Mandela’s Electoral Legacy

A moral and political giant like Nelson Mandela seldom appears more than once or twice in a hundred years. In the twentieth century, the only fully comparable figure who comes immediately to mind is Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose work in South Africa foreshadowed Mandela’s. Looking at the nineteenth century, one thinks of Abraham Lincoln.

And in the eighteenth century? Mandela has often been called the George Washington of his country, and justly so. But he was also South Africa’s James Madison.

After Mandela’s dramatic release from twenty-seven years’ imprisonment, in 1990, he spent nearly four years in intensive, sometimes contentious negotiations over the shape of a new South Africa—including, not least, the writing of a constitution worthy of a multiracial democratic republic. As much or more than anything he did before or since, those few years demonstrated his political genius and his greatness of soul.

“Mandela took the path of reconciliation from the day of his release,” the late, great New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in May of 1994, shortly before the inauguration of the president of the African National Congress as the President—the first democratically elected President—of the Republic of South Africa. A “spirit of inclusiveness and reconciliation was carried on through the long negotiations and then the election campaign,” Lewis continued.

    The new Constitution, drafted mainly by lawyers of the ANC and the governing National Party, contains assurances to whites and other minorities. It has a detailed bill of rights and a Constitutional Court to enforce it.

    Perhaps most important, the negotiators agreed to conduct the first election on the basis of proportional representation. In a system like Britain’s or ours, with legislators elected by districts, few whites would have won—because only a few districts in South Africa have white majorities. PR will produce many more white members, because each party will have the same share of seats as it has of votes in the whole country.

    The ANC agreed even though it will have fewer winners. As a study by the Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington put it, the leaders realized that the distortions caused by a district system “would be fundamentally destabilizing in the long run.”

Mandela faced some opposition on this point, mainly from militants who wanted precisely to minimize white representation but also from Afrikaner diehards who hoped a district system could somehow be gerrymandered to maximize it. But, in the end, all parties accepted proportional representation as the fairest option.

In recent years the system of P.R. used in South Africa has been criticized for a failure to create strong connections between particular parliamentarians and particular constituencies, and there is considerable support for moving to a mixed system like Germany’s or New Zealand’s, which would allow for a certain number of single-member districts while preserving strict proportionality among national political parties. But the principle of proportional representation has not been seriously questioned.

Lewis again, in that same column:

    Americans might look at South Africa and think about our politics. South Africans lined up for hours, determined to vote; half of us do not bother. There, victims of oppression built bridges to those who held power; here we increasingly have the politics of division and hate. They used proportional representation to mitigate conflict; we mocked a Lani Guinier who thought we should consider a form of it for the same reason.

Those words, written nearly twenty years ago, might as well have been written for today’s paper.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg