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South Africa's second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome | openD...

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truly non-racial, modern and cosmopolitan

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Less than fifteen years after liberation, it is no longer clear that the country has the moral and intellectual capacity to generate an alternative meaning of what our world might be, or to become a major centre in the global south

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populist rhetoric

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millenarian form of politics which advocates, uses and legitimises self-destruction, or national suicide, as a means of salvation.

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Nongqawuse pattern

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generally a person of very humble origins. Backed by a certain level of mass hysteria, the maprofeti then claims that a great resurrection is about to take place. Whenever questioned about the sources of his actions and authority, he invariably refers to the authority of his "ancestors", his "tradition" or his "culture"

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Third, the elite display cowardice in the face of the challenge. As the maprofeti's message spreads fervently among the multitudes of disadvantaged and disaffected poor, the elite keep laughing at, and ridiculing, him

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of all sorts of prophets, healers and swindlers.

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A growing chorus of discontent is swelling from the multitudes of disadvantaged and disaffected poor young black men, many of whom firmly believe in the craft of witches and occult forces. How can it be otherwise? Their life expectancy is fast diminishing. They hardly trust the constitution. They deeply resent the new rights granted to women. Often, they will use rape as a means to discipline them while compensating for their own perceived loss of power. With nothing to lose, it is easy for many to choose predatory behavior over political life.

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ust as yesterday's cattle, today's poor blacks are dying in a particularly horrible manner. They cough and gasp for air. Fluid creeps over their lungs and as the disease spreads, they putrefy from the inside. Unable to eat, they are wasted and die mere skeletons. All over the country, cemeteries are full. Who can reasonably argue that such a frightening scale of death, such a racialised way of dying, does not have radical implications for politics and culture?

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This is the context in which a class-oriented millenarianism and nativist revivalism are fuelling mass disillusion, if not outright discontent. The discontent is spearheaded by the trade unions, the ANC Youth League and the South African Communist Party

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Although of a secular nature, this new millenarianism and nativist revivalism is using the eschatological language of the "revolution second coming" in order to paint as the epitome of the Antichrist one of the most worldly, cosmopolitan and urbane political leaders modern Africa has ever known.

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They want to exact vengeance, to humiliate him and to punish him for his alleged political sins – a neo-liberal, aloof, secretive and paranoid intellectual who is bent on centralising power and on driving South Africa towards a Zimbabwe-style dictatorship.

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The emergence, now, of a "democratic mob" led by self-appointed champions of the poor who claim to speak for the "common man" is itself the result of recent seismic shifts in the realm of South African political culture.

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Years of apartheid violence and, more recently, the utter degradation of urban public life have had devastating consequences on the culture of law and civility. Poverty, crime and disease, hunger and pestilence are weakening state and civil institutions while tearing apart the moral roots of civic and ethical life.

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To the continuing denial of white privilege, many blacks are responding with an exacerbated sense of victimisation and disempowerment

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