Liberation movements in Southern Africa emerged from the anti-colonial struggle as political parties in government. Since taking power they have consolidated their position in both the political arena, as well as within most, if not all, state and parastatal structures. In securing a power of definition in the political arena they are shaping – to the extent of manipulating - public discourse to suit their ends. Why have the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), to a lesser but clearly visible extent the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia) - and also to some degree the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa - not displayed a more consistent commitment to democratic principles and/or practices? Why have they also largely abandoned their once-sacrosanct goal of socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing inherited imbalances in the distribution of wealth?

In examining these issues, contributors to a just published book volume probed beyond the myths and legends, which have long surrounded southern Africa’s liberation movements. They acknowledge that while these organisations were waging war on systems of institutionalised injustice, they did not always display sensitivity to human rights issues and democratic values. The struggle for a ‘good cause’ and the noble goals associated with it did not prevent them from falling prey to authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic (at times violent) practices towards real or imagined dissidents within their ranks.

Even the popular support for their struggle expressed by local groups was at times based more on coercion and the manipulation of internal contradictions among the colonised than on genuine resistance to the colonial state. There were varying degrees of internal repression inside the liberation movements shaping a mindset far from liberal. This is particularly true of the Zimbabwean and Namibian cases. But some of these anti-democratic tendencies are also detectable of late in South Africa too. A recent study suggests a high degree of political intolerance among South Africans who, it seems, dislike political enemies a great deal and perceive them as threatening.

An argument presented in this volume is that the political change which has occurred in those Southern African societies shaped by settler colonialism can be characterised as a transition from controlled change to changed control. A new political elite has ascended the commanding heights. It employs selective narratives and memories relating to their liberation wars as justification of their unquestioned continuation of rule obtained. They have constructed or invented a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces. The (self-)mystification of the liberators has played an essential role in this fabrication of political culture and ideology.

These elites have also developed militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping their postcolonial identities claimed to be collective in the sense of ‘national’. Early post-independence notions of reconciliation and slogans like ‘unity in diversity’ have given way to a politically correct identity form. Those in (political) power apply their definition along narrow ‘we-they’ or ‘with-us-against-us’ lines. Simultaneously, the boundaries between party and government are blurred and replaced by a growing equation of party and government. Opposition or dissent is increasingly considered as hostile and the dissenter sometimes branded as ‘enemy of the people’. In a University of Amsterdam doctoral thesis of 2001 on Zimbabwe it is argued that power relations had changed, but ‘perceptions of power had not changed. The layers of understanding regarding power relations, framed by socialisation and memory, continued to operate.’ The new actors executed power in relation to opposition unchanged, ‘as their mental framework remained in the colonial setting’. Hence patterns from colonial rule of ‘citizens’ ruling the ‘subjects’ were repeated and reproduced.

With this tendency towards autocratic rule and the subordination of the state to the party, a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty has emerged. Self-enrichment by way of a system of rent- or sinecure-capitalism has become the order of the day. The term ‘national interest’ has been appropriated and now means solely what the post-colonial ruling elite decides it means. It is used to justify all kinds of authoritarian practice while the term ‘anti-national’ or ‘unpatriotic’ is applied to any group that resists the power of the ruling elite of the day.

These selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-independence power are not too dissimilar from the commandist notions that operated during the days of the liberation struggle in exile. As Rhoda Kadalie - a frustrated former ANC activist - noted: ‘Many of my former comrades have become loyal to a party rather than to principles of justice. (…) Unfortunately it is true that those who have been oppressed make the worst democrats. There are recurring patterns in the behaviour of liberation parties – when they come to power they uphold the most undemocratic practices’. A similar sobering observation by another among the disappointed was quoted in The Guardian (16 May 2001): ‘It is interesting to see who still carries their own briefcase. These are people I’ve known for years when we were in the field. Some of them are still great but some of them have become very pompous. When you have a car and a driver and you’re travelling first class, some people change.’

