Burden of Proof

South African President Thabo Mbeki is angered, reports the BBC, by the claims of his government's critics that he is doing too little to stop rape and the spread of HIV in South Africa. He fought back, using the term "racist" to describe a journalist who is also a white rape victim who criticized Mbeki in a recent article. More recently the opposition politicians weighed in to compare Mbeki's comments as an "own goal" in the war on crime and AIDS. In his defense, Mbeki claims rightly that his government has brought crime to a post-Apartheid low.

Mbeki is correct when he identifies the issue at stake here: The psychological residue of apartheid has produced a psychosis among some of us such that, to this day, they do not believe that our non-racial democracy will survive and succeed. Can an African-led democracy in a multi-racial, multi-cultural land such as South Africa survive? Or will the country collapse, forcing back toward the racism, or (more likely) the authoritarianism of apartheid.

Mbeki is wrong, however, when he blames his opposition for raising the question. The question exists, and no veneer of public-spiritedness can cover it over. The responsibility does not lie with the media and the world at large to call South Africa a success; the responsibility lies with the new Black leadership to make South Africa a success. If they fail, they should have the maturity to admit it, and to ask for assistance from the world's better-established democracies.

Compare Mbeki's finger-pointing response to the response of the leader of the first attempt at a multiracial democracy:

...a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure...we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, who of course is the speech-giver, takes upon himself and his nation the responsibility to see the noble American experiment through to its logical and just conclusion. He of all people could have laid blame on the secessionists, who were actively attacking the democratic Union and denying racial equality before law. Yet Lincoln took for granted that he and America would face opposition in the attempt to build a just and democratic society, and thousands of Americans showed their willingness to die for the Union and the principles on which it was founded, in that war and others.

President Thabo Mbeki and the others leading South Africa need to take a sheet from Lincoln's playbook, and understand that the success of great moral efforts is not foregone, and they, like the previous generation of Black South African leaders, sometimes must fight great adversity with great courage to see their noble experiment succeed.