The thing is JRG, I mostly agree with you about the nature of post-apartheid South Africa, but you’re not going to persuade anyone who’s not already convinced with that tone. I don’t think you would have got far telling the people in the townships who actually made up the mass movement in the 80s that Mandela had nothing at all to do with their struggle, or that the defeat of the apartheid army by the MPLA, the ANC and the Cubans at Cuito Cuanavale had nothing to do with the end of the regime.
One of the great tragedies of what’s happened there since 1994 is that very often, it’s people who were very much part of the struggle who’ve taken their places in the new elite. Presumably that wasn’t what they thought they were fighting for when they were in jail or in exile and their comrades were being killed all the time. You can’t come close to understanding why and where things went wrong if you assume that all they cared about was ‘preserving the rule of capital’ or ‘derailing the mass movement from its historic tasks’.