One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘The world looks to South Africa now for inspiration,’ says Ashwin. ‘We need to spark a new form of opposition that has an international resonance. The question is, how do our struggles in places like this link with the Seattles and the Genoas? We need to, because to fight disconnection and to ignore the World Bank or the IMF or whatever, is fighting the symptoms not the cause. On the other hand, I wish the people in Genoa would come down here and see that trying to smash international institutions without winning support from communities like this is never going to work. Neither work on their own. If we can link them, we get a truly international movement.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s so fucking hard, man,’ says Heinrich.

  ‘It’s hard,’ agrees Ashwin, ‘but we have to make the break.’

  It’s a warm November morning, and about forty people are gathered in Pimville Library in Soweto to learn about the World Trade Organization. I am back in Johannesburg, this time in its biggest and best-known township. The lime-green room heaves with the red T-shirts of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and the yellow T-shirts of the Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum. The AIDC is running a teach-in before the WTO meets next week. George, who is running the workshop, is exhausted – he’s already done three this week in other townships. He stands in front of the whiteboard at the front of the room, brushing his hair out of his face. All eyes are on him; eyes belonging to rotund middle-aged women in headscarves and African dresses; angry young bucks in ‘No to privatisation’ T-shirts, interested young mothers, curious teenagers. It goes without saying that everyone in the room, apart from George and me, is black.

  ‘We’re gathered here today,’ begins George, after an APF man has introduced him to everyone, ‘to discuss this thing called the World Trade Organization.’ He writes ‘World Trade Organization’ on the board with a blue marker pen. ‘People around the world are going to be protesting about this WTO next week, because they’re very unhappy about what’s happening there. So let’s have a look at it. Who knows anything about it?’

  There is a sea of blank faces. One man raises his hand.

  ‘It is an economic muscle,’ he says, ‘organising the world into one global economy – but for the rich, not for people like us.’

  ‘No,’ says another man, ‘I think it is about job creation, so that countries can organise themselves for economic development together.’

  ‘I think the WTO has organised the G8.’

  ‘Governments of the north want the WTO,’ says another man, ‘because they want our wealth! That’s why the APF says no to the WTO and no to privatisation!’ He seems to be reading from a sheet.

  ‘I don’t think the WTO will create jobs,’ says a young woman. ‘I think they exist to make a profit for companies. How will this give us jobs?’

  ‘The WTO is like the World Bank and IMF,’ chips in the sheet-reading man again. ‘They want to generate more profits for the capitalist class. That is why the APF says no . . .’

  ‘OK,’ says George, ‘right. Anyone else?’ An old man, who’s obviously been thinking about this, raises his hand.

  ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is that the WTO doesn’t take into account different ideologies. They impose sanctions on countries that don’t fit into their economic model. They give countries no choice about how to develop themselves.’

  ‘OK,’ says George, ‘there are a lot of ideas here. Let’s talk about them. First, I’ll tell you about the history of the WTO. It’s a very new organisation. It’s only five years old . . .’

  An hour or so later George is explaining the WTO’s agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights – or TRIPS – to his engaged audience. TRIPS, according to the WTO, globalises patent protection, copyright, trademarks and the like, to prevent unfair theft of ideas or designs, and ‘protect innovation’. It means that something patented in one WTO member country is patented in all of them, and that undermining that patent is illegal.

  South Africa, meanwhile, has a law allowing the government to make use of ‘compulsory licensing’ of drugs in times of national emergency – taking away patent rights from a company and mass-producing cheaper versions of the drug. South Africa, in which 4.7 million people – one in nine of the population – is HIV-positive, has a national emergency on its hands by any standards, and virtually everyone agrees that providing free or cheap AIDS drugs to the poor is a moral necessity. Everyone, that is, except thirty-nine of the world’s biggest drugs companies who, in 2001, brought a legal case against the South African government, saying its cheap drugs policy was illegal, and quoting TRIPS to back them up.

