Ivor Powell
Through half-closed eyes, you could have mistaken it for a scene from a different era – 1985, 1989, even 1960, when this dusty square of veld in Sharpeville saw the massacre of 69 Pan Africanist Congress supporters protesting the pass laws. A hefty contingent of cops in armoured vehicles kept a beady eye from the fringes – armed, walkie- talkied, potentially dangerous.
But only for the briefest moment could you make that mistake. This meeting had none of the fire, the passion, the danger or the commitment of protests in days gone by. It would be generous indeed to describe the political temperature in Sharpeville’s Freedom Square on Freedom Day as the New National Party’s election roadshow rode into town as even tepid.
There were hardly 100 people present to watch NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk lay his wreath. About a third of them were vaguely embarrassed whites; most of the remaining two-thirds was made up of a motley, seemingly rent-a-toyi-toyi crowd of youths in brand new NNP sun visors and T- shirts.
And in the event there was no threat whatever: no hecklers or firebrands turned out to protest the hijacking of a space sacred to the struggle of black South Africans by a political party whose forebears had overseen the massacre in the first place.
But then the cops weren’t there to prevent things getting out of hand. They were there for a more psychological reason: to make the whites feel safe in the desperately unfamiliar terrain the politics of the new South Africa had led them into.
At the end of the day, the manoeuvrings of the NNP are about whites and finding a place for them in the bewildering if brave new world of democracy in South Africa.
As one party organiser noted while the whites gathered at the party’s Vereeniging offices before the trek to Sharpeville: “This isn’t really about winning votes – it’s a symbolic thing.”
The Freedom Day events had clearly been set up with a view to media coverage rather than whipping up support. From the matching white and black choirs to the balanced wreath-layings – the first in memory of the PAC martyrs in Sharpeville, the second at the site where the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed between the Boers and the British in the late 19th century – the party was trying to reposition itself before the elections.
And in the Gauteng context, that means giving whites a sense of belonging – there’s no realistic expectation that significant numbers of blacks are going to vote for the NNP. Even guest of honour Job Tsolo, one of the PAC organisers of the 1960 protest, succinctly answered “no” when asked if he would consider voting for the Nats in the June elections.
“It is only when white South Africans understand the struggle of black South Africans to be free that they will really be free,” Van Schalkwyk said in Sharpeville.
At the Vereeniging Vryheidsmonument he reminded his (now mainly white) audience: “Ons het hard vir ons vryheid geveg [We fought hard for our freedom].”
With the peculiarly unrigorous logic of the politician, Van Schalkwyk was trying to get his audience to buy into the dubious notion that there was some kind of historical linkage between the Boer Wars and the liberation struggle.
Over the last few weeks, there has been a shift in the NNP’s campaigning style ahead of the June elections. Faced with a drop in support from around 22% of the electorate in 1994 to probably under 10% in 1999, it has decided to go on the offensive.
Where earlier campaigning focused on building the profile of Van Schalkwyk, the new approach appears to focus rather on issues than personalities. “Hang murderers and rapists”, one banner screams. Another attacks the ANC for introducing 26 new taxes. One still in the pipeline wants to demand double punishment for certain crimes (whatever that means). In addition, the NNP has predictably enough identified job creation, corruption and low matric pass rates as issues of burning election concern.
Organisers claim the tide is turning in the NNP’s favour as sectors of the electorate return to the tried and tested. And what Van Schalkwyk was trying to do was firm up that support base.
A less generous impression is of the desiccated remnants of a party trying to locate itself inside a history that has already left them behind.