On the establishment Right (with some honorable exceptions) apartheid was deemed unimportant in the context of the Cold War. Conservatives found it easy to condemn Mandela as a terrorist and a communist, while minimizing or ignoring the violence perpetrated by the South African regime against blacks (and other nonwhites). The implication was that apartheid wasn’t really so bad and that the militancy of its opponents was unreasonable. South Africa, after all, was a U.S. ally against the Soviet Union and a member of the “free world” — a shocking notion when one considers the appalling lack of freedom there. This complacency had its parallel in the attitude of many conservatives toward government-enforced racial segregation in the American South.

Apartheid South Africa, of course, brutalized, humiliated, and stifled individuals merely because of their race. Had blacks been oppressing whites, voices on the Right would have howled without end. Apartheid should have sickened and infuriated anyone who believed in the dignity of the individual and the freedom each person deserves by virtue of his or her humanity. But even at this late date, praising Mandela — for embracing racial reconciliation and averting civil war, for rejecting dictatorship and the cult of personality — can evoke vicious reactions from the Right, as Newt Gingrich learned. (Of course this is not to say that Mandela was a saint. “That’s not the job I applied for,” he once told John Pilger.)

But the establishment Left also leaves out a big piece of the story: the precise nature of apartheid. Progressives portray apartheid as the systemic violation of blacks’ civil rights, including the freedom to move about freely without an internal passport. True enough. But what progressives and mislabeled liberals don’t understand — or don’t want to admit — is that apartheid was a legislative prohibition of the free exercise of choice in a marketplace unfettered by government-bestowed privilege. Indeed, one cannot conceive of apartheid without official interference with markets. The opposite of apartheid is laissez-faire.

Apartheid did not merely consist in the state’s denial of the right of blacks (and whites!) to trade goods and services — including labor — with whomever they wished. The system wasinstigated by white labor unions precisely to keep blacks from competing.

This was clearly spelled out in 1964 in The Economics of the Colour Bar by University of Cape Town economist W.H. Hutt (1899–1988), a self-described classical liberal (libertarian), a leading opponent of apartheid, and a prominent critic of Keynesian economics.

While formal apartheid got started in 1948, Hutt wrote, legislation protecting white workers from competition goes as far back as 1907. In the second decade of the 20th century, the government effectively prevented black workers from competing with whites by forbidding blacks from offering to work for less than the wages artificially inflated by restrictive legislation. So-called “standard rate “ (or “equal pay for equal work”) legislation may sound humanitarian, but by intention and in practice it facilitated racism by preventing a group disadvantaged by bigotry from offering more attractive terms to employers. Apartheid made racism costless and so encouraged it.

That such restrictions were enshrined in legislation indicated that white employers would otherwise have hired black workers, enabling blacks to advance and prosper. As Hutt wrote,

The lesson of history, explained by classical economic analysis, is that disinterested market pressures, under the profit-seeking inducement, provide the only objective, systematic discipline that would dissolve traditional barriers and offer opportunities irrespective of race or colour.

In the decades following World War II, legislative decrees formalized racial bigotry by “accord[ing] dictatorial powers over the use of African labour.” These powers included control even over where blacks could live and work, and what kind of work they could do.

This horror ended in the early 1990s, with credit due to Mandela. But he and his movement were not nearly radical enough, because although they eliminated apartheid, they left in place a government powerful enough to control the economic system to the detriment of working people. The market still needs to be freed.

I remember that the Mandela administration was a pleasant surprise to those of us who were expecting something more authoritarian-collectivist. As an individualist at heart I had had before then only peripheral contact with apartheid-era political dissent, enough to share the disgust with the Nationalist state but also enough to be deeply concerned about a Stalinist strand that ran through the then underground alternative — an attitude incapable of conceptual distinction between individualism and capitalist colonialism. Of course we had been fed ghost-stories about the Red Peril which had largely succeeded the Black Peril as universal bugbear, so that we should submit to totalitarianism lest we end up under the yoke of totalitarianism. That never made any sense to me: The absurdity of apartheid was to me that the Communists could take over and nobody would be able to tell the difference. But just as the Nats failed to convince me that they were any better than the ANC; so the ANC failed to convince me that they were any better than the Nats.

