The Big Read: Nelson Mandela's signal achievement was to enact a substantive civil religion based on the idea of racial reconciliation. The idea of the rainbow nation continues to be the dominant generative metaphor of democratic South Africa.

But the miracle is sometimes a mirage - it looks great from a distance but, close up, the shine is replaced by appalling poverty, inequality and racism.

Thabo Mbeki came on to the political stage as part of a second cycle of leadership that sought to shift the national discourse by placing the issue of racial transformation at the centre of the national agenda.

As if to deliberately shake the comfortable assumptions of racial reconciliation of the Mandela era, Mbeki increasingly spoke of the continued threats posed by racism to South Africa's democracy. He argued that "despite our collective intentions, racism continues to be our bedfellow". Mbeki's radical talk came as a shock to many white South Africans.

In the period leading up to our democracy he was the darling of the white media and the white business community. He was feted by leading white politicians and business people as the polished, urbane, suave, pipe-smoking, grey-haired intellectual - an embodiment of modern sophistication, different from all the other blacks.

But the very people who feted him turned against him because of his radical talk of transformation.

As soon as he felt the sense of rejection and resistance, Mbeki increasingly called on black intellectuals to rally to his support.

"Where are the black intellectuals," he asked plaintively.

But his troubles with white South Africans coincided with some of his controversial positions on HIV/Aids, Zimbabwe, and economic policy that black intellectuals found disagreeable, at a time when he needed their support.

Though they sympathised with the broader transformative agenda he had put on the table, black intellectuals could not go along with him on the policy stances he had adopted.

Mbeki got angry with this group, too. He described the black intellectual class as a confused group standing midway between the white ruling class and the black majority population.

Abandoned by his erstwhile white backers as well as by black intellectuals, Mbeki turned to the party machinery for support. He consolidated power around him by centralising decision-making in the presidency of the ANC. The president became the boss, or "the chief", as he is euphemistically called in the ANC.

But it was Mbeki's reaction to the rejection by whites and the criticism by black intellectuals that derailed him.

Jacob Zuma's political ascendancy - after a brief interlude with Kgalema Motlanthe as president - was historical in that he became the mobilising symbol against a style of government that was exclusionary and intolerant.

It is indeed in the nature of political movements in democratic societies to reproduce the outsider-insider dynamic that they were themselves protesting against. The former outsiders become insiders, and a new set of outsiders is established. This is how the dynamic of democracy is continually created and reproduced.

Suddenly, Zuma the anti-establishment hero has become Zuma the establishment. The question now is whether Julius Malema and his cohorts have become the "constitutive outside".

On being reprimanded by Zuma, Malema said that, in politics, there are no permanent friends. The drama of our current politics is that Zuma's strongest backers are now competing in the space of the constitutive outside. The daggers are drawn not only at each other but also at the establishment.

Though this is par for the course in democratic societies, the manner of the competition has serious implications for political authority.

I suspect that above everything else this is what led Zuma to finally speak out against Malema. Malema's visits to meet people such as Robert Mugabe and Venezuela President Hugo Chavez have the potential to undermine Zuma not only as president of the party but as head of state.

One thing that we know from the experience of post-colonial societies is that social and economic inequality ultimately leads to political instability, and political authority ultimately has to be maintained through violence.

Problems of unemployment, hunger, inequality, crime and sickness, and hopelessness will most likely persist. Add to that the multiple layers of identity-based differences - tribe, ethnicity, race, xenophobia - and you have the makings of a dangerous cocktail.

I argue that lasting solutions to these problems are not to be found in individual leaders. The challenge is to strengthen our formal institutions of governance and also build new integrative social institutions.

In the absence of such institutions, people such as Malema, or whoever comes after him, will fill the void, as has happened in so many other post-colonial societies.

ýThis is an extract from Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times: From Mandela to Malema, the first of two public lectures delivered last night by Dr Mangcu at the University of Johannesburg. The second will be tonight