(Un)Mourning Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has died. And, in the age of Twitter and Facebook, reaction to her death, and remembrances of her life, will not wait for the carefully-curated obituaries to run in the newspapers and television. They are coming fast and furious – and often from people too young to actually remember the Thatcher years. Thus, many of the Twitter and Facebook mourners are regurgitating the rather more quickly curated obituaries running on websites (many of the selfsame television stations and newspapers which will run the longer versions). These tend to concentrate on Mrs. Thatcher’s role in transforming Britain’s from a sclerotic to a dynamic  economy in the 1980s. They’re also looking, appropriately for April, at Thatcher the Warrior Queen who vanquished the Argentinians in the war over the Falklands that started in April 1982.

Thatcher should be given her due. She was steadfast in her beliefs and principles, and stood by their implementation as policy, sometimes in the face of incoming fire from her side of the political divide. While some claim that the Falklands War was unnecessary, there’s widespread agreement that the Argentine defeat helped to speed up the fall of the genocidal military junta there. Thatcherite economic policies were gospel for most of the 1990s until the correction of 2008.

However, the one policy and belief that Thatcher held dearly is now a point of contest. In the mid-1980s, when the world was agitating for the complete isolation of the apartheid government in South Africa, Margaret Thatcher and her comrade-in-arms, President Ronald Reagan, were firmly on the side of the regime, both in word and deed. While revisionist history has attempted to finesse their position as being one that wanted an orderly transition in South Africa, any observer of that era remembers the truly epic battles in support of sanctions being enforced on Pretoria. Thatcher and Reagan were on the other side of those battles.

What is in contention now is whether our remembrances of Margaret Thatcher should include her firm belief that even if apartheid was to be dismantled, power should not be handed over to the ‘terrorist’ ANC. This is despite the fact that the ANC (with Nelson Mandela as its leader) was the only political institution acceptable to South Africa’s majority. Yes, there were other power centres, including the Allan Boesak-led United Democratic Front, as well as the moral crusade led by the Bishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu. Yet these were merely placeholders until the unbanning of the ANC, and they recognised and stated as much.

Thatcher, though, maintained that those who believed that the ANC would one day lead South Africa lived in ‘cloud-cuckoo land’. (In other words, they needed their heads examined). She held such an antipathy to the ANC, and to Nelson Mandela, that it took an Indian threat to break up the Commonwealth for her to even accept limited sanctions against South Africa. And this was a time when the Pretoria regime was distasteful to the whole world, as the Great Crocodile, PW Botha, dug in, and a state of emergency was declared when the townships became ungovernable.

Another debit against the great ledger Mrs. Thatcher takes with her to the Great Beyond is her deep friendship with President Moi, at the time of his greatest oppression. Scores had been detained and  tortured at the height of the Mwakenya troubles in 1986. University lecturers and opposition activities had gone underground and into exile in droves. Yet Margaret Thatcher landed in Kenya in January 1988 to aver her bond with Moi. Phrases such as ‘we admire…your country’s peace and stability’ and  ‘your (Moi’s) contribution to Kenya’s success has been remarkable’ can be dismissed as mere boilerplate, but they helped to buttress a repressive regime when a well-placed word could have led to a thawing of the frozen Kenyan political culture.

So, how should Margaret Thatcher be remembered  and mourned? Did her sad years of dementia (memorably dramatized by the award-winning Meryl Streep) make up for being on the wrong side of African history? Did she pay her historical debt to us?

(Also published in the East African, April 13-19, 2013)