There is much I am glad to have escaped, but the settlement of ’94 left much to be desired. The failure to do anything about the South African Reserve Bank as a corporation answerable only to its shareholders allowed policy decisions to be dictated by expectations of “investor sentiment,” and the concomitant myth of “foreign investment” as the sine qua non of national prosperity. Hence the gradual dilution of the (basically Keynesian) Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) until it was replaced by the trickledown-heavy neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan (GEAR) under Thabo Mbeki. The result is that South Africa remains a deeply unequal society, and one still tragically overshadowed by race. The shared spaces have not been created: Khayelitsha is still not somewhere to go for a Saturday afternoon coffee for anyone of any race.

It is not as it should be. But we are rid of something that had plagued South Africa for half a century, though I fear that the respite may be brief. The character of the Mandela years was one of a wide-reaching opening-up, a great inrush of fresh air. Military conscription, the death penalty, and official censorship were abolished. Efforts were made to demilitarize the police, with a civilized rank structure with inspectors and superintendents instead of the banana-republic colonels and generals that had gone before. Unorthodox lifestyles were actively protected, and unorthodox thinking actively encouraged. Even things like liquor laws and trading hours were loosened up: no longer would pharmacies need elaborate internal partitions because they were allowed to sell aspirin on Sundays but not shampoo. And this brought a new culture: No longer would the detail mundanities of life be considered the province of the state.

This was still not enough to awaken a true civil-liberties sensibility in the South African population. For years a white constituency was happy to condone oppression as long as it was aimed at the Other, and so issues like due process were seen as favouring the Other over itself. Now the Other would be recast for a multi-racial audience as the Criminal Peril. Random road-blocks continued without comment, and house-to-house searches remained part of the normal police routine following major violent crimes. The culture that produced mass demonstrations against apartheid’s pass system meekly accepted its doors being kicked in if it was done in pursuit of a murderer, as meekly as whites had previously accepted their doors being kicked in if it was done in pursuit of a Communist.

In subsequent years the growth of immediate everyday liberty that had blossomed during Mandela’s presidency began to wither. The ANC’s place-renaming programme went far beyond correcting the Nats’ previous place-renaming programme (the Nats had the gall to call the airport at George “P. W. Botha Airport” not only while Botha was still alive but while he was actually president) and in so doing ended up perpetuating the disease, instead of recognizing popular descriptive names already in use. The same attitude is what is bugging me now: Every TV station including the non-government one is broadcasting all-day Mandelathons, and have shifted every surviving regular programme to a slot other than its usual one. It is as if every effort is made to prevent me from not noticing, or not caring. I don’t like it.

In February 2010 Chumani Maxwele was arrested for giving Jacob Zuma’s motorcade the finger. Zuma had taken to flaunting his police-escorted motorcade, deliberately forcing a path to be cleared through the heaviest rush-hour traffic every morning and every afternoon, apparently in an attempt to play to that element which admires the African Big Man. His patriarchal polygamy is an affront to every ordinary man who is consequently a wife short, and to every ordinary woman who has loved an ordinary man. Zuma has actively cultivated a constituency to whom politics is a sport and voters are fans, who vote for the ANC because it is the election-winning machine and the best party ever, just a pity about their policies. The booing that met him at today’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela makes me think that Zuma has severely underestimated the South African population.

The death of Andries Tatane in April 2011 confirmed what many were beginning to fear. The police had reverted to a military rank structure and a military culture by the time of the Marikana massacre.

Still, Chumani Maxwele was able to sue the police successfully, and the blue-light motorcades were subsequently abolished. Still, Zuma had to drop his defamation suit against cartoonist Zapiro over his “Rape of Lady Justice” cartoon. Still, interracial marriages are so common in my neighbourhood as to be completely unremarkable. Still, having a drink on the sidewalk with the Congolese and Moçambicans in Long Street does not make one a danger to the state.

There is as much cause for dissent as there had been before Mandela, and at last there are new movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, whose issues are economic rather than racial and whose culture is not that of Marx and Lenin but that of Occupy and Anonymous. This gives me enormous hope.

In the meantime I shall go back to not marking the passing of Nelson Mandela, however fond I might have been of him.