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  • How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis by R. W. Johnson
  • Damien Ejigiri
Johnson, R. W. 2015. HOW LONG WILL SOUTH AFRICA SURVIVE? THE LOOMING CRISIS. London: Hurst & Company. 266 pp.

With visionary South African president Nelson Mandela at the helm of his country’s affairs, every citizen saw a rosy picture and a bright future. Since his death, burial, and departure from the political landscape, there have been negative feelings. Therefore, R. W. Johnson’s book and its subtheme, How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis, are not accidental. The author, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College at University of Oxford, was supposed to be the only South African Rhodes scholar who returned to the country after the fall of the apartheid regime; one wonders if there was a survey on that.

The publication being reviewed is one of a dozen or more books and many scholarly articles and popular articles that Johnson has authored. Since South African president Jacob Zuma once sat in his classroom, he writes that “it feels strange for me to be writing about South Africa in the era of Jacob Zuma” (p. ix). Yet he goes on to complete his book, in which Zuma plays a central role. In his estimation, Zuma “never expected to be president” (p. ix). He goes on to give a brief anecdote of Zuma’s biography: that he migrated “to Durban from a bone-poor rural background (his mother a domestic, his father a policeman, who died young)” (p. ix).

Describing Zuma’s relationship with the African National Congress (ANC), he sees him as being full of a bounce and life, and says it was natural that he joined the ANC out of enthusiasm: “Albert Luthuli, a Zulu chief, was its leader and, for Zuma, with his rural Zulu background, that mattered a lot” (p. x). Johnson recalls an early Mandela rally on Commercial Street in Durban in the early 1960s, when, as a result of a whisper in Mandela’s ear, [End Page 105] Mandela bolted from the platform and “the meeting broke up in disorder as the police arrived in force to close the meeting down” (pp. x–xi).

This book, apart from the fact that it is divided into ten main chapters, provides a list of abbreviations and acronyms, a preface, copious notes, and a useful subject index. Johnson discusses such topical themes as KwaZulu-Natal, the world of Jacob Zuma (chapter two); the ANC under Zuma (chapter three); the new class structure (chapter five); culture wars (chapter six); state repression of economic activity (chapter seven); the view from the International Monetary Fund (chapter eight); the BRICS countries as an alternative model (chapter nine); and what he calls the impossibility of autarchy (chapter ten). In the final chapter, where autarchy is handsomely discussed, the Zimbabwe is invoked in variety of subheadings, including “The Zimbabwean Example” (pp. 223–24); “Why South Africa Can’t Be like Zimbabwe” (pp. 224–28); and “Going for the Mugabe Option” (pp. 230–32).

In the final chapter, Johnson’s references to Zimbabwe lead to a question: why could South Africa not be like Zimbabwe? Johnson answers that if South Africa were to follow Mugabe’s example, it would have to undertake drastic land reform, which the ANC leaders are not ready to authorize; and that turning to a Mugabe option or “direction on its own would soon find itself [South Africa] trying to implement a wholly impossible and, indeed, ruinous set of policies” (pp. 233–34). It is, however, not that South Africa—like Zimbabwe—did not implement policies that were similar to Mugabe’s policies in Zimbabwe, including the fact that the “ANC has on its own embraced a series of policies (expropriation without compensation, the 50 per cent seizure of commercial farmland, the NHI, forced demographic representivity in the workforce, etc.) which are already far down the road—and the ANC official policy is now for a much more radical ‘second transition’” (p. 234). Surely, this book is worth perusal by Africanists and general readers, especially those who want to know about post-Mandela South Africa.

Damien Ejigiri
Southern University and A & M...

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