‘Unless the DA wishes to court middle-class black voters only, its confident foray into identity politics might backfire’
THE news about Lindiwe Mazibuko’s election as Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary leader had hardly been announced when inveterate blogger Anton Barnard published his acidic take on it under the title, The DA’s token black. Not only did he coin a new term for a token black in Afrikaans, a fopswarte or "faux black", but he astutely concluded that "the DA had committed the most blatant act of identity politics".
Dene Smuts and other diehard colour- blind liberals in the DA were right to oppose the appointment of the young Swazi-born "iron lady", as an effusive Beeld dubbed her. For by embracing identity politics, the DA is abandoning its classical liberal stance that SA represents a mere collection of individuals whose ethnic affiliations are the products of happenstance and as inconsequential as the colour of a person’s shirt.
The immediate question is: does this matter? Clearly, DA leader Helen Zille does not think so. Perhaps the electorate no longer cares for ideology and votes for brands. The DA has been building a strong brand as an alternative to the increasingly radical and precisely ethnic African National Congress (ANC) with its dancing Zulu president and firebrand youth leader embroiled in controversies about "Shoot the Boer" songs.
The DA has been a hodgepodge of old Nats and Progs, even former Conservative Party members, with the former Pan Africanist Congress mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, spicing up the mixed grill. Mazibuko’s left-wing noises about land reform and support for the ANC’s Freedom Charter have dragged the party with its few million middle- class supporters further to the left. I suppose one could argue that SA is undergoing a major lurch to the left, with Julius Malema calling himself a Marxist-Leninist and vociferously championing nationalisation of land and mines. Is the DA simply following a trend being set by Malema?
But muddled or eclectic thinking in politics never gets one very far, as the graveyard of southern African "pragmatists" attests. Is Mazibuko the new Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a seemingly moderate black ally that should divide the majority-black electorate, thereby catapulting Zille into Mahlamba Ndlopfu? For those who do not know, that is the name of the presidential residence in Pretoria, designed by Afrikaner architect Gerrit Moerdyk and formerly known as Libertas.
Not only did the National Party (NP) of the 1970s not have much success, despite its alliance with Buthelezi and other homeland leaders, but FW de Klerk’s equally "strategic" transformation of the NP into a "melting-pot party" swiftly led to its demise and absorption into the much smaller but staunchly liberal Democratic Party under Tony Leon. In a similar vein, one still remembers the assurances given by stolid SABC commentators in 1980 that Ian Smith would win a landslide against Robert Mugabe, thanks to his moderate black ally, Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
Mazibuko is seemingly popular with whites because she speaks English with a more or less "white" accent. She could be a kind of female Barack Obama. However, unless the DA wishes to court the middle- class black voter only and not the township dwellers, its confident foray into identity politics might backfire badly. Apparently Mazibuko does not speak an African language. How will that affect her appeal towards Zulus, SA’s largest ethnic group?
Volumes have been written about the importance of being black in SA. The question must be asked, however: is Mazibuko black enough, in that sense? Her popularity with the ageing white liberals in the DA caucus may yet turn out to be her kiss of death. Already a chorus of young black radicals in the ANC or ANC Youth League are labelling her a "sell-out" and a traitor to the black cause. Will the shot of blackness she adds to the DA's cocktail compare with the heady brew of black nationalism already served by Malema and his party that made black economic empowerment a ubiquitous business and social shibboleth?
The DA will also be walking a tightrope in pandering to the interests of the ANC voters it wants to win over. Its core constituency still consists of whites and coloureds. An equally high percentage of Afrikaners voted for Zille as blacks voted for Obama, in the order of 80% or 90%. In embracing identity politics and applying affirmative action in her own party, Zille is betting the bank on the loyalty of her followers.
Even if the Freedom Front remains the Cinderella of Parliament with its four MPs, Afrikaner intellectuals will find solace in the demise of both communism and liberalism in SA. For most of the 20th century, they were ridiculed for asserting that ours was a multi- ethnic state in which identity politics would always predominate. The DA, like the Communist Party before it, has just admitted that the siren song of race and identity far outweighs the appeal of ideology.
