Don't Get Boered

They'll all be out for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. They probably already are. "We were right," they will be screeching about themselves and their heroine, who as late as 1990 was using a prominent position on the world stage to agitate for South Africa to become the all-white state that she pig-ignorantly believed it to have been until 1910. 

Margaret Thatcher's position was more extreme than that, at the time, of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, those scourges of P.W. Botha's liberal softness and backsliding, who for part of her Premiership bankrolled her supporters in the League of St George. Thatcher's position was more extreme than that of Franz Josef Strauss or Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It made her by far the most racist figure to have held a national office of any prominence anywhere in the West since the 1950s.

The failures of post-apartheid South Africa are in any case failures of the economic system created by her and her flame-keepers. The ANC sold out out neoliberalism, and we all see the results. It should not go unremarked that the demonisation of Mama Winnie began in earnest during that sellout. 

Yes, Mama Winnie had her faults, and very great they were, as the faults of great people are bound to be. But was she worse than the apartheid regime? Was she worse than a British Prime Minister who, back in the days when the British Prime Minister still mattered in the world, wanted there to be no blacks at all in South Africa, oblivious, as ladies of leisure always are, to the question of who would do the menial work? Was she worse than Jacob Zuma? Was she worse than Cyril Ramaphosa, the Butcher of Marikana?

In spite of everything, Rest in Power. Amandla!