On the election trail with the DP, Howard Barrell finds an unusual ferment among conservative Afrikaners
Any ostrich can tell you that he and his kind are much defamed. He does not stick his head in the sand when he feels threatened, hoping this means no one can see him. Instead, the ostrich is a hardy, intelligent bird with a highly developed sense of self-preservation
Ostriches consequently resent being the butt of the insults between politicians. And if Tony Leon and his Democratic Party get a kick in the backside in Oudtshoorn in the election on June 2, this will probably be why.
For there was Leon on the campaign trail last week saying he was sure local voters were not as stupid as the local ostriches and that they would, therefore, vote resoundingly for the DP.
Leon may be forgiven on grounds of ignorance – as apparently he was for his inability to speak convincing Afrikaans. But in the latter case, the way he battled on, sounding almost camp at times, endeared him to many local folk.
Because they knew this little bull terrier of a man in the baggy Italian suit was the chap who had sat scowling on the DP’s front bench in Parliament for the previous five years locking his jaws around any African National Congress throat reckless enough to expose itself.
“I like him, man, he’s hardegat (hard-arsed),” said a local farmer, a former member of the Conservative Party, who was among the 60-odd people paying R100 each to attend a DP fundraiser at a beautiful Cape Dutch farm-turned-country-lodge outside Oudtshoorn last week.
He was not the only former CP member there. So was Piet Retief (oh yes), whose motor business once straddled the Little Karoo. And the lodge owner, Mathilda da Bod, young wife and mother, and a former CP activist, who had organised the fund-raising drink. She had – bravely in a small town in which political loyalties can determine business opportunities – placed DP posters on the lodge’s grand gates.
Something extraordinary is happening. Opinion polls have shown that more Afrikaners now support the DP than they do any other party. Out of every 10 Afrikaner voters, about three (30%) will vote for the DP, two (23%) support Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s New National Party and one (11%) backs Constand Viljoen’s Freedom Front.
How can this be? How in 30 years can a party of verdomde liberaliste (damned liberals) become the party of biltong, braaivleis and boeremusiek?
According to Errol Moorcroft, a DP MP, there is nothing quite like a spell out of power to help someone appreciate liberal political values – such as tolerance of dissent and minority rights. Having railed against liberalism for decades as a threat to their survival, many Afrikaners now identify liberalism as the guarantor of their future as a language group whose members, unsurprisingly, most enjoy each other’s company.
It is a message that Western Cape DPleader “Slim” Hennie Bester can suggest with a subtlety that removes any trace of even a seam, let alone a gulf, in the journey from CP to DP.
Someone like Bester is, in many ways, the key – certainly to what is happening in Oudtshoorn. He speaks the local white farmers’ language, directly but softly and with the same Cape brei that purrs on Da Bod’s palate. She says she gave the fund- raiser “mainly for Hennie”. She trusts him. She can look him in the eye; he looks back directly; he does what he says he’s going to do.
She is saying something about honesty. And this encourages me to ask her the question I have come to the conservative little town of Oudtshoorn to try to answer.
Why, I ask Da Bod, this change in her politics? From CP to DP, for Chrissake? You, a Schoeman by birth, a member of the most prominent family farming in the valley?
She laughs and walks off. I follow, repeating my question. She laughs and walks off again, as if there may be pain in her reason.
“Because,” she answers when I cut her off near a hok (cage) holding a pair of ostriches, “there’s no place for the CP and its ideas in South Africa anymore. Because we’ve got to find each other’s hands and a way of holding them and of moving forward. And the DP gives us the best way of doing this.”
She, like others I interviewed, considers herself an Afrikaner. She rejects euphemisms developed to render people like herself bland or politically neutral, among them Afrikaanses or Afrikaanspraters (Afrikaans speakers).
Retief feels the same. Over a cup of tea in the voorkamer (front room) of his splendid home, he spoke first of those he held in contempt, mainly the National Party.
The NP had entered negotiations with the ANC and others after 1989 without saying what it was up to. Then, having negotiated itself out of power, the NP had remarketed itself as the party of power-sharing. But then, in 1996, it suddenly withdrew from the government of national unity.
“That was a terrible betrayal,” he said. “And then comes the shock of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I tell you, I was shocked, and so were others, at what the government had been doing to people. I just did not know.”
His former party, the CP, has missed the boat, he believes. The party’s shilly-shallying over whether to stand for Parliament left him feeling deserted, vulnerable. He respects Viljoen, but he’s not going to go and live in the desert. And Louis Luyt doesn’t resonate with him.
He arrives at the DP. “Man, they’ve got no skeletons in their cupboard. They haven’t been up in the truth commission . They have been saying the same thing all along.
“Over the past four years they haven’t just been opposing; they have also been coming up with ideas. And DP policy can accommodate the Afrikaner and other ethnic groups.”
And that is where Retief is in the company of many Afrikaner intellectuals. They see no reason to apologise for the affinity many Afrikaners feel for each other. And they have little doubt that other language or ethnic groups feel the same. Like often seeks out like for the ease that can come when sharing a cultural idiom.
What is evolving is a view that Afrikaners can best advance their culture by helping others foster theirs – what some call a “positive ethnicity” containable within the patchwork of a politically and culturally pluralistic South Africa.
For some, like Pierre-Jean Gerber, a farmer and former youth leader of the NP, the answer lies in Afrikaners finding common cause with the ANC. A former New National Party member of the provincial legislature in Cape Town, he crossed to the ANC recently. Afrikaners have nowhere else to go – “I have no aunt in England or uncle in Germany” – so they must get involved and make things work, or get left behind.
In the seriousness of the search now under way among Afrikaners for a way forward there is little burying of heads in the sand. Like ostriches, Afrikaners – a hardy, intelligent, picky-and- choosey people – have been much defamed.
If you disbelieve them or me on this, ask yourself: can you think of any group in history which has more skilfully negotiated itself out of a position of untenable power?