What should we do to push the country to the left?

[struggle4progress]

23. To me, the lesson of the South African struggle is the dispensability of leaders:

the apartheid government in South Africa regularly decapitated the anti-apartheid movement by silencing leaders (with legal instruments such as banning), imprisoning them (as in the case of Mandela), or outright killing them (as in the case of Biko)

By the late 1980s, however, there was a sufficient cultural understanding of methods useful for resistance (and of the expected governmental responses), that whenever the government shut down one avenue for anti-apartheid work, the movement would quickly exhibit another avenue: this, of course, required continual hard organizing work, but by then a very large number of people had learned how to think about the struggle productively

IMHO Tutu is a great man for many reasons, but it would be an error to think that the success of the movement depended on one person, or on a small number of people: it succeeded because it was a broad-based mass movement that pursued several strategies simultaneously