ABSTRACT
This chapter raises for consideration the immediate aftermath of the two instances of democratic political tragedy covered in Chapters 4 and 5. The subjects of concern are, each briefly, the Percival James Patterson regime that comes immediately after Manley in Jamaica and the Thabo Mbeki regime that follows Mandela in South Africa. Both cases are symbolic as well as concrete representations of the momentary triumph of the neoliberal designs they entail over the popular democratic aspirations of the political moments that immediately preceded them. We encounter in both cases, in the immediate aftermath of the tragic failure of progressive politics, political leaders whose devotion to the tenets of neoliberal development as a way out of the economic malaise take on pseudo religious attributes. The chapter will theorize via these developments the extension of the tragic element in democratic political tragedy beyond the formal structure of conflict and into the content of everyday existence in the postcolony.
