As the new South Africa interacts with the United States, there are times when one has to pinch oneself to be sure that the things one sees are really happening. South Africa was doubtless the only industrialized country where a majority of the population saw O.J. Simpson as a hero and greeted his not guilty verdict with rapture; Simpson's lawyer, Johnny Cochran, naturally rushed out here to star on the chat shows. American consular officials proudly posed with him in apparent celebration of the verdict, before Cochran was led away to watch a sheep noisily slaughtered in his honor, African-style.
My own introduction to the oddities of the American-South African interface came during the run-up to South Africa's first democratic election in April 1994, when the election monitoring project I was running brought me into contact with the U.S. Democratic Party's international arm, the National Democratic Institute. NDI, like its counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI), received funds from USAID to promote multi-party democracy in South Africa. This bipartisan election support project was specifically tasked with providing non-partisan support to all the formerly disenfranchised political groups who had agreed to participate peacefully in the election process. In practice NDI leaned heavily and lopsidedly toward the African National Congress (ANC). One oddity of this overt favoritism was that, given the powerful position within the ANC of the SACP (South Africa's old-style Communist Party--which still brandishes the Lenin badges and hammer and sickle icons long discarded by its brother parties elsewhere), NDI frequently provided a platform for the Communists. The SACP played a brave role in the liberation struggle and is a player of some significance in the South African multi-party system, but it is doubtful whether the U.S. Congress, when it voted through the money, had in mind quite the sort of outcomes that resulted.
