South Africa’s Brave New World is a big book: 646 pages of text, and another fifty pages of notes and index, even though it covers only fourteen years (1994–2008), the years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, which saw the African National Congress (ANC) attain power, and its three presidencies so far: Nelson Mandela (1994–99), Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) and now Jacob Zuma. There is a brief preface, setting out some of the writer’s personal background, then fifteen chapters, mostly divided into un-numbered shorter sections, rather like newspaper articles. There are sixteen pages of illustrations, and the usual but always useful list of abbreviations.

The book is packed with detail, so much so that the reader sometimes feels overwhelmed, inevitable perhaps when a working journalist turns his reports into a fully fledged book. One does, however, sometimes feel that ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ have been used rather more than that other useful function, ‘delete’. Most footnotes refer to newspaper articles, and only a few to interviews or the usual scholarly sources. Occasionally, there is that most annoying footnote, ‘Private source’, or even just ‘R.W. Johnson’. David Beresford, correspondent of the British Guardian in South Africa, himself not averse to passing on the odd bit of gossip, called Johnson’s book ‘a record of pretty well every piece of unsubstantiated gossip to have circulated in South Africa’s rumour mills’ (Guardian, 16 May 2009).

For instance, consider this passage about the then National Director for Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, a powerful figure in the ANC; his wife was herself a cabinet minister and close to the then president, Thabo Mbeki. Ngcuka seems to have been used by Mbeki and his cronies to target various people perceived as enemies: for instance, Mac Maharaj, a close friend and confidant of Mandela. Maharaj counter-attacked with a reminder that Ngcuka had been suspected of being a police spy, partly at least because, although he had been detained by the police in 1981, he was later granted a passport – an unusual circumstance for any black person, let alone a former detainee. Johnson writes:

The real sting in the tail here was that Ngcuka had been a clerk in the Durban law firm of the ANC activist Griffiths Mxenge. Griffiths and his wife Victoria had both been brutally murdered by the Security Police. In Durban, where the tragedy remained a cause célèbre, rumour had it that Ngcuka might have passed information to the Security Police enabling them to waylay the Mxenges. That is, lurking not far behind the accusation that Ngcuka had been a police spy was the lethal accusation that he had been an accomplice to the murder of two major struggle-martyrs.

There is no attribution. Yes, the Mxenges were both murdered by hit-squads organised by the security police; but first it was Griffiths, then, months later, his wife. They were not waylaid together, which presumably throws even more doubt on the rumour, unless of course Ngcuka set up first one murder, then the other. But rumour, as Johnson doesn’t say, is ‘many-tongued’. Do historians not need to be even more careful than journalists in drawing conclusions from rumours?

The polemic is always vigorous and the reader is often pulled into the action by the power of the syntax, the scope of the argument, the urgency of the narratives, the passion of the conviction, the piling up of detail – almost, indeed, at times, as if this were a work of the imagination, informed by a single and singular vision. If I found myself protesting most vehemently, it was only because I happened to know something personally about the individuals being traduced: for example, Judge Richard Goldstone, Archbishop Tutu, Dr Mamphela Ramphele (sometime vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town), the Reverend Barney Pityana (vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa). Since the last-named still serves as a lowly curate in the Johannesburg Anglican Cathedral every Sunday, isn’t calling him ‘a man of brazen ambition’, as Johnson does, a trifle exaggerated? Even Mandela is a diminished figure in Johnson’s book, seen as a pitiable old man who spent too long in jail.

Johnson’s fiercest opprobrium falls on Mbeki. Much of his two terms as president may be regarded as a set of missed opportunities and wrong moves, perhaps even as a tragedy; yet Johnson’s view of him is so belittling – literally so, for he suggests Mbeki is self-conscious about his height – and demeaning that sometimes fair-minded readers might begin to doubt if any portrayal so dismissive could be accurate. For instance, Johnson takes every opportunity he can to mock Mbeki for not being as clever as either he or others suppose. Don McKinnon, when he was Commonwealth Secretary – no slouch intellectually himself, and with some good reasons to dislike Mbeki – thought that Mbeki was far and away the cleverest of the Commonwealth leaders. Run one’s eye down some of the headings in Johnson’s index under ‘Mbeki, Thabo’ to get the flavour: Aids denial, arms deal, bizarre comments, colonial personality, grandiosity, intellectualism, paranoia, racism, womanising allegations. Even Satan was allowed to have intelligence.

Johnson has a short way with his own critics; a review he wrote of Anthony Sampson’s Mandela: The Authorised Biography (1999) began thus:

One of the oddities about living in South Africa is that a whole lot of people who have left the country still believe that they know better than those of us who live here what goes on … Having seen apartheid crumble and the ANC come to power, such folk know that good has triumphed over evil and that if any problems persist they can only be due to the legacy of apartheid. Any suggestion that the truth is actually a lot more complicated is often met with rage and moral disapproval. (LRB, 19 August 1999)

When Johnson himself lived outside South Africa, he didn’t seem to think that criticisms of the orthodoxies then preached in the country were invalid just because one wasn’t there.

Johnson was himself, in his younger days, a supporter of the African National Congress. Now that he has changed sides, he seems to blame almost everything that has gone wrong on what has happened within, or because of, the ANC, and much less on the legacy of apartheid. Is not ‘the truth … actually a lot more complicated’ than he himself admits? It would be unfair to accuse him of the old journalistic trick, ‘simplify, then exaggerate’. His methodology is to accumulate detail, to pile it up in great heaps, then to say that only conspiracy could have made such a mess.

There are other, more considered judgements on the political present in South Africa. The historian Tom Lodge ended an essay for the Journal of South African Studies a year or two back thus:

Rent-seeking by sectional interests has certainly detracted from the state’s legitimacy. It has probably prevented it from receiving the public acknowledgement it deserves for the relative success it has enjoyed in meeting certain basic needs particularly with respect to housing, electricity and social security. It is probably the case that the state is better organized today than it was in 1994: the extension of social grants and the reform of local government with all its shortcomings are compelling evidence of this. However these achievements are eclipsed by failings in health and education which on both fronts seem to have been the consequence of mistaken policy priorities and which present massive waste of public resources. No state that fails so spectacularly to improve the health and education of its citizens can make serious claims about its developmental achievement.

Lodge’s prose may not have the aggressive punch of Johnson’s, but his opinions have something Johnson’s too often don’t: balance. By all means read Johnson’s book; it has much to recommend it, especially when analysis predominates over polemic or when he reports on his own conversations with politicians. However, if you want to understand Mbeki better than Johnson’s savage portrait of him allows, try Mark Gevisser’s biography; the abridged version, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream (2009) is better and much shorter than the 935-page version, Thabo Mbeki: the Dream Deferred (2007). If you want to understand why Mugabe is still regarded by many blacks in Southern Africa as a liberator and not merely as the kleptocratic monster most Westerners consider him, read Jonny Steinberg on attitudes to the ownership of land in Midlands (2002). If you want to understand why ‘Aids denialism’ can’t be blamed simply on the attitudes of Mbeki and central government but is deeply rooted in South Africa’s conservative rural culture, read Steinberg in Three Letter Plague (2008).

Surely what one needs, especially in the history of our own times, is nuance rather than headlines? As Donne wrote, centuries ago,

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and      he that will
Reach her, about must, and about             must go;
And what the hill’s suddenness resists,    win so …