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.