Anthony Holiday
It needs no sage to see that, while the letter of parliamentary democracy in South Africa remains perilously intact, the spirit of that institution is already ailing.
The symptoms of the disease are manifest, not only in the frictive partisanship which has infected the functioning of the parliamentary portfolio and oversight committees or in the unseemly public spats in which the Speaker of the National Assembly, Frene Ginwala, has allowed herself to become embroiled. They are evident also in the breakdown of that sense of collegiality between government and opposition MPs, which must survive the hurly-burly of adversariality if debate in what is supposed to be the nation’s highest forum is to remain above the level of a slanging match.
The latter phenomena was brought home sharply to me recently when copies of an exchange of letters between two very senior figures one from the government, the other from the opposition benches came to my hands. The subject of the exchange was what the African National Congress representative had construed as an illicit attack on the sacred personage of President Thabo Mbeki.
But it was not the topic of the letters which struck me so much as their tone, their use of phrases like “hatchet man” and words like “vile”. They were not letters written to one another by colleagues who happened to disagree, but verbal broadsides fired by enemies. An outside observer could have been forgiven for thinking that these two personages had come to hate each other.
How have things come to such a pass? Why do the corridors and debating chambers of our Parliament exude the atmosphere of a run-down sideshow? Where is the sense of common purpose and of a profound connection with the nation’s political life which Ginwala professed herself so anxious to establish?
No doubt a variety of sensible responses could be made to these questions. But the reason which seems to me most fundamental is that the two main groupings confronting one another in the assembly are not two parliamentary parties, which happen to have different policies, but two alien political forces, each of which employs an entirely different set of fundamental concepts in order to understand the world and its own place in it. The Democratic Alliance and the ANC share the same physical space in the National Assembly, but they inhabit philosophical spaces which are pretty well alien to one another.
This has not come about simply because the two organisations have had very different histories, although that has certainly had a great deal to do with it. Rather, what happened was that during the course of their histories they imbibed sharply divergent conceptions of what history was, which inevitably affected their views on what politics was and how it ought to be conducted.
In the ANC’s case, a crucial phase in its ideological metamorphosis came during the period of its illegality between 1960 and 1990, when its bonds with its present alliance partner, the South African Communist Party, grew especially intimate.
The SACP exercised the influence it did, not because it was especially active in proselytising non-communist members of the ANC, but because its leading members brought their own particular world-picture to bear on the debates about strategy and tactics which preoccupied the ANC leadership during those troubled decades. This is how the ANC came to adopt the doctrine that apartheid was really an epiphenomenon of something called “colonialism of a special type” a form of colonialism in which the colonisers had no external metropolitan base and no home other than the country they had colonised.
This theory, in its turn, spawned something called the “two-stage theory”, according to which the “national democratic revolution” would be followed indeed it would necessitate a socialist revolution in which South Africa’s supposedly vast mineral and agricultural wealth could at last be justly shared.
Now there are two important features about this Marxian way of looking at history and poli-tics. Firstly, it assumes that political history can, in fact, be explained in terms of internally connected stages with something approaching the precision of a natural science. Secondly, it is organicist. It sees historical events and historical actors as being organically connected, much like the elements of a biological ecosystem.
This is why the ANC and its alliance partners are currently spending so much time in bipartisan talks trying to agree on what “stage” the South African revolution is at. It is also why the ANC still insists on describing itself as a “movement” rather than an ordinary political party, because to do otherwise would be to deny its organic connection with and leading role within a vast and purposeful historical process.
The DA’s perspective is entirely different. In so far as it can be said to have philosophical antecedents at all, these probably lie in the pre-Marxian, indeed pre-Hegelian, reaches of Kantian individualism and constitutional liberalism. Its leading figures men like Tony Leon and Doug Gibson are not visionaries or philosophers and would be embarrassed by being thus described. They are career politicians, pursuing practical and limited ends, not agents of a profound historical movement.
This is not the place to pronounce on the merits and demerits of these two alien conceptual schemes. What is clear is that they cannot continue to coexist into perpetuity. If South Africa is to grow as a constitutional democracy, somehow and sometime soon there will have to be conceptual adaptations.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris