Word: easting
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...warm summer's day in mid-January, South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, held a rally in East London on the country's southern coast to launch its campaign for re-election. Inside the city's stadium, in a pen between the stage and a sea of supporters in the ANC colors of yellow, black and green, stood the party's VIPs. Many of the men wore Gucci and the women Prada, but mixed in with them were 60 or so people, of both sexes, in combat fatigues whose camo caps identified them as veterans of Umkhonto...
...Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution - some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office only when another revolutionary seizes power...
...reward for "liberating" it. But it is also observed around the world. A tide of leftwing revolt in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia left much of the same sour legacy of totalitarianism. In India, the Gandhi family has towered over its democracy for 60 years. In the Middle East, after helping broker a historic peace deal with Israel in 1993, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement quickly lapsed into authoritarianism and corruption. As a young man, Henning Melber, executive director at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, fought in Namibia against white rule. Watching his fellow liberators...
...using the instruments of state power - government, law, the police - which it had spent years fighting. One way in which this identity crisis is expressed is in the modern ANC look - the mix of bling and camo worn by the Prada proletariat on display in East London. At a more serious level, while business, civil society and the press provide far more of a check on South Africa's government than they do in, say, Zimbabwe, the party's critics see the same bad underlying dynamics at work. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP who resigned in 2001 in protest...
Problems at Home If there is one region in South Africa on which the ANC might have focused its efforts to build democracy and progress, it is the Eastern Cape around East London. Drive out of the city and after an hour you descend into a steep, forested canyon along whose floor snakes the River Kei, the old boundary between white-run South Africa and the rolling prairies which apartheid authorities designated the black "homeland" of Transkei, meaning "across the Kei." During apartheid, the Transkei was a place of destitution: thousands of mud-walled, grass-roofed huts where people lived...