We are all prone to stereotyping. Few areas of the world are the object of more stereotyping than Africa. Hence, the notion that there can be any connection between our ancient, venerable, European – and white – people and the “Dark Continent” may strike us as odd. But in fact, there are connections, and even parallels.
We do not know when the first Ukrainian set foot in Africa. Some may have served with Polish military units in Egypt during World War II. I once knew the family of a Ukrainian physician who had settled in Tanganyika after the war. USSR involvement with countries like Egypt and Ethiopia must have brought many Ukrainians to the continent. A number of Ukrainian physicians or other health professionals settled in South Africa – in some ways the region’s most advanced country – in the last decades of the Soviet era.
Many remain there today, along with engineers, employees of international organizations and spouses of South Africans. There are Ukrainian communities in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Ukraine’s Embassy in Pretoria, one of nearly a dozen throughout Africa, lists some 300 Ukrainians in its register, but estimates another 1,000 or so in the country. In Cape Town, the Ukrainian Association of South Africa works to promote Ukraine, its culture and language, as well as to foster Ukrainian economic cooperation with South Africa (www.uaza.co.za). There is even a Ukrainian school.
South Africa presents some surprising parallels with Ukraine. Obviously if superficially, the long struggle against colonialism and its consequences resembles Ukraine’s centuries-old quest for freedom. Much as Ukrainian nationalists took up arms against wartime occupiers, the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) carried on armed struggle after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Both movements had innocent victims: one of the first South Africans I met told me that his wife had been murdered by the ANC. From the 1960s to the 1980s, both black South Africans and Ukrainians had their jailed dissidents, appealing to human rights and international law, and both had their martyrs. Both movements triumphed in the early 1990s.
But whereas the immediate cause of Ukrainian independence was an intra-party deal, South Africa’s was one of the rare cases where opposing leaders committed to peaceful dialogue staved off civil war by reaching an accord. ANC leader Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in confinement (thus approaching Yuriy Shukhevych’s 34 years), and President F.W. de Klerk, who headed the National Party, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Activist Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, though not quite an Andrey Sheptytsky or a Josyf Slipyj, had received that honor in 1984. Although various internal and external factors contributed to the accord – the threat of mass violence, the Dutch Reformed Church’s about-face on apartheid, international pressure, the resolution of the Angolan and Namibian issues, the waning of the Communist threat after 1989 – the idealism, determination, and political skill of Mandela and de Klerk cannot be overestimated.
In the wake of this revolution, South Africa set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its purposes were to expose the crimes of the apartheid era on the part of both pro- and anti-apartheid forces, to seek mutual forgiveness, and to encourage compensation for injuries. The process seems to have had a healing effect. A similar approach in Ukraine might have prevented some of its current pathologies.
But in South Africa, as in Ukraine, the fruits of victory were not altogether sweet. Living off the moral capital of its long struggle, the ANC has become corrupt. President Jacob Zuma resigned on February 14 under a cloud of accusations. In 2014, incidentally, South Africa abstained from voting on U.N. General Assembly Resolution 68/262, condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Both countries exhibit the growth of a nouveau riche, high unemployment and vast economic inequality. Over the long term, industrialization has continued to disrupt traditional life in both lands. In South Africa, the mining industry that developed after the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and gold in the 1880s drew native farmers and herders away from the stability of tribal customs and religion to sprawling cities and shanty-towns where crime and corruption flourished. In his classic 1948 novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” Alan Paton portrayed the interrelationships among environmental, social, cultural and moral degradation. Similarly, in Ukraine’s Donbas the coal mines plucked peasants out of the matrix of traditional village life, turning them into rootless proletarians plagued by alcoholism and other social ills. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2015 South Africa had a murder rate of 34.27 per 100,000, ranking eighth in the world. A common sight is posters on lampposts advertising 30-minute abortions (legal since 1996).
There are other parallels, as well as contrasts. Ukraine was not the first country to renounce its nuclear arsenal – South Africa did so a few years earlier. Having struggled for a century or two to preserve their language, Ukrainians are not impressed by their Russian or Hungarian minorities’ linguistic demands. In contrast, by giving official status to 11 of its many languages, Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” has invited additional claims. The Khoi-San, an ethnic group possessing the world’s oldest DNA, are demanding that its “click languages,” perhaps among humanity’s first, be included. Moreover, they are asking recognition as not merely a traditional group, but as South Africa’s only indigenous group. After all, the hunter-gatherer San and the pastoral Khoi, sometimes known as Bushmen or Hottentots, preceded the 14th century Bantu migration by some 20,000 years.
Today, both Ukraine and South Africa seem adrift. Perhaps this is a consequence of the socio-cultural disruptions of the modern era. Alan Paton’s words remain relevant: “It was permissible to allow the destruction of a tribal system that impeded the growth of the country. … But it is not permissible… to replace it by nothing, or by so little, that a whole people deteriorates, physically and morally.” Has not something similar happened to Ukraine?