WE may never know exactly how Alexei Navalny died. One possibility put forward by someone familiar with such matters is that he was forced to stay out in sub-zero temperatures and then punched in the chest, suffering a heart attack. It’s apparently an old KGB trick. In her impressive commentary on the consequences of his death, Irina Filatova raises a number of questions about South Africa’s close relations with Russia.[i] ‘There must be some honest people in the ANC. Or are they all ready to betray their old ideals in the name of their friendship with Russia?’ She concludes ‘the ANC is ready to forget its old slogans of democracy, freedom, and human rights.’
Navalny’s death bears striking likenesses to Steve Biko’s murder by the apartheid regime in September 1977. Both were charismatic men who spoke the language of those struggling against tyranny. Both rejected violence. Both were feared by the tyrants more than people with guns because they articulated ideas that held hope for the future. Philosophers are more dangerous than gunmen. Authoritarians always have more guns. What they lack is inspiration. So, both Biko and Navalny were murdered in custody and their deaths obscured in blatant lies at which Putin’s Russia is far more adept than was Vorster’s South Africa.
Filatova is understandably primarily concerned about the impact on Russia and generously tentative about South Africa. The ANC has greeted Navalny’s death in predictably tepid and muted tones. There are three good reasons for this which boil down to envy, imitation and inclination.
It is all too easy to see why the ANC and its offshoots should be fascinated by Putin’s Russia. Next month Putin will win the national elections, the result of which is preordained. A plausible-sounding figure has no doubt already been settled in the Kremlin. On 29 May the outcome of the South African election is anyone’s guess and the ANC has a great deal of hard work ahead. It may even be dependent on other parties to form a government. This was not how history was meant to unfold for a vanguardist liberation movement; or so the ANC’s Soviet handlers taught them. Various leaders over the years, Jacob Zuma included, have declared that the ANC would rule ‘until kingdom come’; or other ironic biblical allusions. History, after all, is something within the power of vanguardists to control and tiresome democracy can get in the way. However, the kingdom may be about to reveal itself and this is when promising revolutions often turn to totalitarianism.
This would have been the teaching of the Soviet trainers of the ANC in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Party government promoted policies that were an assault on human rights and practised its own brand of authoritarianism, but it sometimes got things right. One was the assertion that the ANC was a communist front. This was put down to Pretoria’s propaganda and initially South Africa was rewarded with the presence of the largely pro-Western and pro-democracy Nelson Mandela. But the signs were there: for instance in the mid-1990s with enforced rolling up of pro-UDF civil society organisations on orders from somewhere vaguely described as headquarters. No guesses needed there. The influence of Soviet communism continues to be badly underestimated. Most of the Moscow-trained are now retired but their world view of heroic youth has influenced ANC culture, even if comrade has been replaced by cadre and deployee. The political system of South Africa is profoundly and damagingly Leninist for reasons of practicality and sentiment.
To envy and training may be added inclination. The czarist aura of Moscow appeals to the ideologically fossilised leadership of the ANC and to the patriarchy and matriarchy that stems from traditionalism. This is the politics of uBaba and uMama and the patronage system that trails in their wake, feeds many grateful recipients, and leaves millions destitute. The Soviet Union was famous for its political elite, the nomenklatura who had massive privileges and even their own segregated department stores. Now Russia has its corrupt oligarchs, the richest of all being Putin himself. It was Navalny’s effective exposure of the illicit wealth of Czar Vladimir that killed him. State capture and individual enrichment in South Africa has been modest by comparison but is part of the same syndrome. The West insists on the rule of law and freedom of expression which are threats to corruption and misappropriation. And whistleblowers have been murdered here, too. Who in the ANC ordered the killing of Babita Deokaram, for example?
South African vilification of the West is deeply hypocritical. Fikile Mabalula, secretary-general of the ANC, was recently in Moscow attending a meeting about neo-colonialism while Russia is busy recolonising significant parts of Africa and conducting a genocidal war in Ukraine; truly genocidal because it claims Ukraine and Ukrainians have no right to exist. Russia has absolutely nothing to offer South Africa by way of trade, aid or culture; most of which flows to and from the West, although China is also important. And with their ill-gotten gains, members of the ANC and its allies swig whisky and flaunt expensive consumer goods, all from the evil West. South Africa is truly part of the authoritarian world although the tattered trappings of democracy cling on.
Hannah Arendt who knew all too well about totalitarianism located it at the intersection of ideology, bureaucracy, technology and violence. Those were the means; the motivation was the turning of ideological myth into reality. The gap between the two great oppressive forces of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, was minimal. But the latter was better at marketing, clothing itself in spurious sentiment about international solidarity and brotherhood while its motive was basically imperial. So, the ANC trained in Moscow while thousands suffered in the labour camps and penal colonies of the Arctic. Its blinkered view and innate hypocrisy have not changed. As someone claimed on SAFM radio a few days ago, Navalny was just a Western spy.
When Biko died, Jimmy Kruger, so-called justice minister, said it ‘left him cold’ (laat my koud). Of Navalny, the ANC government has in effect just said the same.
[i] Irina Filatova, ‘Navalny’s death shakes Russia …’ BizNews, Johannesburg, 22 February 2024.