SOUTH AFRICA:Historian Pádraig O'Malley has written a new book which is highly critical of the ANC. He speaks to Joe Humphreysin Johannesburg
An Irish historian is at the centre of a political storm in South Africa after lifting the lid on a bitter power struggle in the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Pádraig O'Malley, a US-based academic who has gained unprecedented access to major South African political figures, including former president Nelson Mandela, has just finished a book tracing the country's transition to democracy under the ANC.
And his conclusions are far from complimentary.
As well as accusing the ANC of becoming "besotted by power" and "intolerant of opposition", the Dublin-born historian criticises South Africa for betraying the underlying principles of its freedom struggle.
It is O'Malley's investigation of the internal divisions in the ANC, however, that has attracted most comment in South Africa.
The book, for which Mandela has written a foreword, draws on more than 1,500 hours of interviews between O'Malley and South African political leaders over the past decade.
Although it is only being published next month, the book has already made front-page news.
The weekly Mail & Guardian previewed excerpts in a lead story in its latest edition, describing the book as a "penetrating exposé of the (ANC) party and its leadership".
Speaking to The Irish Times, O'Malley, who is Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says: "I hope the book provokes a debate in South Africa that has not been conducted . . . There is no criticism in the ANC about what is going on in the ANC - of people being redeployed from prominence to obscurity because they speak out."
O'Malley first visited South Africa in 1985 with a group of Dunnes Stores workers who had refused to handle apartheid goods in Ireland.
The shop-workers were stopped at the airport in Johannesburg and deported but O'Malley and two of his colleagues made it through - and subsequently headed to a pre-arranged meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
"We drove to St John's Church in Soweto," O'Malley recalls. "When we got there, Tutu stopped in the middle of his sermon and said 'The Irish have arrived' . . . After that trip I was hooked."
O'Malley returned to South Africa on several occasions before the apartheid regime collapsed. It was then that he began conducting interviews with key politicians, including Mandela, former president FW de Klerk, and Roelf Meyer and Cyril Ramaphosa, the chief negotiators for the government and the ANC respectively.
O'Malley, who left Ireland for Yale University on a Fulbright scholarship in 1968, subsequently played a behind-the-scenes role in getting Ramaphosa and Meyer to travel to Belfast in the late 1990s to aid the Northern Ireland peace process.
He said he built up trust with his interviewees by agreeing not to publish anything until the negotiations on South Africa's transition to democracy were completed.
He kept his promise by some distance, as his book, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa (Penguin USA) contains the first public airing of much of the testimony.
The book uses Maharaj, a former political prisoner on Robben Island and covert operations specialist for the ANC, as a means of examining 50 years of struggle in South Africa.
Maharaj's recent fall from grace within the party amid claims of a power struggle with president Thabo Mbeki has given the book an added political resonance.
Maharaj's wife Zarina is quoted in the book as saying that Mbeki disliked her husband in part because he - as an Indian - refused to "know his place" vis-a-vis the African majority.
Resentment of Mbeki's ruling style has grown recently to the point that party members openly heckled him at a rally in KwaZulu-Natal last year.
The president, who faces an ANC leadership battle in December, has denied reports that the province has become a no-go area for him. But there were fresh tensions this week when an ANC commission investigating dissent within the party's KwaZulu-Natal branch allowed to be made public the names of three members who had given evidence about an alleged "anti-Mbeki coup".
O'Malley says Mbeki's insistence on appointing key personnel at all levels of government "is not healthy". The Dubliner recalls that when violence broke out in the early 1990s, "all the other black parties pointed the finger at the ANC, and said they were intolerant of opposition. I think in retrospect that is telling . . . They (the ANC) are besotted with power, and the people have gotten lost because the system of democracy is not a participatory democracy."
The ANC, he says, has come to believe "it is our revolution - there is no room for anyone else". He cites the example of the Pan-African Congress, a fellow liberation movement about which "the ANC always speaks disparagingly - back then and now".
"What South Africa has lost to me is what made it special," O'Malley says. "One of the most abominable acts it has committed was when it voted (earlier this year) against sanctions on Myanmar in its first vote on the UN Security Council." O'Malley describes Myanmar as a state "more brutal than the apartheid regime", and suggests the vote is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the so-called Rainbow Nation.
In his book, which is being published in conjunction with a substantial dossier of information on his website (www.omalley.co.za), O'Malley sums up South Africa's condition thus: "There is a new terrain of struggle: the struggle for power (which) . . . is increasingly becoming a battle for a large empty space."