Shades of Difference

"Well that is one of the amazing books that have been written. It’s had less attention than some of the others. It’s an extraordinary account focusing on one member of the ANC, a man called Mac Maharaj a man I found particularly interesting because at the end of the apartheid era he had a spell in all three distinct strands of the anti-apartheid movement. There were those who were political prisoners, primarily on Robbin Island with Nelson Mandela, there were the exiles who were living abroad, including Thabo Mbeki, and then there were those known as ‘inziles’, the internal movement who were fighting apartheid from the townships. Well, Mac spent time with all three different groupings so he had a fairly unique perspective on all this. The book tells his story and also paints a picture of the ANC as a pretty dysfunctional organization: chaotic, drifting, deeply indecisive, sometimes corrupt, hobbled by its collective tradition whereby no-one seems able to make a decision. That historical perspective is very useful for those who want to understand the ANC now, because I think it’s very easy to have a romanticized view of the anti-apartheid movement and then, as a result, the ANC which was its most powerful voice. It was in many ways a pretty hopeless organization. It had some great, heroic figures who were members of it, but the organization itself was often flawed. Padraig O’Malley’s book gets you into the mindset of the ANC by telling Mac Maharaj’s story, and does a similar thing when Mac goes into government and later gets caught up in a corruption scandal. It’s a remarkable book, addressing some of the same themes as the Andrew Feinstein book, but with more breadth, but less personal, and has astonishing detail of the workings of the ANC. This is the story of South Africa formerly under white rule. It’s a portrait of anti-apartheid South Africa and the stop-start progress it has made since the ANC took over. It’s also something of a warning to the ANC that unless it changes its ways on a number of key fronts pretty quickly the country runs a risk of at best drifting, or at worst slithering in the wrong direction. It’s also a warning to the world to sit up and pay attention, because I think for many people the story of South Africa ended with Mandela’s assumption of power – that wonderful, miraculous moment when apartheid came to an end relatively peacefully and this tall, graceful statesman took power preaching reconciliation. Well it didn’t end there, it was just the end of the beginning, and now we’re deep in the second, grittier part of the revolution which is trying to make the dreams come to reality, and that’s always the hardest part."