Bless the Rains Down in Africa

What we can learn about the ideas at the heart of the Progressive anti-Israel movement from the South African election

One of the most successful campaigns driven by the loose global coalition of activists and politicians identified as the Left is the anti-Apartheid movement, which rose to prominence in the 1980s. As the heirs to that campaign, the African National Congress (ANC) sees itself as the flag-bearer of third world nationalism and decolonization, a responsibility that motivated it to, among other things, bring charges against Israel to the International Court of Justice for how Israel conducted the war in Gaza.

Given the poor outcome for the ANC in the last elections, I thought there may be an opportunity to learn from the South African experience about the trajectory of the ideas driving it, and particularly the anti-Israel instinct at its core. So I turned to two experts with somewhat opposing yet overlapping views: Ivor Chipkin, a South African policy scholar and co-founder and director of the New South Institute, and Raven Brown, a scholar of international development with extensive work on South Africa’s political economy.

In order to understand today’s South Africa, I learned, one first needs to understand the ideas that mobilized the ANC, now found at the heart of what is popularly called the Progressive Movement in Western circles. Chief among these ideas was a conception of decolonization developed in the 1950s which rose to prominence in the 1970s as part of the anti-apartheid struggle, asserting a direct link between racial domination of colonial holdings and class exploitation driven by capitalism.

Chipkin summarizes this idea as follows: “Capitalism was fundamentally dependent on racial domination to expand and to integrate profit, so racial domination created the conditions for cheap labor which were the underpinnings of capitalist expansion,” thereby creating justifications to continuing and expanding racial domination. To end racial domination, the logic went, end capitalism.

This link of racial domination and capitalism was actualized in an alliance between the ANC and the Communists and Trade Unionists – called the Tripartite Alliance – which led the anti-apartheid movement to greater and greater successes by the 1980s. In many ways the power of this linkage is what set the South African cause apart from the many other decolonization movements of that same period across the global South. It earned the movement critical funding and marketing support from non-South African sources who had an interest in the movement’s ability to distract and polarize the West.

Campaigning against apartheid had something for everyone: racial justice, economic justice, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and a regime far less brutal than the Soviets or Chinese Communist Party in silencing dissidents at home and abroad. And above all else apartheid was truly evil, causing those who disagreed with the anti-capitalist, anti-liberal nature of the often authoritarian third world nationalist movement to put differences aside until apartheid was washed away.

When apartheid finally did fall, however, the world was in a different place: the Soviet Union collapsed, liberal capitalism seemed to have ended history. The Capitalist West celebrated the rise of a new South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, and Mandela chose his own path. Instead of using his newfound power to purge elites and end capitalism for its exploitation of Black labor, Mandela sought reconciliation, keeping his (White) predecessor involved as his vice president in order to build a South Africa that betters the lives of all South Africans, even those who perpetuated apartheid.

“The purpose was to create a kind of society which is more racially equal, socially just,” summarizes Chipkin, noting that such a strategy required the ANC to accept that South Africa would continue to develop “on the terrain of capitalism. In other words, one that does not abolish private property, does not nationalize it. So how does one achieve the social ambitions, political ambitions,” of the previously disenfranchised Black community “within the framework of a market capitalist economy? Black economic empowerment.”

For a time, Mandela’s strategy for economic growth worked, especially for a class of elite Black South Africans. Until it didn’t, because in large part the onerous financing terms demanded by international creditors such as International Monetary Fund, who gave plentiful loans to the new South Africa to cover the debts incurred by the Apartheid regime, with a payment schedule the government struggled to meet. As Brown shared with me, “denying capitalist history and its ties to racism” when it came to the cheap labor that propped up the South African economy does nobody any good, and can be helpful to understand the crisis the new government faced. As Brown points out, “the ANC’s attempts to implement a social democratic welfare state didn’t work because the country‘s institutions were designed to produce based on inequality – cheap labor – and that is exactly what they continued to do,” until they couldn’t.

