“I’ll give him this. When Mandela became President, he did not go “Full Mugabe”. He could turned that country into a bigger bloodbath than it is now.”
I keep seeing this claim. What prevented him, and the ANC, from doing that before the election? They tried, but couldn’t.
After the election, even though he became president, he did not really control the military, still full of white generals and soldiers fiercely loyal to them, and even if he did control it, he did not have nearly enough trained soldiers to make use of the equipment. At its very peak, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC, had 15,000 men. The SA police force alone was 600,000, and the trained military in permanent and national guard type forces was another 800,000. Then there was about a million really pissed off Zulus, who would not have taken his side in a genocide exercise, and widespread solidarity against the ANC from some of the homelands too, like Ciskei and Bophutatswana, all with their own armies equipped by the SA government.
Now you can see the problems I have with this claim that Mandela could have massacred South African whites like animals had he wanted to. It may have been a bloodbath, but he and the ANC would have been utterly destroyed.
Of course, most of the generation that could have fought has left South Africa, the military is a complete mess, and whites are being murdered in comparatively large numbers.
So how did the ANC get so powerful if that was the case?
All good points to be sure. I wasn’t saying that he necessarily could have visited wanton genocide on whites, but his rhetoric could have been more divisive and could have raised tensions inevitably leading to more bloodshed.
I am no fan of the current South African government and I am no fan of Mandela either. Apartheid and white control of the country was going to end. The numbers were not there nor was there the will to continue with that system. Partition of that country may have been a better solution or, perhaps, a more gradual transition to majority rule/power sharing should have been implemented.
There are numerous outrages being committed against the white population. Also, there is a large increase in black on black crime. I don’t see the situation getting better very soon. Perhaps, the new overlords of Africa, the Chinese, will impose some order. I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the Boers and other European descendents in S.A. Hopefully, I am wrong about that.