Millions around the world are mourning the loss of the
symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela. But people are mourning
for different reasons. Most are mourning a freedom fighter who spent 27 years
in jail for his opposition to colonialism and racism. Most are mourning a
symbol of international solidarity, who spoke out against the Iraq War,
supported people with HIV/AIDS and likened the Palestinian freedom struggle to
his own. But others are using his death to hide the history of anti-colonial
struggles.
Apartheid: a Canadian tradition
According to The National Post, Conservative Prime Minister
Mulroney “spearheaded
Canadian push to end apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela
into the House of Commons on June 18, 1990, later claiming that “the very
notion of South Africa’s apartheid was anathema to me…I viewed apartheid with
the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis…I was resolved from the
moment I became prime minister that any government I headed would speak and act
in the finest traditions of Canada.”
But South African apartheid was based on Canadian tradition.
According to Shannon
Thunderbird, a Coast Tsimshian First Nations elder, “It is ironic because the Canadian
Indian Act formed much of the basis for the oppressive apartheid policies in
South Africa. It’s kind of an understood custom and practice that Canada’s
Indian Act came to be known as the acceptable role model for apartheid policies
and there are books and websites that outline all of this. It’s actually
hypocrisy for Canada to stand forward as a kind of bulwark of protest against
atrocities going on in other countries while at the same time we turn a blind
eye to our own people.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela while the genocidal
residential school system was still operational, and two months before sending
thousands of Canadian soldiers to confront the Mohawk blockade at Oka.
It is not only the Conservatives whose tributes to Mandela
reveal their hypocrisy. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and former Prime Minister
Jean Chretien called Mandela’s life inspiring, but Mandela certainly did not
inspire the White Paper. In 1969—five years into Mandela’s incarceration, when
Canada still supported South African apartheid—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
and his Minister for Indian Affairs Jean Chretien proposed the White
Paper to forcibly assimilate First Nations. As the Cree activist Harold
Cardinal wrote in his book The Unjust
Society (exposing Trudeau’s claims of Canada’s supposed “Just Society”), “In spite of all government
attempts to convince Indians to accept the white paper, their efforts will
fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of
Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads
directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.”
Anti-colonial struggles
The Red Power movement emerged to
challenge Canadian colonialism and defeat the White Paper, and later solidarity
with Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle swept the country. Mandela
was part of a mass movement against apartheid that included student and
township uprisings, armed resistance, mass strikes, and international
solidarity. South African apartheid depended on black workers for profits, so
the wave
of unionization—including the founding of COSATU in 1985—provided a
powerful weapon to organize strikes of millions against apartheid. It was South
Africans themselves who spearheaded the push to end apartheid and free Nelson
Mandela, not the “humanitarian intervention” myths
about Mulroney.
But there was widespread solidarity against South African
apartheid, which has inspired a similar movement against Israeli apartheid. Western elites are eager to detach Mandela from the struggle,
counter-posing the South African freedom struggle with other anti-colonial
struggles. Prime Minister
Harper claims that Mandela “demonstrated that the only path forward for the
nation was to reject the appeal of bitterness.” But it was the bitterness of
fellow Conservative Rob Anders—who in 2001 called Mandela a terrorist—that best
expressed how Western elites view anti-colonial struggles. That this label was
imposed on South African freedom fighters should lead us to challenge the
criminalization of other anti-colonial struggles—from Palestine to Tamil Eelam
to Turtle Island.
South Africa after apartheid
Mandela’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the elites, from terrorist
to inspiration, is not because of newfound solidarity with his anti-apartheid past
but rather the neoliberal policies of the ANC government. Reacting to news of
Mandela’s passing, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund offered their
sympathies to the South African people—sympathies that were lacking when these
financial institutions imposed structural adjustment policies in the 1990s.
According to South Africa’s Anti-Privatization Forum and
Coalition Against Water Privatization, “The majority of South Africans, made up of the poor
and working class, fought and died not just for political freedom from
apartheid, but for socio-economic freedom and justice, for the redistribution
of all ‘national wealth’…This popular mandate was captured in the
Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), which formed the basis of the
‘people’s contract’ with the new democratic government. However, it did not
take long for the ANC government to abandon that popular mandate by
unilaterally deciding to pursue a water policy that has produced the exact
opposite result… Following the neo-liberal economic advice of the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund and various Western governments (and heavy
lobbying by private multinational water companies, such as Suez and Biwater),
the South African government drastically decreased grants and subsidies to
local municipalities and city councils and supported the development of
financial instruments for privatised delivery. This effectively forced local government
to turn towards commercialisation and privatisation of basic services as a
means of generating the revenue no longer provided by the national state. Many
local government structures began to privatise and/or corporatise public water
utilities by entering into service and management ‘partnerships’ with
multinational water corporations. The immediate result was a massive increase
in the price of water that necessarily hit poor communities the hardest.”
But the struggle
for socio-economic freedom and justice, against the ANC government and global corporations, continues—from the Treatment Action
Campaign for people with HIV/AIDS, to the protests outside the UN climate
talks at Durban, to the strikes at Marikana and beyond. As Mandela himself said
in 1993, “You must
support the African National Congress only so far as it delivers the goods, if
the ANC government does not deliver the goods, you must do to it what you have
done to the apartheid regime.” The best tribute to Mandela is to continue the movement he represented—of anti-colonial
resistance, protests and strikes, and international solidarity.
