Peter Marais, Western Cape MEC for Local Government, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
I will testify, before a court of law, that Western Cape MEC for Local Government Peter Marais was stone- cold sober when, at the end of our interview, he launched into a serenade that included a hip-rotating Elvis impersonation, some Johnny Mathis crooning and a pitch-perfect rendition of The Platters’ Twilight Time.
The pinnacle of his political career might be his current standoff with central government over the demarcation of the Cape Peninsula metropole but, in another life, his greatest glory was singing with the Big Beats when they opened for Cliff Richard and the Shadows at the Luxorama. These days, his songmaking is confined to composing and singing doggerel to the jaunty rhythms of Kaapse Lied.
During last year’s election he recorded eleven such hits, including the following (sung to an obscure Presley tune): “Joe Slovo is/ ‘n kommunis/ Allan Boesak is sy grootste pel/ Hy lei ons kinders na die hel/ Almal na die hel.” (Roughly translated: Boesak is leading our children to hell because his big buddy is Joe Slovo the communist.)
His sobriety notwithstanding, meeting Marais was, at times, like revisiting an old racist stereotype from my childhood: the “coon carnival” image of Cape coloureds that white Vaalies encountered when they went down to Cape Town for the Christmas holidays. It was like watching the stereotype bite back, for Marais — blustering, buffoonish, folksy, but nobody’s fool — is the voice and face of a robust coloured chauvinism all the more remarkable because it is buttressed by precisely the process of caricature for which it claims to be seeking redress.
Marais’ voluble discourse is replete with proclamations about The Coloured Man (“The coloured man has found a home in the National Party”; “The coloured man will never support things like prostitution and pornography and abortion”; “The coloured man is an Afrikaner”) that is, at times, wilful in its racism. While Nats in the rest of the country go out of their way to insist that theirs is a party for all races, something different is happening in the one province they actually rule.
“There has never,” says Marais, “been a real close affinity beteen blacks and coloureds down here in the Cape. Right now fear still channels most of the decisions that people make. Fear of the unknown. And what we see happening all around us — the murders, the assaults, the disrespect for authority and conventions — that doesn’t help bring us any closer. We also have our skollie elements, but we frown on them. We never carry them on our shoulders like heroes. When you see a man dying in the street with a tyre around his neck while the people around him are dancing, that’s foreign, man! It’s foreign to us! It’s got nothing to do with race. It has to do with behavioural patterns. With norms. With standards. With preferences.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? When the demarcation board paired African Khayelitsha with white/coloured Tygerberg, the plan had to be approved by the Western Cape Provincial Committee. Marais stands accused of dropping two ANC-supporting members from the committee, replacing them with NP sympathisers, and pushing through a new plan that gave Tygerberg more coloured townships and dumped Khayelitsha with a now excessively-large Cape Town that would have over two million people. Defying even the NP minister responsible for local government, Roelf Meyer, Marais stuck to his guns. President Mandela issued a proclamation declaring the newly-configured provincial committee invalid, and Marais now plans to take central government to court for violating the Constitution.
He is adamant that his decision to excise African Khayelitsha from white and coloured Tygerberg also has “nothing to do with race” and insists that it is all a question of financial viability. The gerrymandering, he insists, was done by the demarcation board in the first place, which is a lackey of an ANC that is “trying to destroy anything that is Afrikaner or Afrikaans. They cannot stand an enclave like Tygerberg, which is all- Afrikaner and where they have no say and so they have to dilute it.”
Possibly Marais is right about the unviability of a Tygerberg/Khayelitsha substructure and about the ANC’s machinations. But so clouded is his speech in racial pathology that sense often eludes it. What I found so fascinating about his language is that he has taken a group of people who could serve as a role-model for the rest of this country due to their hybridity — their very lack of racial purity — and claimed, for them, the cultural and linguistic purity of Afrikanerdom; one which must now be fortified against dilution.
Marais’ colleague, Health MEC Ebrahim Rassool, is one of the ANC’s more lucid thinkers when it comes to an understanding of coloured ethnicity. He notes that everyone — including his own party — has become so tied up in the technical battle over Tygerberg and Khayelitsha that they have lost sight of the real import of the battle, which is about a hollow “coloured jingoism” that is appealing precisely because it papers over all the very real cracks in coloured identity.
