Each year some people have the privilege of doing a political tour of South Africa. From Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal, through Johannesburg’s Constitutional Court, Stock Market, Soweto and other attractions to Parliament in the Cape, Hout Bay’s squatter camp and the lovely wine farms.
The tour’s emphasis is on politics and the political people of the country. They meet the players in politics, business, the media, health and education. Fortunately for us, former president Thabo Mbeki agreed to meet us at his Foundation.
Mbeki was in a wonderful mood, sharing his stories, answering our questions, asking a few of his own. Most fascinating for me was his answer when asked to explain why his liberation party moved away from nationalizing mines and banks.
“Well, we went to Cuba in 1986, and you know before our meeting Fidel Castro asked us to bring a copy of the Freedom Charter with us. But he asked it three times, three times!”
“We asked ourselves, we heard you the first time, why ask again?”
“He then told us when we saw him – with the document – that the government Cuban rum is called Cuban Club, and that it is owned by Cuba, it is the best rum, but does not do as well as Bacardi. The owners of Bacardi left Cuba in a hurry but had to leave the vats.”
“Fidel then said, ‘Now you know good rum is made by mixing old rum with new, but Bacardi left in a hurry, taking everything but leaving the old vats. Yet they set up in America and sold a completely new rum. It was not great, it lacked the Bacardi flavor, it was all new and all they had was the name,’ he told us.”
But it was enough.
“‘So,’ said Fidel, ‘we quickly went to France and Europe and registered the names of Cohibas and other cigars, so if those companies also left we would still have their names. ‘Now tell me, ‘ Fidel said, ‘how many mining engineers do you have in the ANC?’”
“We looked at each other and said we did not know if we have any, probably none at that time (1992).”
“Then he said that if we took over Anglo American and nationalized them, we would have to ask them to do the mining, to manage it and run the mines because we could not, and they would then deliberately mine badly, because they would be angry that they had been nationalized. ‘Rather wait a bit,’ Fidel told us, ‘then in 15 years or so you can start taking over as you develop the capacity.’”
“It made sense, so we went back and convinced our people.”
I asked why Mandela, when he first came out of jail, in his first speech in Cape Town, said mines and banks would be nationalized?
“When Mandela was released it was a bad mistake of ours. We had been in talks with government and they had agreed they would give us nine or 10 days’ notice before releasing him, they would call my home with a code name and message, like ‘it is going to rain on Sunday November 1’ and we would have time to prepare.”
“But I was away, with Oliver Tambo in London, so when Zanele (Mbeki’s wife) was called by this strange person with a fairly innocuous message for me she waited a few days and then told the wife of Oliver Tambo to tell me the message. His wife also waited a few days and then said to him ‘Oh, tell Thabo somebody called Zanele to say it is going to rain on Sunday November 1.’”
“I got the message and thought nothing of it. I had forgotten what that meant. Me, I made that mistake… Later I suddenly remembered and realized, it was our code agreed with the South African government, but by then it was the day before his release.”
“We quickly tried to write a speech but failed and those inside South Africa wrote the speech, but they had not yet been told how we had changed our minds on nationalizing the mines and banks despite what it said in the Freedom Charter. So that’s why Mandela said what he said.”
I was aghast. I had written several times to say it was at Davos that the first democratic president had changed policy on nationalization. Mbeki laughed.
“Davos being the place he changed his mind is really just one of many stories&#8230;”

Nationalization Is A  Rum Deal

It’s a simple sculpture of a woman and a blue dress. Phila Ndwandwe was a general in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) – South Africa’s African National Congress’ armed wing – who was held captive during the height of apartheid. She was tortured for ten days and left naked in her own blood. But one day, in captivity, she comes across a blue plastic packet. By the time her torturers returned, the general donned the packet as a pair of panties to reclaim her dignity. Ndwandwe’s body was found naked in a shallow grave, with the thin piece of plastic still covering her private parts.
The artwork by artist Judith Mason, hangs from the rafters of the Constitutional Court gallery.
“The powerful thing was that the men remembered it, among the many people they may have put to death on behalf of the apartheid government… I think many women can relate to Ndwandwe’s plight,” says Stacey Vorster, curator of South Africa’s Constitutional Court Art Collection.
Telling the stories behind art is all in a day’s work for Vorster. It’s not all glamor and gala events. In between working for the court, Vorster is also a full-time associate lecturer in history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand. On any day she can be giving tours to princes (Prince Edward visited last year), to climbing a ladder and patching walls. She keeps two pairs of shoes handy, one flat, the other heeled, for such emergencies. She also carries tissues.
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“As I was telling the [blue dress] story to some visiting judges from Germany, one man started crying, and I burst out crying in response. I am an emotional person, and I sometimes get tripped up by these moments. Most women don’t want to seem emotional, especially in the workplace. I often get overwhelmed by this collection, I can’t help but cry.”
It’s not easy to preserve and maintain the 404 pieces in the collection worth over R50 million (almost $5 million), but Vorster does what she can on a tight budget. One of her big headaches is money. She has to fundraise internationally, as no local donations can be accepted. The rule of the Constitutional Court is that South Africans can’t sponsor the art collection for fear that it will be seen as a potential conflict of interest. Apart from its first artwork which was bought for R10,000 ($1,000) by Justices Albie Sachs and Yvonne Mokgoro, every other artwork has been donated. Vorster hopes to preserve and let it interact more with the public, if new funders can be found.
It hasn’t stopped Vorster from trying to shake things up.
“I am the only curator on the project. Most collections this size, in terms of international standards, would have at least two full time people looking after them… One of my concerns about the collection is that we don’t have enough artworks made by women. We also don’t have enough artworks that speak of women’s issues. As a collection that speaks to the identity of a nation and its journey to a nascent democracy, it’s important to me that it is representative of a variety of views… Little did everyone know that I am here to cause trouble; a curator as a trouble-maker is an idea that interests me. It’s not a job of simply putting objects into a room. We are here to ask questions and stimulate dialogue. Art is a powerful tool for change,” she says.
By the time we leave the gallery, it’s dark outside. Vorster prepares to meet a group of American tourists, here to see the collection, after hours.
“I see the collection through other people’s eyes and I feed off of it.”

Tag: Constitutional Court

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Nationalization Is A Rum Deal

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