How the ANC came to Power - the real story.

Nelson Mandela is the president of South Africa, an event of monumental significance in world history. This great personal triumph is for him a vindication of his struggle. But now that the South African elections are long past, the record must be set straight about what really happened and why. The press has concealed as much as it reported; ideologues of all stripes have rushed around to rationalize their hypocrisies, and American politicians have been spreading around largesse as if the money were their own. That the results were so perfect, historically so symmetrical, is rather remarkable.

Those with power, or who are connected to it, do not want the facts about the funding of the election to be known because it would reveal a pattern of deception and control, both to influence the outcome and to moderate the African National Congress. And those on the radical left don't want it known that the ANC has compromised itself by joining the list of organizations taking money from the United States, because they think it will hurt the cause of revolution. Everyone involved, across the ideological spectrum, has therefore joined in a kind of game to cloud the minds of outside observers.

Most hypocritical perhaps was the attempt to make a devil out of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi by characterizing him as the tool of the oppressors and an obstructionist in the transition to democracy. His anomalous situation in post-apartheid South Africa led to suggestions that he was an enemy of democracy, and the cause of dissension that led to violence in an attempt to disrupt the electoral process that black South Africans struggled for decades to achieve. Chairman of the Inkatha Freedom Party and chief minister of KwaZulu, this prince and descendant of Shaka Zulu was then cast in the role of villain and reactionary. But it was not always so.

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