In 1994, 19 years old, I got to answer phones in the ANC’s media centre in downtown Johannesburg’s Carlton Centre during SA’s first democratic elections and cast my first vote at the Johannesburg Civic Centre. It was almost empty due to an earlier bomb scare, which allowed us to get back quickly to the switchboard. I remember that time as frantic and the people as anxious, but also the sharpest sense of indescribable hope.
Two years before, in my matric year, I had walked the streets of Warsaw with my grandfather, after his return to a country he had fled more than 50 years before. He made observations about the industriousness of the Polish people and the damage done to a collective psyche by years of Soviet control. But if he carried with him the traumas of an early life ruptured by war, a family destroyed and a half-century of exile, I saw in his reunification with his sister, and with Poland, that the forces of history might carry us up.
In 1994 I was very much part of the generation that came of age in the early to mid-90s like a Benetton-advert battalion, glorious and glorying in the belief that history would set us free. If there was smugness (and there was), it wasn’t that this generation failed to see the genocide in Rwanda or the fratricidal fallout in the former Yugoslavia; it was the conviction that ultimately triumph would emerge there too.
But Poland now is very far from the country of Lech Walesa, the inspirational trade unionist under whose helm Poland shrugged off Soviet control. What seemed like a ferocious appetite for democracy has turned out to be a rather puny thing. The governing Law & Justice party has, as documented in Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy, waged a direct assault on the independence of the judiciary, seeking to pack the courts with pliant judges and enacting laws that would punish them for the content of their rulings. The public broadcaster sings from Law & Justice’s hymn book and civil servants are “party hacks or else cousins and other relatives of party hacks”.
The party has also distinguished itself by it antimigration policies, most viciously regarding those who don’t also look like they’re Slavs swept from the Caucasus.
The party has also distinguished itself by its antimigration policies, most viciously against those who don’t look like Slavs swept from the Caucasus too. Those leanings make the recent reports of African students in the Ukraine stranded at the Polish border not being allowed admission not unsurprising. And yet it should be when one considers that Poles have found themselves for decades on the receiving end of some of the most discriminatory antiforeigner sentiment in wider Europe.
Presumably no reader of this newspaper needs a similar précis on how SA departs from the hope at transition. But SA is not Poland, however fearful we may be of those distinguishing features becoming our own. Poland’s Law & Justice party lies to the political right, while the ANC still largely identifies with the political left. But plotting alignment on a left-right axis may be less illuminating than one moving between authoritarianism and democracy. Law & Justice has moved quite clearly into authoritarianism’s embrace: the ANC’s flanks increasingly seem to flirt with it too.
And now there is another war across the shifting divides of East-West Europe. This naked act of aggression on the part of Russia in a bid to reclaim its former Soviet imperium may be as epoch-defining and displacing on the authoritarian-democratic axis as was the disintegration of that empire.
How will SA fare? That may be a fool’s guess. But it hardly bodes well that the ANC and SA executive proffer only dialogue and mediation, to say nothing of those factions heaping praise on Vladimir Putin in the face of Russia’s attack on, and denial of, Ukrainian self-determination.
It was SA’s struggle for democracy and the ANC that came to be seen globally as the embodiment of the principle of self-determination, and its realisation the ground on which we pitched our tent of democracy.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is director of the Helen Suzman Foundation.
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