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Really? Just how many South Africans do you know? On my latest trip to South Africa, I listened to a national news broadcast in which a leader of the Zulu tribe proclaimed that, upon Mandela’s death, the Zulus would engage in the same type of cleansing that has been underway in Zimbabwe for years. Do a search for “violence against whites in South Africa”.

I’ve done a number of training missions to Africa, including South Africa before and after the transfer of power to the ANC. Among black Africans, tribal affiliation always has and always will trump all other loyalties and affiliations. There are significant physical differences between people of different tribes. Some whites can tell the difference as can virtually all black Africans. Members of the predominant tribes in South Africa - particularly the Zulus and Xhosa, treat whites and members of other tribes with equal disdain - whether they’re native to South Africa or not and violence against black immigrants from other parts of Africa is actually quite commonplace.

This tendency applies especially to immigrants from other parts of Africa, as I witnessed in the Alexandria area of Johannesburg (a huge ghetto of makeshift “houses” with about one water spigot per block), which, as of 2008, had the largest population of immigrants from other parts of Africa. Students from Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Chad have told me that they were treated far better by white South Africans than by the Zulu and Xhosa.

Americans did not understand Nelson Mandela and still don’t understand the dynamics of African culture and politics. As one of my Zimbabwean students (who was also a friend) told me some time ago, “Zimbabwe cannot afford to cut off relations with South Africa (which was still under apartheid at the time). South Africa is our single largest trading partner. The ANC poses a much greater threat to Zimbabwe’s national security than South Africa. Don’t Americans understand that Nelson Mandela is a communist?”