office and someone on the anti-apartheid coalition – both of whom had intelligence connections. I write about this in my recent memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Secret Meetings Between the ANC and the Apartheid Government

Nevertheless I fully believed the fiction about successful activism bringing apartheid down. And was dumbfounded to learn from John Pilger’s 2006 Freedom Next Time that the African National Congress (the former “terrorist” organization led by Nelson Mandela) held secret meetings with the apartheid government between 1987 and 1990 to organize an orderly “transition” from apartheid to a black-governed liberal democracy that would keep property and business in the hands of a white elite. Pilger is an Australian journalist who is probably better known for supporting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in dealing with Swedish sexual assault charges.

As Mandela was in prison, the ANC leadership was led by former South African President Tabo Mbeki (the one who claimed HIV was a myth). Part of the “compromise” they agreed to was the elevation of a black super class into positions of responsibility in the South African mining and banking establishment. In other words, they agreed to eliminate political apartheid by giving the black majority voting rights – replacing it with economic apartheid. It makes perfect sense now why poverty and living conditions are so much worse under the ANC than they were under apartheid.

The Role of Wall Street and the IMF

The secret meetings came about as a direct result of the South African stock market crash in 1985, which caused the apartheid government to default on IMF and other foreign debt repayments. This led to the apartheid government getting one of those offers you can’t refuse from the international banking establishment – unless they worked something out with the black majority to end growing popular unrest, their international loans would be cut off. Publicly Ronald Reagan was advocating a policy “constructive engagement” with South Africa, while according to declassified documents, Wall Street was exerting strong pressure on the apartheid regime to bring the black majority into government.

Meanwhile Mandela, still in prison, was engaged in secret negotiations of his own. In 1986 he was moved from Robbin Island to a mainland prison, where he had three rooms and could entertain people privately. He was ultimately moved to the to the chief warden’s house at Victor Verster Prison, where he had a phone, fax, swimming pool – and a secret meeting with South African president P.W. Botha.

Structural Adjustment = Brutal Poverty

The ANC charter promises land distribution to everyone who works, as well as nationalization of South African mines, banks and monopoly industries – a commitment Mandela confirmed in 1993. This was just before he agreed to join GATT and the WTO and to accept new IMF loans to repay the $25 billion foreign debt the ANC acquired from the apartheid government. As a condition of IMF loan, he also had to agree to IMF structural adjustment – including water privatization, low wages for public sector workers and a social welfare policy that leaves even more South African children suffering from poverty and hunger than during the last decade of the apartheid government (which guaranteed black residents access to free housing and water).

Part of the secret agreement between the ANC and the apartheid government was that government officials guilty of crimes against humanity (torture and politically motivated imprisonment and murders) wouldn’t be prosecuted under the new black-led government. This, in essence, was the true rationale for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – where perpetrators were spared prosecution if they publicly confessed to their victims. As Pilger notes, only underlings who carried out orders were required to appear. None of the corrupt judges, generals mine owners – nor former South African presidents Botha and De Klerk, who ran the security forces who committed the atrocities, ever testified.

South Africa in 2011

Income inequality continues to worsen in the five years since Pilger published Freedom Next Time. As of February 2010 2/3 of South African children lived in poverty (living on less than $4 US a day – see http://www.irp.wisc.edu/dispatch/2010/02/26/child-poverty-south-africa/)/

As in Columbia, strong local activism against water privatization, has forced some communities to abolish the pre-paid water meters that led residents to drink contaminated water, causing a resurgence of cholera (see http://www.thehealthculture.com/2010/11/water-privatization-in-south-africa-prepaid-meters/).

Freedom Next Time also has excellent chapters on the hidden history of Diego Garcia (an island in the Indian Ocean forcibly evacuated to create a US defense installation), Palestine, Afghanistan and India.