It is history that will judge them — not by the events they attend or the awards they give out but by the systems they protect — or fail to dismantle, says the writer.
It should come as no surprise that the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and other South African NGOs have aligned themselves with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
This moment represents the culmination of decades of ideological compromise and a creeping dependency on foreign funding.
The outrage over the NED’s upcoming conference, scheduled for 20 to 22 November 2024 at The Sandton Convention Centre, is understandable. But it also arrives too late to reverse the damage.
The warning signs were always there, evident to those who were willing to look. Yet, civil society chose comfort, and its leaders dismissed or derided those who risked their personal security to challenge the slow decay.
The NED’s global track record has been extensively documented. Across continents, it has destabilised democracies, facilitated coups, and entrenched neoliberal agendas.
Operating under the pretence of democracy promotion, it has served as a vehicle for US imperialism. In South Africa, the playbook is all too familiar. The NED’s involvement here stretches back decades, its influence quietly spreading through partnerships with NGOs, think tanks, and the media.
The NED’s presence in South Africa began during apartheid, laying the groundwork for its ongoing influence. In 1987, the NED funded the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA), an organisation formed to promote dialogue between the apartheid regime and its critics. At first glance, IDASA appeared to be a progressive effort to transition the country toward democracy. In reality, its approach ensured that this transition remained favourable to Western interests. Framing democracy as a process that premised in free-market policies and global capitalist integration, IDASA subtly aligned the anti-apartheid movement with the neoliberal values that continue to dominate South Africa’s post-apartheid political economy.
This initial foothold allowed the NED to entrench itself into the deep DNA of South Africa’s civil society after 1994. The organisation shifted its focus to funding NGOs, think tanks, and academic projects, surreptitiously shaping the country’s democratic institutions in ways that ensured alignment with Western geopolitical goals. Decades later, this legacy persists, with the NED still operating through partnerships that steer public discourse and influence civil society agendas.
When the NED was founded in 1983 under the Reagan administration, its purpose was clear. Designed to take over many of the CIA’s covert operations, it adopted a public façade of supporting civil society while advancing American hegemony. In Nicaragua, the NED funded right-wing groups to destabilise the Sandinista government, culminating in an attempted coup in 2018. In Ukraine, its financing of over 65 organisations laid the groundwork for the Maidan protests in 2013, a key step toward NATO expansion and civil unrest.
South Africa’s inclusion in the NED’s web is no coincidence. With its mineral wealth, strategic position on the continent, and ties to BRICS, the country is a critical target for Western powers. Instead of through military aggression the NED has embedded itself here by co-opting civil society. Its money has bought influence in NGOs, think tanks, and media outlets, ensuring narratives favourable to the West dominate while local sovereignty is steadily eroded.
For years, activists have raised the alarm about the creeping influence of Western funding in South Africa, myself included. The backlash to these warnings was often fierce.
When I publicly criticised Daily Maverick, over a decade ago, for its alignment with Western intelligence interests, I was met with swift hostility. My critique was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, even though the evidence of foreign funding shaping its editorial narratives was undeniable.
Today, the same patterns continue, with platforms like Daily Maverick strategically reinforcing neoliberal agendas while side-lining dissenting voices.
This reluctance to engage with criticism has extended beyond the media. When our social justice advocacy group, Media for Justice, called out Western mining companies for gross mistreatment of both the environment and communities living in the ambit of mines, joining communities and filming their struggles for months on end, exposing their transgressions globally via video evidence, Eusebius Mckaiser famously dismissed it as “white madam township tourism.” Rather than address the legitimate concerns raised, critics reduced our self-funded activism to caricature, revealing a civil society more interested in protecting its reputation than addressing systemic issues.
I mention my personal run-ins with NED-affiliated entities because they illustrated to me, back then, the depth of this issue. The efforts of Media for Justice to highlight environmental and community abuses by Western mining companies were met with resistance and sneering dismissal. These types of responses revealed a civil society increasingly unwilling to address systemic issues, instead opting to protect its foreign funding scheme through soft politics and smearing the reputations of detractors.
Mark Heywood, a well-known figure in South African civil society, epitomises this ideological betrayal. As a self-styled activist and founder of Chapter 27, Heywood has built a reputation on fighting corruption and defending democracy.
Yet his willingness to collaborate with the NED reveals a perceptible hypocrisy. While he publicly decries the erosion of democratic values, his association with an organisation that has actively undermined democracies worldwide tells a different story. Heywood’s selective outrage — focused on left-leaning Black political corruption while turning a blind eye to systemic issues — mirrors the broader failures of South African civil society.
The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation’s participation in the NED conference is equally telling. Known for symbolic gestures, the foundation has prioritised media-friendly acts over substantive engagement.
It once awarded Chester Missing for his takedown of racist musician Steve Hofmeyr, a move that gained widespread praise but tackled racism on superficial terms. In contrast, my exposure of High Court Judge Mabel Jansen’s systemic racism — a case that highlighted structural inequality and deep racism within South Africa’s judiciary — was co-opted by them in a shallow display of performative activism.
They totally circumvented any mention of my long campaign calling for an investigation into her public utterances and trial biases. Later, I was excluded from their forums on racism, though I was well known for my anti-racism work, because I addressed it as a systemic and structural issue rather than a matter of individual prejudice and identity.
The Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation, another participant in the NED conference, similarly lends its moral credibility to an organisation whose track record is entirely at odds with the values it claims to uphold. Participating in the conference not only aligns the foundation with imperialist agendas but also erodes what many have seen as the hard-won legacies of Archbishop Tutu and his fight for justice and equality. (Many others though, speculate that Tutu was himself was part of the problem created by NED infiltration into the handover politics, including the failed Truth and Reconciliation project.)
This preference for post 94 performative activism has allowed foreign entities like the NED to thrive. Civil society’s fixation on individuals, rather than systems, has weakened its ability to resist ideological infiltration. The participation of these organisations in the NED conference isn’t an anomaly—it’s the natural outcome of years of ideological drift.
South Africa: A Strategic Target
The relentless attacks on the Independent Media Group must also be seen as part of this broader strategy. The group, which has consistently challenged dominant neoliberal narratives, has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to discredit and marginalise it. These attacks, funded and supported by the same networks tied to Western interests, aim to suppress dissenting voices and amplify those aligned with imperialist agendas.
Independent Media’s coverage of issues like BRICS cooperation, land reform, and the Western role in global inequality has made it a target. Yet, instead of supporting one of the few platforms willing to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, much of South Africa’s civil society has remained silent—or worse, complicit in its demonisation. Acknowledging this attack is vital for understanding the broader mechanisms of NED-style influence.
South Africa’s political and economic significance makes it a prime target for NED operations. With BRICS gaining influence and South Africa asserting itself on the global stage, Western powers are eager to reassert control. The NED’s conference, held under the Orwellian banner of “Revitalising Democracy,” is part of this effort. It is not about strengthening democracy but about creating the conditions for intervention — political, economic, or otherwise — should South Africa stray too far from the neoliberal order.
Civil society’s complicity in this process is more than concerning. Through avariciously aligning themselves with the NED, organisations like the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation, and Defend Our Democracy are paving the way for foreign manipulation. Their selective focus on corruption within leftist movements, while ignoring conservative liberal authoritarianism and structural inequality, serves imperialist interests far more effectively than they might admit.
NED funding and its affiliated networks have not only infiltrated civil society and media but also extended their influence to the arts, shaping narratives that align with neoliberal and imperialist agendas.
Filmmaker Rehad Desai, a notable beneficiary of funding linked to these networks, has used works like Miners Shot Down and Everything Must Fall to present skewed accounts of South Africa's contemporary political history.
While these films purport to champion the struggles of the oppressed, they conspicuously shield white capital and South African elites, placing blame narrowly on government factions while leaving corporate complicity and systemic neoliberal exploitation untouched. Even more obnoxious is Desai’s exclusion of Black African perspectives, particularly those of Black women, from his storytelling. This deliberate omission reinforces entrenched hierarchies and reduces the richness of grassroots struggles to one-dimensional narratives crafted for global consumption. His wilful prioritising of the optics of activism over substantive engagement with the oppressed puts profits and Western palatability above authentic representation, further entrenching the very systems it claims to critique.
The outrage over the NED’s conference, while welcome, must go further. Civil society has to confront its own role in enabling foreign influence. This means rejecting the shallow, performative activism that has allowed imperialist forces to flourish and rebuilding movements grounded in genuine accountability and independence.
Organisations like the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation, Defend our Democracy, Rivonia Circle and Mark Heywood, amongst others, won't ask themselves the hard questions about their complicity.
They are no longer concerned about honouring the legacies of those who fought for liberation, or the reality that they are betraying them. However, it is history that will judge them — not by the events they attend or the awards they give out but by the systems they protect — or fail to dismantle.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.