One of the most venerated people in South Africa launched a blistering attack on the country's current leaders yesterday, calling them corrupt, arrogant and deeply estranged from those they govern. Archbishop Desmond Tutu warned that those who rule today could soon lose power, just as the National Party leaders in the apartheid era did, because of the extravagant and vain isolation in which they live.
And he said all this with the only two people who rival him in public esteem at his side.
Archbishop Tutu said the country's current leaders are "arrogant ... strutting about like a proud peacock seemingly deaf to the cries of those who brought [them]to power ... like the Nationalists, thinking only they possess wisdom or knowledge. At one point the Nationalists, too, seemed immovable and destined to rule forever."
The archbishop's criticism was delivered in indirect terms, but was an unmistakable reference to both South African President Thabo Mbeki and to Jacob Zuma, the newly elected head of the governing African National Congress, and their respective supporters. His outburst came as a surprise at what was otherwise a low-key gathering in honour of Albertina Sisulu, who is fondly known here as the Mother of the Nation.
Ma Sisulu, as she is universally addressed, fought a quiet, dignified and determined fight against white rule, leading the national resistance while her husband Walter was locked away on Robben Island for decades. Her children fled into exile and she herself was repeatedly jailed, harassed and "banned," not allowed to work or meet with more than one or two people at a time.
Ma Sisulu turns 90 this year, in October, as does one of her closest friends, Nelson Mandela, whose birthday is in July. Instead of a cake-and-balloons sort of event for Mr. Mandela (although no doubt there will be many of those), his foundation is organizing a series of public events that "celebrate his legacy."
The first of these was yesterday's lecture by Archbishop Tutu and the launch of a travelling exhibit about the Sisulus' lives. Yet there was no public in attendance, just a throng of reporters, some loyal and potential donors to the foundation and family and friends of the Mandela and Sisulu clans.
And so it was an intriguing platform for the archbishop to have chosen for his stinging critique, and impossible not to notice that Mr. Mandela, who sat just to his left, was nodding in agreement at points. Ma Sisulu, next to the two men, kept the dignified but emotionless expression that her daughter-in-law Elinor Sisulu said became her public face through years of warily confronting the state during the struggle.
Mr. Mandela has stayed resolutely silent on the political turmoil that has gripped South Africa over the past 18 months, as warring factions in his beloved ANC fought for its leadership. Mr. Mbeki ruthlessly purged perceived opponents and manipulated the national prosecuting service in his campaign against Mr. Zuma, to whom he lost the presidency of the ANC in December in a ferociously contested, often ugly election.
Mr. Zuma, who will stand trial for grand corruption in August, said outright last week that he, not Mr. Mbeki, now leads the country, although Mr. Mbeki has more than a year left in his presidential term. Mr. Zuma has in recent weeks married a fifth wife and become betrothed to two more, appalling many South Africans; said he thought capital punishment should be reinstated (in complete contradiction to ANC policy); and launched a new lawsuit against the state to try to make it pay for his multiple corruption defences.
Recalling the years when the Sisulus encouraged, directed and provided succour to the apartheid fight from their tiny home in Soweto, Archbishop Tutu said, "Imagine knowing a leader exists for the sake of the led. A servant to the people, of the country, not one eager to enrich himself or herself and not even blushing about doing it corruptly."
Fourteen years after the end of white rule, the dream of the new South Africa for which she fought is, at best, partly realized. While great strides have been made in extending jobs, health care, education and housing to the black population, unemployment remains at about 40 per cent and hundreds of thousands of the black poor live in shacks and squatter camps. On Tuesday, the national Ministry of Health acknowledged that 75,000 children, virtually all of them black, die here before the age of 5 - in a country where the rich can buy the best medical services the world can offer - because of lack of food, shelter or primary health care.
And in the past few months, the idea of racial reconciliation championed by Mr. Mandela has seemed hollow indeed. A white youth took a gun and opened fire into a black township in January, killing four and wounding seven. Students in an all-white dormitory at a university produced a video, made public a few weeks ago, showing the motherly black women who cleaned for them retching as they were forced to eat stew into which one man had urinated. On Monday, South African magazine editors (almost all of whom are white) admitted they never put a black model on a magazine cover because it "wouldn't sell."
Archbishop Tutu, speaking of the Sisulus, said "They gave themselves to the cause of liberation so utterly selflessly, so altruistically, with no thought of reward. It would be wonderful for us if we could recover that sense of idealism that we had in the days of the struggle."
The indictment was there in the archbishop's words, but something else was visible in the mingling of the crowd before he spoke: Old stalwarts from the struggle arrived, among them Ahmed Kathrada, who spent decades in prison with Mr. Mandela and Mr. Sisulu; Frene Ginwala, the first Speaker in the democratic parliament; Rica Hodgson, a petite 87-year-old white liberal who once helped make secret explosives for the ANC's armed wing and later was Mr. Sisulu's secretary. And in the affectionate, dignified way they greeted each other, there was a brief glimpse of another South Africa, truly multiracial and equal, still generous and caring.
"Despite [the shooting and the video]we are a wonderful country with wonderful people," Archbishop Tutu concluded wistfully. "If we have leaders who emulate people like the Sisulus ... we have glimpses of who we can be ... as this crazy and lovable rainbow nation."