These examples show that outside of the inner sanctum of the political arena critical voices have emerged. They include those of some who played roles as active supporters of the liberation struggle. A new and sharper debate has emerged. It deals increasingly with the post-colonial content of liberation. As a result, it questions the validity of the concept of solidarity based on a shared past, and calls for the end of the cultivation of ‘heroic narratives’. The much-celebrated attainment of formal independence is no longer unreservedly equated with liberation, neither with the creation of lasting democracy. Now, closer scrutiny is paid to both the inherited and self-developed structural legacies, which have imposed limits to the realising of real political, cultural, social and economic alternatives in the post-colonial era.

This involves a growing recognition that armed liberation struggles operating along military lines in secret underground conditions were not suitable breeding grounds for establishing democratic systems of governance. To be successful, the forms of resistance employed in the struggle were themselves organised on hierarchical and authoritarian lines. In this sense, then, the new societies carried within them essential elements of the old system. Thus it should come as no surprise that aspects of the colonial system have reproduced themselves in the struggle for its abolition and subsequently, in the concepts of governance applied in post-colonial conditions.

There is a parallel here to Alexis de Toqueville’s celebrated retrospective on the shortcomings of the French Revolution. It reflected the frustration provoked by the restoration of old power structures under Louis Napoleon after his coup d’etat in 1851 and provides relevant insights to our southern African cases. De Toqueville argued that the French revolutionaries in the process of implementing the structures of the new system retained the mentalities, habits, even the ideas, of the old state while seeking to destroy it. And they built on the rubble of the old state to establish the foundation of the new society. To understand the revolution and its achievement, he concluded, one has to forget about the current society and instead interrogate the buried one. His conclusion was that the early freedom of the revolution had been replaced by another form of repression. Revolutionaries in the process of securing, establishing and consolidating their power bases had sacrificed the declared ideals and substantive issues they were fighting for in the name of revolution.

This process is not confined to the sphere of conscious and deliberate effort. It is also a result of particular socialisation processes. The recognition of the relationship between power, discourse and political institutions and practices has much to contribute to the study of the politics under scrutiny. The conventional approach to see domination and resistance as an oppositional pair is misleading. Resistance cannot be idealized as pure opposition to the order it opposes. Instead, it operates inside a structure of power that it both challenges and helps to sustain. Hence, the seizure of state power and control over means of production does not secure a solution alone, since a change of economic and political structures of domination and inequality requires a parallel and profound change of their nature and effects.

It is in this context that the essays in this reader just published with the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) reflect on the state of the democratisation process in post-colonial Southern Africa. Case studies are not limited to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, but include Botswana and Lesotho also for comparative insights into similarities and differences. As the sub-title to this volume suggests, there remains much in the way of unfinished business in regard to consolidating democracy in post-colonial southern Africa. This applies not only to the political process but also to our analytic understanding of the dynamics of the process.

These essays represent a start with a grappling of the issues. The recognition that the model of liberation democracy as developed in Namibia and Zimbabwe is inherently elitist and potentially authoritarian is a significant step forward in the debate. The debate needs to go on and be further developed. Other southern African cases, most particularly Mozambique, need to be scrutinised and brought into the analysis while a critical eye needs to be kept on South Africa as it completes its first decade of democratic rule. There is still much work to undertake for the scholarly community concerned with these issues – as well as the political and grass root activists still seeking emancipation.

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* This is a shorter revised version of an Introduction to Henning Melber (ed.), Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa. The unfinished business of democratic consolidation. Cape Town: HSRC Press 2003. The just published volume is distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver (Cape Town/South Africa, [email][email protected]), in Europe from The Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala/Sweden, [email][email protected]) and in the USA and Canada from Independent Publishers Group (Chicago/USA, [email][email protected]).
The author has been the Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek from 1992 to 2000 and is the Research Director of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala since then. He had joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974.