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Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila are given a tour of the archives of the Nelson Mandela Foundation by Sello Hatang in Johannesburg on Dec. 7, 2015.

Brian Mulroney arrived in South Africa eager to talk about his friendship with Nelson Mandela, the country's liberation hero. He found instead a country of strangely shifting sands, where even the legacy of Mr. Mandela is coming under attack.

The former Canadian prime minister visited South Africa this week to receive one of its highest awards, in recognition of his push for sanctions against the apartheid regime and his campaign to get Mr. Mandela released from prison.

Soon after finally winning his freedom from 27 years of imprisonment, Mr. Mandela received a joyous welcome in the Canadian Parliament in 1990. Those were simpler days, when the heroes and villains were clear.

But today is a murkier and muddier time, and politicians are looking for scapegoats for South Africa's economic stagnation and growing inequality. And even the heroes of yesterday are coming under assault.

On Monday, when Mr. Mulroney toured the Mandela archives in Johannesburg, the director of the archives explained to him Mr. Mandela is now the subject of a raging national controversy.

By Wednesday, at an event in Pretoria, the former prime minister was on the counter-offensive, criticizing those who "trivialize" Mr. Mandela's legacy. South Africans are not "celebrating and promoting" the achievements of Mr. Mandela as they should be doing, Mr. Mulroney said at the event.

The attack on Nelson Mandela has been led by a left-wing firebrand, Julius Malema, who heads the third-biggest political party in South Africa's parliament. In a speech last month, he alleged that the Mandela who walked out of prison in 1990 was "tired and old" and made too many compromises in his negotiations with the apartheid regime. He accused Mr. Mandela and his political allies of "selling out" the "revolution."

It is a tempting version of history, resonating deeply with many of the angry and restless young people who remain marginalized in South Africa, where unemployment and inequality are still far too high.

But it is also an ideological argument, implying that South Africa could have been saved by the socialist ideas of nationalization and enforced redistribution of wealth. Those were the policies of Mr. Mandela's political movement, the African National Congress, in its years in exile, when it was allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Most economic analysts say the socialism of the Soviet era could never have succeeded in the globalized economy of the 1990s, and that is why Mr. Mandela ditched those ideas when he came to power in 1994.

The attacks on Mr. Mandela exploded just before Mr. Mulroney arrived in the country this week, around the second anniversary of Mr. Mandela's death, and they caught him by surprise. He was outraged by the political sniping at his friend, and he sprang to his defence. "Mandela achieved the impossible for South Africa," he said in an interview.

"To even think, in the back of your mind for a second, that Nelson Mandela and his legacy will not be revered in history, 500 years from now, is to have no knowledge whatsoever of human nature or elementary politics. It was a tremendous legacy of leadership, and you'd have to verge on lunacy to think otherwise."

But for fiery populists such as Mr. Malema, seeking to appeal to South Africa's frustrated and marginalized voters, the villain is "white capital." The theory is that Mr. Mandela failed to grab economic power from the white capitalists, allowing injustice and inequality to persist. This anger at the country's wealthiest citizens, still largely white, has helped fuel racial tensions.

Mr. Mandela had always emphasized the "non-racial" character of his ANC movement. His friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously described South Africa as a "rainbow nation." But with economic frustrations mounting, Mr. Mandela's views have lost support, and the rainbow nation is being exposed as a myth. South Africa is increasingly divided on racial lines, with mistrust growing and black people complaining that racism persists.

A new survey by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, a South African think-tank, found disturbing evidence of the widening rift between blacks and whites. According to the survey of more than 2,200 South Africans this year, 49 per cent say race is a key source of social division – up from 37 per cent just two years ago.

More than 60 per cent say racial relations have worsened or stayed the same since apartheid ended in 1994, and two-thirds say they have "little or no trust" in people of a different race.

In a fragmented country like South Africa, racial tensions are always likely to increase when an economy slumps, when a growing population is fighting for a slice of a limited resource. With economic stagnation becoming deeper, unemployment stubbornly stuck at an official rate of 25 per cent and more than 50 per cent of the youngest job-seekers unable to find work, South Africans are increasingly likely to blame another racial group. The result is a volatile tinderbox of a society.

Steven Friedman, a South African scholar and political analyst, believes the compromises Mr. Mandela made in his negotiations with the white-minority regime were justifiable. "The apartheid government's military could have held out for decades," he wrote recently. "The choices were a compromise, or continued war and pain without any assurance of the system's defeat."

But while Mr. Mandela made courageous and visionary decisions in those negotiations, it is his party's later performance in government that has come under fire. "The problem is not the compromise of 1994, but what has been left undone," Mr. Friedman said. "White supremacy was not defeated in 1994. The biggest obstacle to economic growth remains the inequality and poverty created by the past."

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