Howard Barrell
The Sea Point beachfront, Cape Town, 2pm, 30 degrees. A smallish figure in a baggy suit, cellphone to ear, mouth moving, strides forth along the pavement in full throttle.
It’s Tony Leon, Democratic Party leader and political combatant extraordinaire. Scurrying alongside him, furiously scribbling notes, cellphone to her ear, mouth moving, is Sid, his personal assistant. Following them, dragging Tony’s suitcase, cellphone to ear, mouth moving, is James Selfe, DP strategist and number one on the party’s Western Cape list for the National Assembly.
The volksleier (people’s leader), as his closer colleagues refer to him with warm ironic awe, is arriving. When he reaches the hotel where his party is hosting a presentation for political journalists on its slick election campaign, he will expect everything to run not just well, not just very well, but perfectly.
It doesn’t. The video machine is obviously a member of the African National Congress. You can almost hear DP officials wondering aloud: “Oh my God, who will take the bullet for this one?”
The pace around Leon on the campaign trail is frantic, the demands on his assistants’ commitment and energy appear relentless. As one of them put it: “Sometimes the only compensation is knowing that Tony works even harder than we do. I don’t know how he does it.”
Leon is driven. He believes passionately that the liberal outlook he has been putting across since his days as a student politician at the University of the Witwatersrand has all the answers for South Africa. Others might have had to change their views – communists and racists might have had to recant – but he has felt no need to change his.
That is one source of his uncompromising attitude: he feels he and other liberals have nothing to apologise for – except, perhaps, for having been a bit wet and apologetic about their views in the past. Now, Leon believes, is a time for liberals to develop muscle tone, to put on weight and to punch well above it.
He appears genuinely to feel that no farmer in the Klein Karoo, jobless squatter outside Durban, intellectual in Cape Town, peasant in Transkei or industrial worker in Johannesburg could do better than with a DP government. He knows that perhaps most squatters, peasants and workers currently see the solutions to their problems as coming via socialist policies. But he thinks this is plain wrong- headed; he will help them see that; and they will, in time, come around to seeing it.
So if it helps get across his message, he’ll wear a baggy suit to give extra bulk to his really quite slight physique; he’ll swish around in a black, open-necked shirt to look seriously cool (or is it coolly serious?); he’ll wear a golden tie to seem presidential; he’ll dress up, dress down, change clothes four times a day; he’ll fold his arms and jut out his jaw on a poster so that he looks like Rocky Marciano’s younger brother; and he’ll visit a home for abandoned and abused children in Oudtshoorn and talk to them, moisture in his eyes, although there is no electoral advantage in his doing so.
One thing he won’t do though is compromise in the face of the ANC. There’s something about the ruling party and many of its leaders – perhaps what he sees as their moral presumptuousness – that he neither trusts nor likes.