‘Is the accuser always holy?” This question is the heart of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. It is also the neglected flip side of the South African problem that most people vaguely describe as the “lack of a strong opposition”.
The necessary question — Miller’s question — seldom follows: Why is the opposition “weak” and the government “strong”? Are the relative weakness of the opposition and the relative strength of the government undesirable in democratic theory or illegitimate in political practice? Does “strong government” necessarily mean dictatorship?
For every “race card” in President Thabo Mbeki’s deck the liberals have a joker called Mobutu Sese Seko in their own. Not long before his retirement, the erratic autodidact, Ken Owen, wrote a Business Day column in which he claimed to see in Mbeki intimations of Mobutu as portrayed in a book on Mobutu by the London journalist Michaela Wrong. Yeah, right.
How can our democracy counter the stereotypes hidden in the Democratic Alliance’s favourite voodoo phrase: “the one party state?” I don’t know the answer, but Miller’s is the right question: “Is the accuser always holy?” That is the best place to start.
Would we in fact be better off as a country if the legitimacy and the good faith of Tony Leon’s DA were articles of faith rather than of doubt? To put the point in paradox: is it possible that the DA is legitimately illegitimate?
In his parliamentary attack on Mbeki last week, Leon threw up the example of his DA colleague, Graham McIntosh.
It was a well-chosen example. Making a bid for parity with Mbeki in the legitimacy stakes, Leon drew upon what he called a “bold protest” by McIntosh in 1977. McIntosh was at the time a member of Helen Suzman’s Progressive Party in Parliament.
Even in Suzman’s own tendentious version this party did not itself adopt a platform of universal black voting rights until the following year, 1978 — but let that pass.
Leon prefers to focus on the more convenient fact that McIntosh once joined a protest against the “official” cause of Steve Biko’s death as given out by the apartheid regime.
As evidence of courage Leon points out that McIntosh then promptly lost his all-white parliamentary seat. Eyes presumably misted over at this outcome — the ultimate tragedy for those who place parliamentary incumbency above all other values.
Leon never sees that in a universal franchise system, the same system that McIntosh’s party at the time explicitly opposed, McIntosh himself might have been spared the racist defenestration of the all-white voters’ roll.
McIntosh was thus less a martyr to courage than a man hoist by his party’s own petard — but let that pass.
More interesting is whether Leon himself might be said, during this very same period, to have lived up to the ambitious standards of political legitimacy that he now seeks to claim vicariously through McIntosh. Did Leon meet the McIntosh standard?
A major theme of Leon’s attack on Mbeki was a critique of the government’s Zimbabwe policy. As in what scientists call a controlled experiment, it is possible to examine Leon’s Zimbabwe policy during the same period when McIntosh was making the allegedly courageous protests that Leon now seeks to appropriate for himself. What, then, was Leon’s Zimbabwe policy during the late 1970s?
After serving in the apartheid army Leon moved on to Wits university where he was elected to the students representative council.
When Ian Smith tried to install the black puppet Bishop Abel Muzorewa by excluding the recognised black liberation movements from the sham election of 1979, Leon went calling.
Together with his political ally on campus, one Donald Rallis, Leon took what he called a “holiday” in Zimbabwe. Through their membership of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) the duo obtained so-called “international observer status” over the fraudulent election.
And what were their findings? Upon returning to Wits they co-wrote an article claiming that Muzorewa “enjoyed visible and deep consummatory [sic] support. This was evidenced by the thousands of people who lined up outside some 15 polling booths on the final day of the elections to watch their leader’s triumphal march around voting precincts.”
Leon reassured readers that “more than equal access was given to the four main contestants” — as in a beauty pageant? — “to put their message across to the electorate”. This comment ignored the banned liberation movements, which were wholly absent from the puppet pageant.
When Leon then turned, in pseudo-impartial fashion, to write that “the case against the validity of the election is also a telling one,” he offered mere political dumbshow. He entirely ignored the wholesale fraudulence and illegitimacy of the entire exercise. Instead he listed a few marginal quibbles akin to the famous “dimpled-chad” queries during the contested Bush-Gore 2000 election. That the problems with the Smith-Muzorewa election were far more deep-rooted no reader could possibly tell from Leon’s piece.
If Leon painted the illegitimate as legitimate during his own glorious yesteryear, might his own current illegitimacy not itself be legitimate, rather than problematic? Back on campus in 1979 after Leon’s piece appeared, Nusas was apoplectic. Its national executive passed a motion of censure against Leon for having obtained observer status in Zimbabwe under Nusas authority, when in fact he had no such authority.
So Leon has, in fact, faced the great legitimacy debate before — and both times over Zimbabwe. The first time it was farce; the second is hardly tragedy.
Ronald Suresh Roberts writes things in Johannesburg