by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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Mputhumi
Ntabeni

QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Our (South African) elections have come and gone. As expected the ANC (African National Congress) government gained an overwhelming endorsement. It won the election by a land-sliding majority of seventy percent. The opposition parties are again left with questions of their inability to gain inroads to the majority of black voters. The major opposition party, the DA (Democratic Alliance) was gunning for a twenty to twenty five percent of the voters. Instead it got only about thirteen percent, which was an improvement from the last election's ten percent.

The opposition parties' impasse in breaking through black majority votes is largely seen as the baggage of history. It is argued, often ad nauseam, that the majority of black people have elephantine memories. That black people still carry over wounds from the apartheid era, hence they still regard only the ANC as their liberator and hope for the future.

Be that as it may, the DA, led by Mr Tony Leon, does not make things easy for itself. Mr. Leon's politics have an uncanny habit of working themselves neatly into a corner. In the 1999 campaign it was the 'Fight Back' strategy, which most black people saw as stereotyping the country's politics into whites against blacks, enlightenment against the hordes of coming barbarians. In the last campaign it was the cynical sophistication of 'South Africa Deserves Better.' In the eyes of most black voters these were politics based only on attacking what the ANC does wrong, which made the DA unattractive.

Black people saw the DA as little more than a suspicious parasite living on the shortcomings of the ANC. The DA is suspicious that South African democracy is heading for the democracy of popular sovereignty, i.e. supreme power in the hands of the majority, which is to say power answerable only to itself and hence unconstrained by any other force.

This concern goes as far back as de Tocqueville, the French philosopher historian who investigated American democracy for nine months between, 1831-1832. Tocqueville's investigations amounted to a book called Democracy in America. Though Tocqueville claimed to support democracy, he feared that its untrammeled popular authority could all too easily devolve into tyranny of the majority. The DA, under the leadership of Tony Leon, uses the same concerns as its trump card, promoting itself as a countervailing force to the ANC's volcanic impulse.

There's another concern the DA shares with Americans. Tocqueville saw American democracy as having been born immaculately out of European birth pangs, that is without having to endure democratic revolution and "to have been born equal rather than become so." Tocoqueville saw America's as not just non-revolutionary, but anti "Men in democracies." This is to say the Americans want moderate change and replacement of things of secondary importance, but are extremely careful not to tamper with things of primary importance. "They like change but dread revolutions."

The DA shares this American fear for radical democracy and anything smacking of fundamental upheaval. This comes from the attitude springing from an obsessive politics of business (acquisition), of wanting change so long as it does not disturb the status quo in running business.

South Africa is not the US.

Non-radical change will perpetuate the status quo of the majority trapped in abject poverty. The majority of black South Africans are privy to this. That is why each election they become more convinced that the only party really looking out for their interests, and not the interests of the business class, is the ANC.

The Jacobean ideology, where anything is allowed so long as it is of the interests of the majority has its shortcomings. It usually amounts to a tyranny by the majority. But when democracy fears its social force, [chooses to becom e] an anxious state, as is obvious with DA politics, it has the uncanny habit of limiting itself to the point of non-effectiveness and eventually collapse.

Tocqueville devoted his life to searching for the means to structure democracy from within so that popular power would be simultaneously supreme yet constrained by some higher concept of law or morality. For most of us, the constitution is enough restraining force for the abuse of democracy, whether welling up from below or above. There's nothing wrong with a one party state so long as it is the will of the people, and it has healthy respect for rule of law. After all governments are made up of one parties, and democracy by definition, is sovereignty of the majority. Those who profess themselves as democrats should ask questions when they find themselves at variantce with the majority of seventy percent of their fellow countrymen. It is arrogance to suppose you're the only person who knows what's good for the country and the rest are just fumbling.

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Most people have difficulty pining down Tony Leon's politics, but I think it is safe to say what he actually represents is a paradigmatic example of the liberal mind in all its dodgy enthusiasms. He stands as a warning on the wrong turns political thought can take when untethered from any sense of reality besides its lingering sense of superiority complex. For all his talk of South Africa deserving better, he shows contempt for the black masses he wants to recruit by promulgating middle-class ideals these masses don't fit in. Looking at his conflation of words and action in his black township rallies, one comes to the opinion that he does not truly engage with the aims and worries of the masses. He merely acknowledges their suffering by his politics of attachment (sympathising with them for his own sense of moral importance than for any real feeling he has for the masses). His sympathies are just a projection of his own ego.

Tony Leon's political sympathies [could be taken as] just a counteracting strategy for responding to the conciliatory political approach of ANC politics. In an age when most people are disillusioned with politicians, treating the concerns of the masses seriously is seen as inclusive and democratic. But assuming or adapting to popular perceptions for only public relation's sake is just as contemptuous of the public opinion as dismissing it. In the long run it may even be more damaging, as I'm sure Tony is finally learning.

South Africa is a country still in transition. The wounds of the past are still fresh in most people, especially black people. Confrontational politics may cause everything to topple over. That is why the ANC, together with most people who recognize this reality, one which is the leader of the National Party, the party who refined and legalized apartheid, chose the path of reconciliation until at least the wounds heal, which won't happen in my life time.

What's worse is the manner by which Leon continues to refuse to recognise the 'axial lines' of South African politics. Unwittingly or deliberately racialism, even racism, is endemic in the political attitudes and structures of South African society. Leon would like to ignore this for specious "common values." What is common between a person living in a township shack and Tony Leon in his white suburb if he won't even acknowledge that the attitude of acquisition is chiefly responsible for their plight? Besides, political parties share similar values and aspirations in most things in our era. It's difficult to distinguish one from the other, except by attitude and tone, which always betrays motives.

The truth is, South African life is non-integrated, and race encroaches in everything. The likes of Leon exacerbates this problem by equating the defence of freedom of speech, academic independence, and so forth, with upholding Western values. Perhaps they share the opinion of people like Joe La Palombara that "to democratise means to Westernise."

Mr. Leon's compeer, RW Johnson writing in the British magazine Prospect last June, laid bare the attitude that makes their likes to be misfits in postcolonial Africa:

If you are white, no positive, active role is left to you. Either you accommodate yourself to the unreasonable or you play out your life in some futile back alley. You are doomed to this by the disgraceful history of your kind. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not, but it is the way things are.

This cloying attitude of disassociation; this disapproving tone of a don for all things not inspired by liberal mores is what makes them misfits. Its major problem is in visualizing only a single universal scale of things, and seeing all that does not tally with it as 'unreasonable.' It is a scoffing superiority complex forever feeling itself more enlightened above everyone else who is not liberal.

The painful truth is that it smacks of subtle racism in the South African context where liberals are largely white. I see no hope of ever placating them into the conciliatory path the majority of South Africans have chosen for their country. Perhaps it's time we applied the rule of FIFO (fit in or fuck off).