His point is that Peter Marais is no unguided missile, no loose cannon. “The support I’m getting for the stand I have taken is enormous,” says Marais, correctly. Not surprisingly, he is a local hero in the precincts of white Durbanville (where he lives now) and in the Bishop Lavis and Elsies River townships (whence he hails). And his party is reporting back that his stand is swelling both its support and its coffers. Through a battle over Tygerberg, his home town, Marais is showing coloured people that he can deliver the goods: entry into the laager.
He celebrates his heritage as part Griqua and part white Afrikaner, and is absolutely adamant, from the evidence of the past four generations, that he has no black African blood in him whatsoever: “People think that the coloured is a cross between a black and a white, which is a ridiculous simplification. There is a minuscule amount of black blood among coloureds.”
But the articulation of a difference from black people is only one part of Marais’ narrative of coloured pride. The other is an aggressive assertion of equality with white people. About his much-publicised dispute with Meyer, he responds testily: “I don’t think Meyer occupies a higher position in the party than I do.”
In fact, the NP has become a coloured party: “I think that white Nats are not used to being in an opposition role. They don’t know how to handle it. Coloured Nats, on the other hand, have been in opposition politics ever since we were taken off the common voters’ roll, and so our white colleagues have got a lot to learn from us.”
There’s something exquisitely patronising about it all; something quite cheeky too, given the fact that Marais was never even elected to office in the tricameral parliament. After losing Bishop Lavis to a popular Labour Party candidate, he was appointed to the President’s Council, where he stayed until its dissolution, crossing the floor several times before becoming one of the first Labour parliamentarians to move over to the Nats.
Marais first realised the plight of his people when, aged twelve, he watched his father — a “great man” who wrote very popular morality plays about the dissolution and redemption of the coloureds — being humiliated by his white foreman. “I asked my dad, ‘how can you let him speak to you like that? Why don’t you bugger him up?’ And he replied, ‘Because he’s a white man’.” From that moment on, the young Marais hated The White Man.
It festered for a couple of years, until he organized a gang “to go beat up the white schoolchildren in Maitland, because they had a swimming pool and we didn’t. We gave them a good working over. I came back and I sort of had a feeling of achievement: ‘Hell, I’ve hit a white child! I hit him pow-wow! I’m stronger than you.’ We talked for days about it. ‘Did you see how I smacked that boertjie, jislaaik, man!’.”
He went into tricameral politics with the same intention — “I wanted to give the boere hell from here to kingdom come” — but found, to his surprise, that The White Man was “a lonely, scared person who surrounded himself with laws to protect himself; who feared that his standards would be destroyed because he couldn’t compete on the open market with the masses. And so he devised all sorts of plans how he could give me equality, without giving me power over him, because he couldn’t trust me and my motives.”
But once The Coloured Man realised that all The White Man wanted was to be his friend, he — in the persona of Peter Marais — magnanimously extended a hand of friendship and camaraderie. And saved him — by ensuring his political longevity through the infusion of coloureds into the NP. By giving him Kraaifontein and Blue Downs and Brackenfell (coloured areas that Marais included with Tygerberg when he redrew the boundaries) so that he wouldn’t have to take Khayelitsha.
So now The Coloured Man has real power — rather than the Pyrrhic victory of a brawl at the Maitland swimming pool — he is flexing his muscles. “The ANC,” says Marais, “could drive the Western Cape to adopt a far more accommodating stance towards the position of the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu/ Natal. If they keep whittling away our powers, perhaps we too will seek international mediation.”
He rises to his theme, proclaiming that Chief Buthelezi is becoming “more and more popular” among coloureds. People, he says, “are getting tired of wishy-washy politics in which everyone is clapping each other on the back and congratulating each other. People don’t feel safe if there’s no real opposition. If everyone’s complimenting everyone else all the time, people get suspicious. They feel much safer if there’s
Earlier on, I was subject to a romantic vision of coloured people as “jovial, friendly, laissez-faire”. The wonderful thing about The Coloured Man (or The Zulu Man) is that he is so entirely a construct that you can write your own script for him: he can be the jolly minstrel transformed, by one stroke, into the belligerent warrior. But his malleability in the hands of his author becomes utter intransigence in the face of his opponents. Peter Marais knows he’s on to a winning thing, and he knows that, given who votes for the National Party these days, there’s very little that a simpering Roelfie or a pedantic Valli can do about