Some Good Hope After All

I hold out no hope for the coming Presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa, the Butcher of Marikana. But the fact that the removal of Jacob Zuma is at last under way, without a tank on the streets, is proof that, for all the economic failures since the turn to neoliberalism in the post-Mandela era, South Africa's constitutional democracy remains robust.

It is now a matter of record that until as recently as 1990, the United Kingdom had a Prime Minister who bestrode the world stage agitating for an all-white state in South Africa, and who bizarrely believed that there had been one until 1910. There is now a statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square. But there will never be one of her. Nor should there be.