/ 28 November 2008

Can Helen overcome history?

United States president elect Barack Obama’s analysis that his election made history by overcoming history is inspiring Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille’s election campaign. Could she and her party make history by overcoming South Africa’s racial history?

The DA’s forays into winning the support of black South Africans have been awkward and uncomfortable. Until now. Its relaunch earlier this month revealed a party with significant black membership, if not electoral support. Held symbolically at the Constitutional Court in Braamfontein, the gathering was largely black – a sea change for a party whose election campaigns I have reported on diligently since 1994.

Reel back to the mid Nineties when the DA held a tea party for the domestic workers of Houghton, one of its first post-apartheid efforts to draw black voters. A tea party? That drew the interest of my editors at the time, who sent an apprentice journalist off to do a funny piece. I went along because it made a change from covering dusty rallies. And amusing it was, with traditionally wealthy and well-meaning madams of the northern suburbs serving tea and cake to domestic workers who came dressed in the traditional pinafore, doek and apron.

They listened attentively and then tucked into the cake. I asked a particularly ebullient sister what the party offered. ”I eat Tony Leon’s cake,” she said, chewing through a mouthful of tasty icing, ”but I’ll keep my X for Mandela.” That was the cherry on top of a great little story and the Democratic Party of the time, of course, managed to secure very few black voters.

Thereafter efforts were more authentic and transformative, but still largely stop-start. Stalwart party man Douglas Gibson, before he jetted off to a cushier job as ambassador of Thailand, put in long hours in the shantytowns of Gauteng with hard-slogging constituency work among the urban poor.

But his and others’ efforts came to nought as Leon embarked on the ”Fight Back” campaign, which was quickly and successfully reconceptualised by the ruling African National Congress as a ”Fight Black” campaign.

Meant to augment its support among the powerful and disillusioned Afrikaner community, the campaign worked for that purpose as Leon quickly polished his Afrikaans and won over support in the farming and student communities of this constituency. But it alienated potential black members, who read into it a subtext that black rule had occasioned chaos and ineptitude.

Now reel forward to 2008. The party’s doing its work if the numbers of black members who toyi-toyied up a storm at the relaunch are anything to go by. And Zille signalled how she will try to overcome history and race.

For one, she can toyi-toyi. And her fluent isiXhosa suggests a rootedness that Leon never quite acquired. A wily politician, Zille started the relaunch party with a video of prominent and ordinary South Africans stating their dreams for South Africa.

Stars like Chester Williams, Karen Zoid, Jonty Rhodes and Francois Pienaar gave it celebrity appeal. But I was more interested in the video presence of the political scientist and thinker Wilmot James as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu who blessed the party not with their ballots but with their credibility and their South Africanness. Afterwards, images of Nelson Mandela and Cheryl Carolus, among others, flashed momentarily across the screen.

It was high political theatre and symbolised an appropriation of hegemony from the ANC.

The venue, Tutu and the new DA logo — which mimics the South African flag — are symbols of where Zille is taking her party: she is taking over the ANC’s principle of non-racialism just as the ruling party has shed it. At Polokwane, the ruling party reinforced its identity as a largely African party; it has eschewed the old construction of non-racialism in the make-up of its national executive committee and in its provincial structures.

”We will not cut adrift from the animating beliefs of what it means to be South African,” said Zille, who has also adopted Tutu’s founding philosophy of the rainbow nation. The launch song was not one of the now familiar kwaito tunes that Leon loved bumping to, but the whimsical Somewhere over the Rainbow.

Her key speakers were a diverse crew of young and old members, represented in all the colours of our rainbow. Will it work? Zille’s construction of the party lists might be more nightmarish than even the ANC’s. She will have to cut adrift white stalwarts in favour of political affirmative action and there is little doubt that the ruling party splinter, the Congress of the People, will hurt her plans to win over 20% percent at the polls.

But what she has succeeded in doing is creating a South African party from a previously white political formation and, in that, history has been overcome.