Clueless in South Africa With Mrs. Obama

This article is authored by Ilana Mercer, libertarian author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

First Lady Michelle Obama is touring this writer’s birthplace, South Africa. “[Nelson] Mandela’s legacy in the battle for South African democracy,” wrote one rapt reporter, who followed the FLOTUS around Johannesburg, “defines much of Obama’s visit.” It was only natural that “her next stop” would be “the Apartheid Museum, which chronicles the rise and fall of white rule.”

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Apartheid was a contemptible caste system. Forgotten, however, in the recriminations over apartheid are the facts as they are documented in my just-released book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The Museum of Apartheid Mrs. Obama and the first daughters graced with their presence will have emphasized that, “Everything that goes wrong in the new South Africa is a legacy of apartheid.” Is not the violence in the rest of Africa blamed on colonialism? “It’s a legacy that has gone on for almost forty years,” I write (citing an exacerbated Jim Peron, an American expatriate, whose idealism drove him to decamp to post-apartheid South Africa). “Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses is recited. ‘We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.’”

There’s one pesky problem with this particular blame-game: South Africa’s flourishing criminal class consists mainly of youngsters who’ve come of age and blossomed under black rule.

What else will the proprietors of the thoroughly Americanized Apartheid Museum fail to divulge? As is chronicled in Chapter 5 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”: “Had the sainted Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison [Mrs. Obama's destinations in Cape Town], he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise.” That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.

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