As Chipkin recalls, the domestic discontent was what made the difference. “By the early 2000s, there’s huge, huge disappointment and even anger with Black economic empowerment,” because it proved to be a very slow path towards Black economic transformation. After Mandela stepped down in 1999, the populist flank of the ANC seized on this growing frustration and returned to its radical proposition: to truly upend racial domination, one needed to upend capitalism as a whole.

Returning to principals, the ANC put forward a set of nationalist and populist policies: they took over state industries and installed party apparatchiks who had little to no technical knowledge or practical experience, what Chipkin called the “repurposing of rich state institutions.” Under the leadership of Jacob Zuma, they attacked the constitution and pushed forward majoritarian legislation out of mistrust in liberalism and the world media, to distance and disconnect themselves from the Capitalist West. The economy, once seen as the Door to Africa, suffered. The infrastructure, once among the most robust in the world, decayed. And with it, the people suffered, as Chipkin describes, a result of the country’s “struggling to get 1% growth since 2008.”

But how does this relate to Israel or the trajectory of the anti-Israel movement? I believe the answer lies in what became visible at the World Conference against Racism of 2001, better known as the Durban Conference, and more importantly in the preparatory meeting to that conference that was held in Tehran. A conference held after decades of Islamist relationship building in South Africa, with the knowledge and permission of South African intelligence services.

The strategists in Iran knew well, from personal experience, how to build a Red-Green Alliance (between Islamists and Communists): that is how they deposed the Shah before turning to eradicate the Communists. They developed a particular expertise in manipulating such an alliance to their benefit, using anti-capitalist and third world nationalist rhetoric as cover for their imperial, expansionist ambitions. This strategy formed the core of the new Islamic Republic’s foreign policy, opening doors into countries that would enable the regime to evade sanctions and build power. In supporting a renewed commitment by the ANC to the Tripartite Alliance, the Islamists were able to play counselor to a regime in transition, and provide a sense of purpose abroad for a South African regime increasingly failing at home.

That is why, for example, South Africa did not lead an international condemnation of the Muslim government of Sudan when it began and committed and continues to commit a genocide of Black Africans. The ANC leadership even invited the perpetrator of that genocide, Omar al-Bashir, to visit in 2015. It is why South Africa is leading the campaign against the Jewish State instead of, for example, supporting coalitions fighting the devastation caused by Islamism across the African Continent. When you’re failing so badly at home, you need to find some pride abroad – and the money and support that comes from an oil rich state such as the Islamic Republic.

Israel might have been able to nip this in the bud were it to engage in its own truth and reconciliation with South Africa’s Black community. Were it to compete with Iran for the hearts and minds of Africans. Israel could have put forward its own vision for decolonization, reminding the world that the Jewish State was founded under first Ottoman and then British Occupation, built from the ground up under harsh regimes who worked diligently to limit Jewish immigration and industry. To share its own anti-Capitalist origins and the transition it underwent when it sought to create greater prosperity for its people. For integrating Palestinian citizens within its sovereign territory into politics and society. Israel could have recognized that third world nationalism is, fundamentally, a movement for self-determination, and that the internationalist components of it were foreign grafts by imperialist forces first from the USSR and now Iran to use such sentiments to aid their global struggle. Yet we did none of that.

When South Africans went to the polls on the 29th of May, 2024, they were not thinking about Israel. They did not vote for or against the ANC because of its support for the Palestinians. They voted because life in South Africa is worse today than it was 20 years ago, for all South Africans. We know this because, as Chipkin points out, the Muslim community of South Africa – stalwart supporters of the Palestinian cause – voted against the ANC, and for the Democratic Alliance (DA), because they too want a better economy, a healthier politics, for their children. Instead of disconnecting from South Africa due to its diplomatic positioning, Israel has a chance to lean in. To re-engage. To build alliances with those who, like us, seek a better life, and to share with them the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic success of Israeli society. To work with those who have experienced the abject failure of the Tripartite Alliance to share with the broader world why the antiracist, third world nationalist ideas now at the heart of Progressive politics pave the road to ruin.