The Mark Gevisser Profile:
Inkatha Freedom Party MP Farouk Cassim
Farouk Cassim has literary aspirations for himself and his hometown. We sit in his bougainvillea-clad and rambling flat above his father-in-law’s dry-cleaning business on Stanger’s main road. The muezzin from the mosque next door blares, intermittently, as we eat the exquisite bread he bakes each Saturday, and he claims for Rood Street the destiny of James Joyce’s Dublin: “I could write a novel the size of Ulysses about this road. All the points of my life are here — my bookshop, my home, my family’s business, Zulu politics (I sleep not 50 metres from the tree under which Shaka held court), my wife’s school, the mosque …”
The difference between Farouk Cassim and Kader Asmal — his wife’s first cousin — is not just that Cassim went tricameral and then crossed over to the Inkatha Freedom Party. It is that Asmal got out of his suffocating, small-town as quickly as he could (and landed up in Joyce’s Dublin!) while Cassim — a man with similar aspirations — stayed put.
Asked why, Cassim compares Stanger to George Eliot’s 19th Century Middlemarch: “If you read people like Eliot, it’s always in a place the size of Stanger that you can explore who you are. You can find an identity in clearer terms than if you’re lost in the city. Here, wherever I go, I am myself, free to do as I choose and accepted as such …”
He compares himself to Tertius Lydgate, Eliot’s idealistic but alienated doctor, who brings science and progress to backward Middlemarch. There is something literary about the persona of Farouk Cassim, but both the exterior landscape of Stanger’s gentle tropical rot and the interior landscape of its muse remind me more of a VS Naipaul anti-hero than an Eliot or Joyce protagonist: the small-town intellectual with a vast vocabulary, the English teacher with ideas too big for his world, the modest man who lives in a noisy flat on the main street, rather than building a home on his 30-acre sugar farm outside town. The loner with a conscience who committed what he calls “an act of political suicide” by taking on both the Zulu chauvinism and the iron-fist discipline of the IFP, by breaking ranks and accusing it of racism towards Indians.
This week, IFP secretary-general Ziba Jiyane publicly described Cassim — one of his moderate allies in the party — as “unstable”; a quality, often confused with conscience, more often found in novels than in parliaments — unless those parliaments happen to be the floor-criss- crossing House of Delegates.
Here are the facts of Farouk Cassim’s demise (or redemption, depending which way you look at it): After IFP whips corralled the party’s Indian MPs together and gave them a tongue-lashing for laziness, Cassim held a press conference in which he accused his party of racism, citing as well Minister of Correctional Services Sipho Mzimela’s ethnic slur against Mohammed Valli Moosa, whom he told to “go back to Bombay”.
Last weekend, the IFP’s National Committee gave Cassim an “apologise or resign” ultimatum. Cassim says he will not apologise “on a matter of conscience”. Talking to me on the day the committee was sitting in Ulundi (he is a member, but absented himself), he compares the silence of Indians in KwaZulu/Natal today to that of Jews in 1930s Germany: “If you acquiesce to the little slurs now, those will confirm people in their bad habits and bad ways. But we need to pick it up now and smash it before it becomes entrenched.”
He is upset that the party lashes out at him, rather than taking the opportunity to “look at itself and its racial problems” — the latest of which is the allegation, published in the KwaZulu/Natal press this week, that all the white and Indian alternates have been taken off the IFP’s provincial parliamentary list and replaced with Zulus. Cassim is careful in his explanation of this impulse: “I think that the party has been forced, by the ANC, into a position where it has to defend Zulu interests first and foremost at the expense of all else.”
One of his white colleagues, talking off the record, is far more dramatic (and deliciously Natal-colonial): “The party is retreating into the narrowest Zulu chauvinism. It has become increasingly hardline and, for those of us non- Zulus who do not toe the line, things are tough. There’s a witchhunt going on, so we have to keep our powder dry, our helmets on, and stay down in the trenches.”
At the committee meeting that decided Cassim’s fate, former Nat Jurie Mentz argued against censuring Cassim. Mzimela reportedly replied, “If you don’t like it, you can also go!” To which Mentz shot back, “If I go, the whites do too.”
The temptation is to rub one’s hands with glee at the IFP — a party built on ethnicity — hoist by its own petard. An investigation into the veracity of Cassim’s claims of racism leads one, inevitably, into the badlands of that very specific brand of Natal racism: “We are not like them,” pontificates one of the IFP’s other Indian MPs, explaining why the Indians in the caucus are considered laggardly: “You see, the IFP meets in Cape Town over weekends, when we Indians come home to look after our families and see to our constituencies. The blacks, on the other hand, just stay in Cape Town. They have a gay lifestyle at the expense of all these foreign foundations. Oh yes, they live it up over there.”
