Monday 22nd September. Cape Town.

It’s been an interesting weekend, politically speaking, in South Africa. I had been away travelling for a week and came back on Saturday to find out that the President of South Africa - Thabo Mbeki - had been deposed. He had been ‘asked’ by the ANC to resign. He did. He gave a speech last night on national TV explaining that he was a loyal member of the ANC and was following the party's wishes. For once, he gave a speech that seemed to be written for the average person in South Africa, not too intellectual or distanced. Something he should have done a long time ago.

Today, the ANC President and political rival, Jacob Zuma, held a press conference to say how the interim president of the republic would be elected and when (by Parliament, this week). And when he spoke to the journalists, he said "it’s your job to teach South Africans about democracy. That’s the media's responsibility."

That is something that has become even more clear recently - that South Africans need to be taught what democracy is. In 1994 South Africa became a democratic nation for the first time in our history. And things went quite well for a while. Then politics became dirtier, and corruption from a huge arms deal started surfacing. This is part of the fallout from that - with Zuma being charged for corruption by the National Prosecuting Authority - and then having the trial temporarily thrown out of court by a judge who reckoned that the charges against Zuma were politically motivated - by Mbeki.

In a democracy leaders come and go. And that is healthy. Especially in Africa where many leaders hang on to their power as long as they can (Mugabe ...). What will be very good for the country is getting rid of some of the Cabinet ministers who have been running disastrous policies in Mbeki's government - such as the MInister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, whose stance on HIV and AIDS has been an absolute disaster for the country.

But there is a lot of uncertainty about the process. And with recent violent xenophobic attacks against foreign Africans living in South Africa, there is a lot of anger and hate under the surface which was taken out on some of the almost 4 million foreigners from Africa, the majority having fled the Zimbabwe meltdown. That was not democratic, and resulted partly from the high levels of poverty and struggle for resources.

The Steps documentary film project Why Democracy? was made to challenge the practise and understanding of democracy around the world. We are currently making a five-language DVD edition for educational distribution across Africa. Documentary film is a powerful tool to help understand and debate different issues, and this collection is a valuable resource for that. Democracy is part of the syllabus for the final years of high school in South Africa, and we are negotiating to make the films available in every school in the country. There is a lot to learn.

Photo from www.kwintessential.co.uk