As increasing numbers of coloured people become disillusioned with the big political parties, a new group has stepped into the breach, writes Stefaans Brummer
‘THE brown man’s struggle did not end when Nelson Mandela was freed. Our struggle is against a new form of slavery which hangs over us like a black cloud,” is how Mervyn Ross explains the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging vir die Vooruitgang van Bruinmense (KWB).
Some would say Ross, 33, has turned 180 degrees on his student and trade union activism of the 1980s, when he joined the then-banned ANC, and that the month-old movement he now leads is an absolute denial of the values of non-racialism and democracy he once fought for.
Some would even go as far as to say the KWB is just another hue of Eugene Terre’blanche’s far-right and similarly-named Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB).
Indeed, the likeness goes further than just the name (which in both cases have no movement-sanctioned English translation). For starters, there is the leaders’ powerful rolling Afrikaans rhetoric, liberally sprinkled with terms like “volk” and “verraaier”.
In both, there is a sense of consolidation of a volk on a hostile continent, where recognition of that volk’s ethnically distinct nature, with own culture, language and land, is the only guarantee against the rapacious hordes without, and the traitors within.
For both, the affirmative action which they see as a government-dictated strategy to advance others at the expense of their own people, and the loss of the land that is their birthright, are their strongest rallying points.
Ethnicity is nothing the KWB shies away from. “We want brown people classified as an ethnic group, part of the native population,” says Ross. And he fetches his people’s roots from way back in history, and traces how their common identity was forged and maintained by resistance to outside interference.
“We were the first to have fought against colonialism; it was the Khoisan, our ancestors. Where was the black man then?”
Black Africans, maintains Ross, were as much colonisers as whites from Europe — and now the brown people have to defend their own against these new intruders. “The black man only came 600 years ago, over the whole of Southern Africa, if you study your history. They are settlers, and the most recent settlers in the Western Cape. We will not allow it. They have a policy of oorvat en afvat (conquer and take).”
And so, the bitterness is tactile when Ross talks about the way his people have been “sold out”. First there are the two big parties: the one which he and many coloured people had helped in its battle against apartheid; the other which had promised deliverance to coloured people in last year’s elections and which built its Western Cape power base on coloured support.
Both have let his people down, says Ross: “Where are FW de Klerk’s promised checks and balances? De Klerk is a traitor; he sold out us brown people; he sleeps with Nelson Mandela in the same bed.
‘And we say Mandela is one of the greatest racists. After the elections he called brown people and Indians traitors. If that is not racism, I don’t want my name.”
More bitterness is reserved for the Labour Party and its role at the multi-party negotiations. “We will not forget the Labour Party’s treason. Those people were not there as brown people, but as agterryers (valets) for the NP and the ANC.”
The same status, that of agterryer, is accorded coloured figures who chose to become part of the ANC establishment: the Jakes Gerwels, the Alan Boesaks and the Franklin Sonns.
But the KWB has a softer side, and one gets the impression Ross’ new struggle means to him an extension of his fight against apartheid, rather than a call for apartheid anew.
Personally, he sees no similarities with the AWB: “The (white) Afrikaner was never in history oppressed and the victim of racism. We as brown Afrikaners suffered for three hundred years under racism. That is exactly why the KWB was formed, to oppose the racism of the NP and the ANC …
“I have a background of struggle against apartheid and racism. I fought against white domination and racism, and will fight equally hard against black racism. The brown people’s struggle did not end when Nelson Mandela was freed …”
When Ross sees affirmative action that benefits the darker shades of black above brown, or when he sees that land restitution will have a cut-off date of 1913 — “that’s when black people lost their land, while in the 1600s and 1700s the brown people’s land was taken from them” — he feels his people are still the target of racism. How then, can his own and the KWB’s struggle be termed racist?
One clear dissimilarity to the AWB is the KWB’s avowed commitment to non-violence. “We are opposed to any form of violence,” says Ross, but warns South Africans to expect “mass action, passive resistance and occupations; these things will be the order of the day”.
What the KWB wants to achieve is not a volkstaat, even though it wants land restitution going back at least to the 1800s. “We want to unite brown people over the whole of Southern Africa, to combat the insecurity and political powerlessness we have suffered because of the treason (of the NP and the ANC). We want to give our people vision, economic advancement and political power.”
* The KWB was launched in Cape Town on February 25. In May a congress will be held where a full leadership will be chosen — for now, Ross only caretakes as leader — and where political strategies, especially for local government elections, will be decided.
Ross claims the KWB already has 100 000 members, although he says the administrative side still has to be brought up to date. The membership base derives, in part, from the affiliation of trade unions, community organisations and the defection of whole NP, ANC and (New) Labour Party structures in coloured communities to the KWB, he says.