  AIDS activists in South Africa initiated an international campaign against the drugs companies, which forced them to drop their case amid a wave of international revulsion. Under pressure, the WTO eventually issued a statement insisting that TRIPS did not prevent governments like South Africa’s breaking patents in times of widespread health emergencies.

  ‘That’s what the WTO says,’ George explains. ‘And yet the American government has taken Brazil to the WTO for doing exactly the same thing – producing cheap drugs and breaking patent laws. Thailand is doing it too. So let’s look at laws. In South Africa, we have a law – you’re not allowed to murder your neighbour. If you do, what happens to you?’

  ‘Arrested,’ murmurs the room.

  ‘Right. The police come and take you away, and then you go to court. So if, say, Thailand keeps producing cheap AIDS drugs, breaking the TRIPS law, what do you think will happen?’

  A pause.

  ‘Thailand will be arrested?’ volunteers a man.

  ‘Er . . .’ says George, ‘well, yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose. Thailand will be taken to a closed WTO tribunal, and if it loses its case, sanctions will be imposed on it.’

  ‘But that’s not fair!’ shouts someone from the back.

  By the end of the meeting, everybody seems to agree: it’s not fair. George is talking about government support for industry, and why WTO rules require South Africa to phase it out.

  ‘A lot of Western Cape canning companies have closed recently,’ he says, ‘because the government is no longer allowed to subsidise them under the WTO. And yet, in Europe, governments subsidise their farmers by billions every year—’

  A woman puts her hand up. ‘But that’s economic oppression!’ she says, simply.

  ‘Yes,’ says George, ‘it is economic oppression.’ A ripple spreads around the room.

  ‘Are our trade ministers stupid?’ asks a large, colourful woman, who has been growing increasingly agitated since the meeting began. ‘Don’t they understand what they’re reading before they sign it?’

  ‘Yes, they understand,’ says George. ‘Now, do you understand why South Africa has lost a million jobs under the WTO?’

  ‘Yes!’ roars the room.

  ‘These people in our government at top level,’ says a man over to one side, ‘they should be doing what we want them to do! That is their job!’

  ‘Yes!’ shouts everyone again.

  ‘So what can we do about this?’ says another woman. ‘Our first enemy is ignorance. I didn’t know anything about the WTO at all until today. How can we fight this?’

  ‘We must fight it!’ shouts an old man. ‘We are being sold! We are always being sold! We must fight it!’

  As the workshop winds up, everyone is busily discussing how to organise transport to central Johannesburg for the march next week. All of them, to a person, want to stand up and be counted. In the corner of the room, meanwhile, writing busily on a very full-looking notepad, sits Dudu Mphenyeke, one of the leading lights in the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.

  Dudu has lived in Pimville for decades, and helped to set up the SECC in July 2000, after her electricity had been cut off. She’s now the SECC’s public relations officer, and has seen the organisation that she helped to create soar from 17 initial members to over 5,000 today. She wears a giant square badge on her red T-shirt that says ‘Third World Within’. I
ask her what motivates the SECC to keep going.

  ‘We regard electricity as a right,’ she says, simply, ‘and we feel it is better to break the law than to break the poor – to break the community. That’s what the government is doing. The free water and electricity that they promised before the election – it’s not been implemented.’ I ask if she agrees with Ashwin and Heinrich, that the government is conducting a ‘war on the poor’.

  ‘Oh, life in Soweto has got worse,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘It was better under the apartheid government. We didn’t have any cut-offs, we didn’t have water leakage, we didn’t have a situation in which even a person with a diploma from university was short of a job. It’s really alarming. People are being retrenched, unemployment is going up, companies are being privatised . . .’ She sighs, and looks me full in the eye.

  ‘We feel,’ she says simply, ‘that this government has brought more misery and more poverty than before. They are making things easier for business people – reducing their taxes to make it easier to make profits – and making it more difficult for workers; more difficult for ordinary people like us.’ She sighs again, and shakes her head.

  ‘We don’t have freedom yet in South Africa,’ she says, ‘and we feel deceived.’

