Faced with racial enmity among its supporters in the Western Cape, the African National Congress goes into the election trying to bridge the divide between the coloured and African communities in the province. The ANC kicks off its 2004 election campaign in the Western Cape on Sunday.
Although non-racialism is one of the defining policies of the ANC, it cannot ignore the racial dynamics of the Western Cape, where there is fading but still existing historic animosity between the Cape’s coloured and African communities, fostered by apartheid’s unequal allocation of benefits like pensions and housing.
Coloured communities are the largest voting bloc in the province, accounting for more than half the province’s 4,5-million residents recorded in Census 2001.
While the ANC has secured much of its support in the past, it has never been able to secure enough to win an outright majority in an election in the province.
On the other hand, the party has consistently received the support of the overwhelming majority of Africans in the province. While this makes the African community very influential in the ANC in the region, it leaves some parts of the coloured community feeling alienated from the organisation.
This is a problem that has plagued the party in the province since 1994, and much work already has been done to bridge the divide. When the ANC scored the most votes (42%) in 1999, it was largely attributed to substantially increased coloured support.
On Wednesday provincial ANC chairperson Ebrahim Rasool was confident that the party had found ”the right formula” to address both ”coloured insecurity”, including fears of losing out to affirmative action and black economic empowerment, and ”African marginalisation”.
A key election message will highlight how the ANC is addressing its shared poverty and unemployment through, for example, increased registration of grant recipients and job creation with investment in both Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha — the two largest apartheid-created dormitory towns for coloured and African residents respectively.
Keith Gottschalk, head of political studies at the University of the Western Cape, said the racial dynamics would, for now, continue to be important although new dynamics of class and urban versus rural lifestyles are taking root.
”Coloureds have internalised white racism: ‘whites are better, but coloureds are still better than Africans’ — they will not vote for a ‘kaffir’, so to speak, but for a ‘white baas’.”
He said a key factor was that coloured voters in the Cape Town metropol, where two-thirds of the province’s population lives, have not really benefited from the ANC’s delivery of services; they always had water and electricity. Instead, apartheid-era benefits such as the child grant had been reduced in the government’s drive to bring everyone into the fold.
In contrast, the poverty-stricken Western Cape hinterland, predominantly coloured, is behind the ANC. This, Gottschalk said, is similar to the voting trends that put the ANC in power in the Northern Cape, the other coloured-dominated province.
Rasool remained upbeat about the province’s racial atmosphere, saying there are ”encouraging signs of goodwill” as feedback from white communities indicated a break with ”the divisive politics of the past”.
In this context, the cooperative governance pact with the New National Party has been a helping hand.
”We [the ANC] are not leaving any area uncontested — even the white communities. [They] are in need of a new dispensation, new politics. We will never be accused of not taking our message there,” he said.
The ANC said it had put aside last year’s bruising battle in the nomination to the lists of public representatives — attributed to racial tensions, but more realistically due to jockeying of jobs.
Publicly aiming for a simple majority, senior party officials said it was confident of at least 40% of the vote. According to its calculations, the ANC has secured the rural vote and would also benefit from the increase of African residents in the province to about 28%, on the back of new arrivals from the Eastern Cape.
With various pre-election opinion polls indicating that neither the ANC nor the NNP will win an outright majority, the cooperation pact is set to continue. The only changes, based on polling strength, would be to its composition and, perhaps, the premiership currently held by NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk.