Opinion: Inside the ANC's well-oiled hate machine

22 July 2016 - 15:46 By Gareth van Onselen
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Gwede Mantashe, President Jacob Zuma and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa dancing during the ANC election manifesto launch in Port Elizabeth on 16 April 2016.
Gwede Mantashe, President Jacob Zuma and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa dancing during the ANC election manifesto launch in Port Elizabeth on 16 April 2016.
Image: Simphiwe Nkwali / Sunday Times.

That's what happens when you cannot win hearts and minds with evidence and reason. All that remains is fear and many ANC supporters trade exclusively in it, writes Gareth van Onselen

The final few weeks of almost any South African electoral campaign are defined by one thing: the ANC goes into race fear-mongering mode. This election is no different, and, led by President Jacob Zuma, like clockwork the party has begun to churn out the kinds of statements you would more readily associate with a 2007 ANC Youth League rally.

Historically, it has worked a treat. The primary target is the DA and, typically, the kinds of sentiments expressed imply the DA is fundamentally racist, born of or embodying the National Party and that black South Africans have an ethnic/historical/cultural/religious obligation to vote for the ANC. If they don’t, well, SA will return to apartheid.

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"Surely none of you wishes to see Jones back?", Squealer asks in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Of course, none of the animals do. And so it is in SA. There is a huge, susceptible audience for that kind of threat and, traditionally, the ANC stokes up whatever latent distrust or prejudice is available to it, until it burns red hot. It is true, the formula has lost some of its bite over the past decade but, in the absence of any reasonable, evidence-based argument in its favour, its pretty much all the ANC knows.

"After we liberated ourselves they came together, this name DA, Democratic Alliance, it was an alliance between the Progressive Party and the National Party," said Zuma last week, "if you are a black person, you join that party really?

"In China, the Chinese rule and in India, Indians are in power. It’s only here in SA that we allow others to govern," Zuma said this week and according to the Cape Argus, which wins this week’s award for Tweet of the Week.

Aaaaah, "the other", a favourite refuge of the racially nationalistic scoundrel.

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The irony is that for the ugliness it tries to attribute to the DA, seen together, it paints the opposite picture: of a majority party support base as one-dimensionally, racially stereotypical as its worst imagined idea of the DA. If it is archetypes and identity-based assumptions SA is currently at war with, the ANC factory of hate should get a bit more attention.

This is an edited extract - read Gareth van Onselen's full column on BDlive

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