  Two days later. Tomorrow is 9 November, when the AIDC’s anti-WTO march will be held, and George is zipping around the city trying to drum up what he needs to make it work. I have promised to help with the props, and so it is that I find myself in a giant disused factory-turned-arts-space, which smells inexplicably of peanuts, painting everything and anything that could potentially be used by the people who will be turning up tomorrow. Four or five members of a local arts collective have promised George that they will make him some props at short notice, and I am helping them out.

  We spend all day brainstorming and crawling around the floor with pens, pots and paintbrushes, and by sundown we have an interesting collection of items to show for our efforts. It includes a giant cardboard puppet of the WTO-loving Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin; he wields an enormous hammer, stamped with the letters ‘WTO’, over a giant yellow representation of Africa, upon which are printed the words FOR SALE. It also includes twenty cardboard water glasses (‘WTO water – 1 Rand 50’), four giant top hats painted with dollar signs and stripes, with accompanying cardboard fat-cat cigars, a collection of cut-out medicine bottles with ‘Stop AIDS, stop TRIPS, affordable medicine now!’ printed on the side, and three giant cloth anti-WTO banners of which we are all quietly proud.

  The morning of the 9th dawns bright and clear, and in the small car park outside the AIDC offices, a vanguard of demonstrators is gathering. George has given me the job of explaining and distributing the props, which we have transported from the peanut factory in his ancient, rattling car. A keen crowd gathers around me as I open the boot.

  ‘OK,’ I say, picking up Alec Erwin, gingerly, ‘this is Alec Erwin. He’s got a WTO hammer, see . . .’ Someone grabs Erwin and parades him around the car park in a circle, to enthusiastic cheers.

  ‘Hang on – wait a minute. This is Africa, obviously. It’s, er, for sale. He’s supposed to be hitting it with the WTO, you see, so you have to carry the two next to each other.’ Now that I explain it like that, it seems, well, a bit silly. But nobody cares, and Africa is swiftly and keenly claimed.

  ‘Right, who wants to be an American capitalist?’ The dollars-and-stripes top hats are being tried out for size before I’ve finished the sentence.

  ‘Don’t forget the cigars,’ I bring a handful of crudely painted rolled-up cardboard things out from the boot. ‘Capitalists need cigars.’

  ‘Dagga!’ shouts someone, grabbing one of them. There is a ripple of laughter. Dagga is the South African word for marijuana.

  ‘It’s not dagga, it’s a capitalist cigar.’

  ‘Capitalist dagga!’ The cigars are in people’s mouths in two seconds, and imaginary dagga smoke is being blown to the heavens. Within a minute, all the other props and banners are eagerly seized, so it looks like our day wasn’t wasted.

  Half an hour later, in the city centre, the march is about to begin. The Sowetans have arrived, joining people from other townships and the city itself. The prop-carrying crew are dancing around wildly in the middle of a square, and the place is a mass of T-shirts; the red and yellow of the Sowetans, and others, worn by those who have turned up independently, with slogans like ‘Corporate globalisation is global apartheid’, ‘Landlessness = racism’, and – my personal favourite – a Nike swoosh, emblazoned with the words ‘Just vom it’.

  A few minutes after my arrival, a car pulls into the square with a pair of speakers attached to the roof. It’s being driven by Trevor Ngwane, a man who is rapidly becoming a new South African folk hero (‘Trevor is our Marcos’ claims Patrick, enthusiastically). A former ANC councillor for Soweto, thrown out of the party for opposing privatisation plans for the city, Trevor is now a leading light in the Johannesburg Anti-Privatisation Forum, works for the AIDC, chairs the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and roams both South Africa and the world giving talks in his booming gravelly voice which rarely fail to grab the attention. This is a man who has given billionaire financier George Soros a tongue-lashing via video link at the World Economic Forum. This is a man who can unashamedly mount a stage in front of thousands of people in Washington DC and toyi-toyi while singing ‘The World Bank – haai! – is the devil – haai! haai!’. The ANC must be rueing the day it drove him away.

  Naturally, I have been wanting to talk to Trevor since I got to the country. When I get a chance to grab him I ask him what he thinks community groups like the ones he is involved in can actually achieve. What has the Anti-Privatisation Forum done, for instance?

