A good way to think of South Africa is Zimbabwe in slow motion. A larger and wealthier Rhodesia with a much bigger industrial base, richer agriculture, and no Mugabe. Mandela was a Communist terrorist, but his saving grace is that he wasn’t Mugabe. A series of ANC figureheads, warped, twisted, and brutal men, including Zuma, the cause of the latest protests, have come and gone, but without Mugabe’s power.

The details are of less interest than the general trend which is that South Africa keeps getting worse and while it may be going the way of Zimbabwe in slow motion, it will eventually get there. 

Did it have to end this way? 

Much as in Rhodesia, western governments chose to support a brutal terrorist organization masquerading as a civil rights group.  In both South Africa and Rhodesia there were options for co-existence short of Mugabe or the ANC. Instead western countries chose bad actors with a history of violence while remaining convinced that giving them power would change them. Unsurprisingly, it did not.

The ANC’s descent into Mugabeism has been slower and inconsistent, but figures like Zuma made the trajectory all too clear.

President Zuma of South Africa began the celebrations of the African National Congress’s 100-year anniversary with the ritual sacrifice of a bull.  While drums beat and singers in animal skins ululated, the animal died, its blood spilled out on the ground and the celebrations began.

Once the party was underway, Zuma sang “Dubula iBhunu,” an ANC song which means, “Kill the Farmer.” A court had ruled that “Dubula iBhunu” constituted hate speech, but President Zuma, who had survived a rape trial and 783 counts of corruption, was not worried about the law. The upper echelons of the ANC were above the law and adept at spilling blood, whether it was the blood of bulls, black rivals or white farmers.

During Zuma’s rape trial, ANC activists had chanted, “Burn the Bitch.” At the ANC’s centenary, Zuma sang, “Kill the Farmer.”… Zuma had joined the South African Communist Party in 1963 and his ANC regime still depends on its Tripartite Alliance with leftist unions and the Communist Party. 

The latest rioting and the death toll signal South Africa’s spiraling descent into a hell of the ANC’s own making. And the western supporters of the ANC have little to say except to exclaim, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

But that’s a lie. It always was.