The African National Congress has messed up Cape Town and the wider Western Cape so badly that it is highly unlikely the damage will be undone in time for the 2011 local government elections. The stepchildren of South African history, coloured people, are bound to deliver a victory to the ruling Democratic Alliance once again.
But how could it have happened that the majority of people there — who have historically been an organic part of the oppressed and exploited people of this country — could vote repeatedly against the elsewhere powerful party of national liberation?
And why and how did it happen that for the first time in the “third world” an oppressed and exploited people voted for their centuries-long enslavers and oppressors during the first democratic election in 1994? Furthermore, why did this happen in a city that gave birth to the powerful ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983? There are several interrelated reasons for this brutal irony.
One: the biggest strategic mistake the ANC made in the Western Cape after it was unbanned was to push for the premature disbanding of the UDF in 1991. Many in the ANC, especially the returning exile leaders, saw the UDF as a potential threat. This move created a vacuum — the ANC was then far from being firmly and securely re-established after decades of illegality — which the then ruling National Party assiduously exploited. The result was that the Nats won the 1994 election in the Western Cape with a comfortable majority.
The UDF — the largest and most progressive nonracial mass formation in the history of Western Cape politics and which openly supported the ANC — should have been retained until after the first democratic election.
Two: having lived in Cape Town for a long period and having closely followed developments there over the years, I am convinced that coloured people today are so alienated from the ANC’s narrow Africanist majoritarian chauvinism (but ironically made worse in a province where they are still a majority, though considerably reduced over the past two decades with the massive influx of job-seeking African people) and so fed up with its interminable and vicious internecine strife that most would rather cast their votes for the DA.
The coloured people are very much about showing ANC politicians a point at election time, often in a manner that suggests a degree of vengeance, especially in poorer communities that feel most neglected and marginalised.
Many may not be so much voting for the DA but rather against the ANC and many may give their votes to any party other than the ANC. That is, ironically, the degree of antagonistic alienation towards the party of national liberation in these communities, which was worsened by the bureaucratically contrived and terribly unwise removal of former premier Ebrahim Rasool in 2008, as the results of the 2009 election made abundantly evident.
Three: it often does not seem that the ANC fully appreciates the overwhelmingly working-class and poor profile of the coloured population.
This is a historical fact that is borne out by driving around coloured townships where poverty, unemployment, hardship and related social ills are extensively evident. As a result, the majority coloured working class should be the most natural ally of the African working class — but sadly, they are not. The brutal irony instead is that, largely, these communities do not like or trust each other, except to some degree in the unions where they are jointly members, such as in those affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which is allied to the ANC.
Four: it is arguable that to a considerable extent the continuing racism in coloured working-class communities is the tragic legacy of apartheid, but the thoroughly nonracial character of the UDF — in word and deed — challenged and undid a lot of this damage during the 1980s.
The big problem is that the UDF’s premature disbanding in 1991 severely disrupted and eventually reversed what it had by then achieved in breaking down prejudices in both coloured and African communities, especially where joint action was often taken on a wide range of issues commonly facing working-class communities.
But the ANC has yet to admit in public the indisputable fact that the UDF should not have been disbanded in 1991. Such an admission is key and critical to any strategy by the ANC to win Cape Town and the Western Cape. There may be political reasons for this failure, because it is quite clear that the decision to disband the UDF was driven not by the UDF itself but by, in particular, ANC leaders who had returned from exile. Their basic argument was that since the ANC had been unbanned, why should the UDF continue to exist? Well, with hindsight — based on repeated electoral failures — the UDF had many good reasons to continue to exist, at least until after the first democratic election in 1994.
What today compounds these divisions is the common and often desperate quest for jobs and housing in both African and coloured communities during a worsening social crisis, which has sometimes violently pitted them against each other rather than together confronting municipal and provincial government on a common class programme.
The ANC itself must take the biggest responsibility for what has happened since 1994. Immersed in a chronic and debilitating factionalism, which has often itself had racial overtones, it has alienated the majority coloured working-class vote.
A good dose of serious and sober introspection, retrospection and self-criticism is incumbent upon the ANC, without which it may never win Cape Town and the Western Cape region. For good or bad causes memory is, indeed, a powerful weapon, not easily dislodged.
Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer and commentator