Mandela dead

The BBC tells us that Nelson Mandela is dead.

I suspect more than a few right wing commentators will greet the news with undisguised delight. And the MSM will run long, turgid, hagiographies about a man who has become a lefty secular saint.

Mandela was the symbol which broke the back of apartheid. He was also the only black South African who could negotiate the transition to black majority rule. In that sense he was and will remain a pivotal figure in the history of the modern world.

But his negotiation and the power which backed it was a facade behind which the unreadiness of the black African majority in South Africa to assume power was carefully hidden. And the history of South Africa since the end of apartheid has striped away that facade.

South Africa is well on its way back to Third World status. Crime, blackouts, racial violence have all escalated with the advent of black majority rule.

Commentators have suggested that the long life of Nelson Mandela has kept something of a lid on the more savage possibilities South Africa has to contend with.

We are about to find out.