  ‘The APF tries to link unions with community organisations,’ he explains. ‘It is a coalition open to anyone who opposes privatisation and is willing to go public about it. But it also gives a new political dynamic and perspective.’ The key issue at the moment, he says, is to break people out of their refusal to criticise the ANC.

  ‘We need to get over that. Take myself: when you part with an organisation you’ve been building and working hard for over the years, you don’t enjoy it!’ He laughs – a deep, long, attractive sound. I ask him if the ANC is worried about what people like him are currently up to.

  ‘Ooh yes!’ he grins. ‘There is no doubt in my mind. They are definitely worried about us. What I have noticed now is that they are no longer coming to the people as the ANC – but as “the state”. They’re the state now – they’re no longer a social movement. That’s how they relate to us. We are “counter-revolutionary”, they say! But more and more people are no longer listening.’

  The march is starting. Trevor jumps into his car and grabs the microphone, leading us slowly through the streets of the city, yelling slogans as he goes.

  ‘Mbeki – away!’

  ‘GEAR – away! Away!’

  ‘WTO – away!’

  ‘Capitalism– away! Away!’

  ‘Viva South Africa! Viva!’

  It doesn’t take much to get a South African dancing, and as soon as the march moves off, everyone is at it; toyi-toying through the streets. I bump into Virginia, who can’t stop laughing at our apparent inability to meet without being surrounded by dancers. The crowd keeps moving, carrying giant puppets, shouting along with Trevor and waving at the police, who have gathered around us in those horrible, huge, square armoured cars that you used to see on TV in the 1980s hosing people down in the townships. Now, the drivers are black. There are maybe 300 people here, but they have enough energy, and make enough noise, for 3,000.

  A few streets into the march, Patrick arrives, breathless. As usual, he is overworked. He’s also depressed, though Patrick depressed is still a bundle of energy. He’s just been at a meeting with some ANC policy-makers, where he and a colleague were trying to persuade them that their privatisation policies were damaging the very people they claimed to have been struggling to
liberate. What did they say to that, I ask.

  ‘Ha! They said we were counter-revolutionaries, of course. So we showed them a video – people in Soweto rising up against the cut-offs. They went very quiet after that. It was unanswerable. Then we pointed out that they promised free electricity at the ’99 elections.’

  ‘So are they going to do something about it?’

  ‘No. They see their role now as selling privatisation to the poor. That’s their version of liberation.’ We turn a corner, still marching and shouting, followed by baton-swinging police. Patrick is introducing me to everyone he knows, which seems to be everyone.

  ‘Paul, here’s someone you should meet. Lucien, this is Paul. Lucien’s one of our leading anarchists.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a leading anarchist, Patrick,’ says Lucien.

  ‘Wolfram,’ Patrick says to a frail old man with kind eyes walking three paces behind us, ‘this is Paul. Paul’s writing a book about the movement. Wolfram’s one of our leading liberation theologists. You two should exchange numbers.’

  In a couple of long strides, Patrick has latched on to someone else.

  ‘Nhiania, this is Paul. Paul, Nhiania is a leading activist from Swaziland. You’ll find this very interesting . . .’ I wonder whether I should offer Patrick a commission.

  ‘Privatisation – away! Away!’ Trevor is bellowing, through his speakers.

  ‘AMANDLA!’ yells the crowd. Amandla is a word I have been hearing a lot since I got here. It is the Xhosa word for power. South Africa’s people have been liberated from apartheid; real power, though, is proving much more elusive.

  I have two days left in the country, and there is one thing left for me to do. I have to talk to someone from the party that is supposedly responsible for all this, and ask them what is going on; get their side of the story.

  Thus it is that I find myself on the fifth floor of the ANC’s imposing Johannesburg HQ, sitting in the office of Michael Sachs, the party’s head of policy and research. Sachs is an influential figure in the party, and has promised to give me the government’s side of the story. I sit down, say that, yes, I would love a cup of tea, thanks, switch on my tape recorder and ask him why so many people feel deceived by his government.