Dear Ronnie
Thanks for the letter suggesting I might like to spoil my ballot. Ironically enough, it comes not long after a friend who is in COPE told me he wouldn't be voting at all this time, and not long after I had decided I could not vote DA this time. How could I possibly vote for a party which praises Thabo Mbeki whose Aids denialism cost the lives of over 360,000 African women and children? I can't vote for that in just the same way that I couldn't vote for a party which praised Hitler.
But I am surprised by your attitude, for you sound so indignant about the corruption of the ANC regime. Yet how could you possibly have expected anything else, Ronnie?
Let me go back to the early 1960s in Durban when we first met. We have been friends for over 50 years now. In those days we saw pretty much eye to eye and we both supported the ANC. Then you went underground and resurfaced in London at about the same time that I arrived there in 1964. My assumption then was that I would continue to support the ANC and I spent some time in ANC circles in London. It was a rude shock. The people I met were completely authoritarian - there wasn't a proper democrat among them. Many were openly racist. And already corruption was visible. The one thing that seemed obvious was that you couldn't trust people like that. They might get up to absolutely anything. So I recoiled and realised that I had been attracted by the romantic myth of the ANC. The reality was something else again.
After all, once I had seen what the ANC in exile was like I could see perfectly well what sort of government it would produce and I can truthfully say that nothing that has happened since 1994 has at all surprised me. I expected the ANC to be completely corrupt, to have very little respect for law or the constitution and only a very tenuous attachment to democracy. It was because this was so obvious to me that I recoiled from the ANC in exile and our paths, which had been roughly parallel until then, diverged.
You see, Ronnie, when I saw you go soldiering on inside the ANC I assumed you must know all about the corruption and the lack of democracy - how could you not, you were in it much deeper than I had been and much more permanently ? So I assumed that while you must know all about that, that you had decided that nonetheless other things were more important. I respected the fact that you wanted to get rid of apartheid - so did I - but I found it impossible to believe that the ANC would build a better or more just society. It seemed to me that Franz Fanon had understood the nature of the African bourgeoisie better than anyone else and that, as in the rest of Africa, the ANC elite were bound to enrich themselves and ape the consumption, though not the productive habits of their white predecessors. The result would be a whole new layer on inequality super-imposed on the already very unequal structure of South African society. This was, indeed, exactly what Fanon would have predicted and it is exactly what has happened.