ASRC 3023 - Nelson Mandela: Politcal Failure

Spring. 4 credits.

G. Farred.

Mandela: post-apartheid South Africa is a society marked by an on-going, but ultimately unsustainable adherence to some notion of the “miracle” of peaceful transition (itself an unsustainable myth), a fiction that is under constant threat from the political reality that is daily life in South Africa. An ever-widening gap between rich and poor, an infrastructure that is impressive but itself a mark of inequality, significant healthcare concerns (again, inequality of access; differential levels of resources), violence (against women, against foreigners, against the urban poor, against anti-government activists and their constituencies), corruption (graft, nepotism) and a growing sense that the governing African National Congress (ANC) has failed; had failed its primary, and historic, constituency, the black poor, as well failing to deliver on its several election promises. this course traces the roots of that failure to the governing myth in contemporary South African life: the iconicization of Nelson Mandela. the problem with the contemporary condition begins with Mandela’s and the ANC’s bourgeois nationalism. the ANC was never, in any substantive sense, a radical or revolutionary movement; it was always a bourgeois nationalist organization. in order to chart a new possibility, it is necessary to undertake a critique of Nelson Mandela’s failure.