Paul Trewhela on an anniversary the ruling party should not forget to remember
Monday 9th November is an anniversary of first rate importance in South Africa, to be met with silence by its main beneficiary, the African National Congress, as ruling party of the state. Its non-commemoration arises from a tangle of contradictions as sharp as razor-wire.
On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave...and the ANC military option lost whatever teeth it might have had.
The military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a centimetre squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimetre squared of soil.
True, the repeated mass mobilisations and popular uprisings within South Africa through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US banking system - placed it under further serious pressures.
Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southen tip was nowhere near collapse.
The worse soldier the world has ever seen is probably MK/ Swapo, 