Given the rag-tag bunch of white and Indian opportunists who joined the IFP, perhaps the IFP’s Zulus have a point. And, unlike many of the Zulus and whites in the party, Indian involvement in the IFP seems to be more about pragmatism than ideology.
Cassim acknowledges the pragmatist impulse — “By being part of the majority party here, we non-Zulus can ameliorate our circumstances by pointing out that there are other people who live here too.” But he also carries within him the essential contradiction of Indian politics; one underscored by his announcement that, once he leaves Parliament, he will form a “professional minority lobby that I hope will take in other minorities too, but will at the very least work to protect the interests of Indians.”
The contradiction — one to which he readily admits — is that “the downfall of the Indian in Africa has been his insularity.” In fact, he says, “apartheid was invented and perfected by Indians long before the Afrikaners came along. That’s why it was not rejected wholesale by Indians, because it in fact gave them permission to stay out of national affairs, to stay in their own areas and do their own thing.”
He claims that the battle against this insularity is his single greatest fight: isn’t setting up an Indian lobby the very worst thing he could do? He cites the experiences of Indians in East Africa and says, “whether I like it or not, there are too many things which stamp us as a vulnerable minority. We have to be conscious of that fact and act accordingly.”
Even though 70 percent of KwaZulu/Natal’s Indians voted for the National Party, they have not found a home there the way the Western Cape’s coloureds have. “Indians as yet have no political home,” says Cassim. Indeed, one is struck by the fact that the only credible Indian politicians are in the ANC, but most of them refuse point-blank to acknowledge that they are in the specific service of Indian interests.
Is Farouk Cassim the answer? He was, by all accounts, far and away the most able politician in the House of Delegates, that slag-heap of Indian politics during its dying days. He now is regarded by all parties as one of the IFP’s most hard-working parliamentarians — all the more reason for the offence he has taken at having been singled out, with other members of his ethnic group, for laziness.
Before the election, he was one of the IFP’s most articulate spokesmen: he was often on television rationalising the IFP’s withdrawal from the election. Behind the scenes, he has been at the modernising forefront of the party, and has consistently led the battle in favour of negotiations and participation and against walkouts and boycotts.
Although he emphatically sees the IFP as “the aggrieved party” in the KwaZulu/Natal conflict, he remains puzzled by the party’s hardline attitude: “When Mandela attacks Dr Buthelezi [yes, the honorific remains, despite Cassim’s disenchantment], I just see it as political posturing, but my colleagues see it as an attack on the Zulu nation. Is it a difference in political culture? Or is it that they have been victimised in a way we non-Zulus can’t understand?”
Given his liberalism and his intellectualism, wouldn’t he have been more at home in the Natal Indian Congress and the ANC? He gives two reasons for having never considered the ANC: “Because I am a federalist through and through”, and “because I always found the NIC very exclusivist: they were self-appointed. How could one participate?”
Despite all, he maintains the intense loyalty to Buthelezi that the chief seems to inspire in so many people, and insists that the problems lie with the sheep of the IFP rather than its shepherd. “Precisely where the IFP is going wrong is that there is so much deference given to Dr Buthelezi. They’d rather do nothing and not cross him than do something and upset him.” The irony, of course, is that Cassim did do something — and is out on his ear.
He wrote his master’s thesis (at the University of South Africa) on the brilliant but fascist poet, Ezra Pound. While criticising the poet’s anti- Semitism and passion for Mussolini, he argues that Pound’s fascism has been misunderstood and over-exaggerated, and attempts to explain that Pound used fascism as a metaphor for perfection and completeness, rather than as an ideology. His thesis is called, Ezra Pound: Poet or Propagandist, and he concludes that the two functions were, in Pound’s work, interdependent.
Farouk Cassim is only just this side of wacky. He spends his spare time writing a school textbook of word games called the Turbo Word Booster and is obsessive about futurism: he adores Ray Bradbury and Alvin Toffler, and once tried to start a school with Toffleresque Third Wave “infospheres” rather than
As I left his Middlemarch-in-the-canefields, he gave me a copy of a poem he had recently written about Buthelezi: “He was polite or he was brusque/ As the occasion found him/ But he had magic and that is his truth …” Unlike Farouk Cassim’s bread — a recipe passed down from his grandmother — or his thesis — erudite and complex — the poem is void of creativity; pure doggerel. Buthelezi has been his Mussolini. But Cassim, unlike Pound, has been unable to turn autocracy into poetry.