Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa

“Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South
Africa,” written and edited by Rob Montz. About 10
minutes. 

Original airdate was May 5, 2014 and the original text is
below:

“This government—our
government—is worse than the apartheid
government.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1994 Nobel
Peace Prize.

South African voters are headed to the polls this week
for the
fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was
elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.

Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a
decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation,
the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early
1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa
swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour
predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to
majority rule. Mandela’s government ushered in pluralistic
democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy.
State officials established remarkably robust constitutional
protections for individual rights.

Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and
social opportunities they’d been denied for so long.

Or so everyone had hoped.

Two decades later, Mandela’s promise of renewal has largely gone
unfulfilled as Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC)
has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream
animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing
corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace
Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, “This
government—our government—is worse than the
apartheid government.”

“Life After Liberation,” directed and hosted by
Rob Montz, details the
role played by political monopoly in South Africa’s post-apartheid
decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown corrupt and
complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling political
class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue, Julius
Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing precisely
the sort of Mugabeist
socialist policies that have ruined so many other African
countries.

About 10 minutes.

Produced, written, and edited by Rob Montz. Camera by Josh
Swain.

View this article.