An interesting response to my last post from Simon Barber, US Country Manager for the International Marketing Council of South Africa.
He is completely right in saying that Mbeki deserves a harder analysis than I provided; I hold my hand up and say I am certainly guilty of not knowing enough about the country and it’s politics. I wish I knew more; I am trying.
And it was interesting that Simon Barber referred to the worrying “herdlike mentality” of journalists writing about Mbeki. It’s something Mark Tran picked up on in his blog in The Guardian, in which he sited an interesting article in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper, under the headline “Days of Shame“.
Written days after I wrote my piece, it is interesting how the themes I skirted over were expanded upon by this article in one of South Africa’s national newspapers, in light of the recent terrible attacks taking place in the country.
“It is clear the African renaissance remains a pipedream when South Africans kill and rape their African brothers and sisters purely for not being South Africans. It again underlines the fact that Mbeki left his society behind as he traversed the continent signing peace deals. He failed to sell his pan-Africanism to his own people.
His head-in-the-sand attitude towards Zimbabwe’s problems has served only to deflect those problems on to the poor. As, daily, thousands of Zimbabweans sneak through our porous borders, we can’t help but remember Mbeki’s mantra on Zimbabwe: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’”
