It seems to me that this is an attempt to dress a disagreement between an idealist and a pragmatist in the clothing of left hypocrisy vrs. right hypocrisy. Would Worms disagree with the following observation of Zizek? "In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence, and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite." Yes, Zizek's article (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/mandelas-soc...) strikes me as too harsh -- but not without its grain of truth. Perhaps the common ground between the idealistic and pragmatic view could be this: that Mandela's pragmatism was/is a NECESSARY step in the journey toward a Zizekian idealism -- with both sides prone to over-reaction, and both sides with a role to play going forward.
zizek has been selling this same article around the world and it appeared in the Guardian, UK paper too. I have no time Zizek with his lofty theories while doing nothing to implement them or to inspiring others to do the same - and it's particularly vulgar to write this piece at this time. His theoretical models might be entertaining at parties, but have little grounding in political struggle.
He's been criticized before for having no real belief system or moral compass or indeed conviction and this article is testimony to that criticism. To address the points in his article, first of all it's quite wrong from the Left to claim him as a hero of theirs who fell short; his goal was emancipate black people from being legally 2nd class citizens and he did so with out the bloodbath that he could easily have brought forth on his release from incarceration. He grew wise and matured enough to compromise the original Freedom Charter - authored some 40 years earlier, in order to secure a peaceful equality for black indigenous Africans. That he did not transform water into wine, part the oceans, or shoot fire from his finger tips of little concern for those millions for whom he won basic human rights.
Curt and coffeesp00ns both make important points. No text can capture the complexity of a man who was both brilliant and very long-lived, and I did not presume to try. Rather, I tried to point out that projecting one's hopes onto even the most exalted of heroes is not always appropriate - especially when said hero is too dead to do anything about it anymore. Curt, I am not, however, ready to agree with Zizek on even the one point you quote. I travel in Africa a lot these days, and always to place much poorer than South Africa. The black friends I speak to there who have worked and lived in South Africa do not highlight the wealth inequalities they found there: these are nothing unusual in Africa. Rather, what strikes them is an undercurrent of hard, sharp-edged ethnic exclusivism which, they tell me, is prevalent across all ethnic groups. It is an unpleasant place to be a black foreigner, South Africa, even a middle class one. That is a legacy of apartheid, not of a lack of socialism. It does put into clear context exactly how amazing it was that De Klerck and Mandela managed to convince their respective constituencies to buy the deal they worked out.
It's not my intent to canonize Zizek -- only to observe that he has a legitimate point -- and one that thoughtful people in South Africa make themselves. Haroon Bhorat (U. of Cape Town) writes "Using the national poverty line of $43 per month (in current prices), 47 percent of South Africans remain poor. In 1994, this figure was 45.6 percent. More jarring, the country’s unemployment rate is 25.4 percent, while the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, is at 0.69, marking the country as one of the most unequal in the world." The Gini coefficient is, I suspect, the primary source of the Zizek I quoted. The fact that there are countries in Africa that are poorer in per capita GDP terms, and/or have a higher Gini index, doesn't seem to me to negate Zizek's grain of truth. The struggle for equity in South Africa is, to paraphrase an old S.A. veteran, not at the end, or even the beginning of the end -- but perhaps is at the end of the beginning.