Tony Yengeni:CROSSFIRE
It was with amazement that I read Howard Barrell’s at best misguided, at worst, false examination (“Liberal invasion of the platteland”, April 23 to 29) of why right- wing Afrikaners are now supporting the Democratic Party.
It is not, as DP MP Errol Moorcroft claims, that “there is nothing quite like a spell out of power to help someone appreciate liberal political values – such as tolerance”.
People who have “railed against liberalism for decades as a threat to their survival”, and fought for an even more crude and cruel application of apartheid than the National Party, have not fallen overnight, in large numbers, in love with tolerance, democracy, non-racialism and individual freedom. To believe that is to be downright gullible.
Rather, they have indeed come to identify “liberalism as the guarantor” of their beliefs. They have come to see that Tony Leon’s brand of right-wing liberalism is a clever way of protecting white privilege and racism in particular, but also sexism, homophobia and discrimination against the disabled.
They have come to realise that the way to discriminate against people in the new South Africa is to support a party whose liberal individualist doctrine’s exclusive concern with individuals and their rights cannot provide content and guidance for disadvantaged individuals to exercise those rights. Thus, only the privileged are able to claim rights.
The DP deliberately fails to acknowledge that in this country people were discriminated against because of the groups they belonged to, not because of the individuals that they were.
That’s why the African National Congress recognises that the only way to redress imbalances is to be honest about the country’s past and to act accordingly. Failure to do so would amount to nothing being done in practice to eliminate historical injustices.
The new South African racist therefore does not wear an Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) uniform and use crude language. No, they can come in baggy Italian suits and upper middle-class English accents.
That is why significant numbers of people like Gideon Fourie, former AWB member and former leader of the Boksburg City Council – the most extreme right-wing council in this country’s recent history- now regard the DP as their natural political home.
Leon has been quoted in a huge DP display advertisement as saying: “Together we can restore merit, justice and honesty.” Note that Leon says he and the DP will “restore” merit, justice and honesty. When previously did this merit, justice and honesty ever exist in South Africa that Leon says they will “restore”?
Is he referring to the colonialist or apartheid era, or both, as the period of great “merit, justice and honesty” which he so wants to “restore”?
No wonder the DP failed to register a percentage point of support among the African community in a recent comprehensive opinion poll.
Interestingly, and to the best of my knowledge and thorough reading of newspapers, this advertisement has only appeared in the conservative Afrikaans press.
As disillusioned Dr Bukelwa Mbulawa, respected former DP MP and Eastern Cape leader said in her first speech in Parliament after resigning from the DP: “They are the new custodians of popular right-wing politics. The protectors of the old order. The promoters of historic injustice. The prophets of the past. Their only camouflage is their magical phrase, `liberalism’.”
George Woodcock, anarchist writer and friend of George Orwell’s, was talking about people like Leon and the DP when he wrote about liberals’ refusal and failure “to penetrate the fundamental causes of social evils, to present a consistent moral and social criticism of society”.
Tony Yengeni is the ANC chief whip in the National Assembly