Authoritarian Regimes

Northern Ireland and the The Troubles, Ethiopia in the last days of Haile Selassie, a history of South Africa from its first colonists to its liberation in 1994, and before that, the former Yugoslavia -- why is it that I have been drawn to books and films on authoritarian states this past year? What's guiding this interest? What am I ... feeling?

Last night I finished Hochschild's book on South Africa, a book that grew stronger as it went along. I say "grew stronger," but it had more to do with me setting aside the bias ledger, stop concerning myself with what side Hochschild is on and start dipping into his extensive annotated bibliography. For this is a journalist who, though he has a white man's connection to a past South Africa, doesn't trust what he remembers of it, nor what lies behind what many of us take for granted.

Hochschild's chapter on the town of Mogopa is devastating, yet hopeful. So to is his 23-page 2007 "Epilogue", where he talks about the pillaged conditions the African National Congress inherited from its sons of Apartheid predecessors: how the ANC is in fact two parties (a welfare state faction at one end and a neoliberal business-first faction at the other), but because it presents as one, its internal discussions are hidden from the public, as opposed to shared through the parliamentary process.

Is a liberal democracy possible in a society where there is only one possible choice for over ninety-percent of the population? Only in South Africa -- at least for an another generation or two. But at the rate things are changing -- not just the climate, but our global (political) economy -- one wonders if South Africa will have time to realize that change, become the Wakanda many thought it could be.