PATRICK BULGER | Welcome to SA, where elections issues aren’t about race, yet somehow still are

Why has an election that should be all about the state of our metros and towns degenerated into a racial slanging match, with the DA cast as a party that promotes white interests, and the ANC presenting itself as having the welfare of the black majority at heart, even though that is clearly not always the case? One might have thought the well-publicised ruin of municipalities by ANC councillors, and the corruption scandals, would have made this an easy election for the opposition. But this has not been the case, possibly because there has never been an election in SA that has not been about race.

Conversely, though, if our politics were only about race, why has the EFF, with its overt promise of a full-scale racial reversal of roles, not managed to break through its 15% ceiling? Its leader, Julius Malema, has not been shy to capitalise on racial tensions, and much of his political narrative is based on the idea that 1994 represented anything but a break from the past. White privilege remains intact, even with an ANC government in power. It’s a persuasive narrative, another chapter in the epic saga of dispossession.

Could it be, though, that while race infuses our politics, and probably always will, it is not the only consideration in people’s legitimate aspirations for their and their children’s future? This suggests an underlying racial pragmatism, and a possible foundation upon which to build a fairer society.

For dreamers in the tough game of politics, 27 years after the ANC came to power with an overwhelming majority, and the promise of a reconstruction and development programme, the racial tone of our politics may come as a disappointment. Ditto those who bought the idea of a “Rainbow Nation’’, and who had looked forward to a new era of racial harmony, forgiveness and reconciliation. In this, the person of former president Nelson Mandela provided an icon around whom these ideas could crystallise. Instead, our politics have followed a familiar racial template.

In the 1970s, the hardline Afrikaner Herstigte Nasionale Party routinely used election posters featuring a white girl holding the hand of a woman in a kappie, with the slogan, “Bly wit my Volk”. This tear-jerker message, to “stay white, my people’’, was apparently originated by the arch-architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd. This was racial politics in its most naked form, playing on the fears of whites who rightly foresaw a backlash from their policies. Nowadays the racial message is more subtle.

In the early days of their rule, though, the Nats were unapologetic about furthering not white interests as such, but Afrikaner interests specifically. In later years, in an attempt to further populate the racial laager, they reached out to English-speaking South Africans. The message was clear: as whites, whether Afrikaans or English, we are all in it together.

This suggests an underlying racial pragmatism, and a possible foundation upon which to build a fairer society.

To show their goodwill on the cultural front, Nat organisers would hand out song sheets with old post-war English “favourites’’, like My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean, at their suburban political rallies during elections. No one blushed.

The Nats’ ham-fisted attempt to acculturate the English to their racial cause was a foretaste of later attempts by parties, notably the DA, to try to provide a comfortable cultural milieu for converts from other race groups. Hence Helen Zille’s infamous dance steps, and other cringeworthy efforts to show that, yes, the white man can indeed dance.

In dining rooms across our well-heeled suburbs, the cry that will go out after these elections will be inevitable, and it will be, “How can so many vote for the ANC when the party is corrupt and failing in its basic duty to provide services to residents?’’

In this question one can discern the presence of a delusion about the real nature of the political contest in SA, and the extent to which wishful thinking has replaced sober analysis. The reduction of politics to a mere transactional exchange ignores the role played by history, sentiment and indeed prejudice. Most of all, it overlooks the question of trust and the absence thereof in how white parties are viewed, regardless of their technocratic credentials. They will wonder why the example of DA-run Cape Town does not encourage many more black South Africans to vote for the party.

Perversely, the DA has gone backwards in its embrace of voters who would not traditionally have supported the party. For a start, it ditched a charismatic black leader in Mmusi Maimane for a rather colourless white leader in John Steenhuisen. From the sidelines, Zille has applauded colonialism, with no great uproar from the white rump of the party. Hers is regarded instead as a muscular form of nonracialism.

The DA crows about how it runs Cape Town, but those whites who support it will never concede that Cape Town is already a modern and wealthy city whose administration can draw on a large pool of skills. It has a thriving tourism sector, and with the tech revolution and work at home it is regarded as the city of the future, unlike Johannesburg with its gold-mining legacy, which has put it on the wrong side of history.

In an ideal world, the ANC government would have capitalised on the wave of goodwill and introduced a programme of action that could reshape SA.

Just what is needed to break the racial mould inherited from the past is the burning question in our politics. In an ideal world, the ANC government would have capitalised on the wave of goodwill and introduced a programme of action that could reshape SA. Instead we’ve had the era of state capture and rampant looting at all levels of government, and a failure to ensure proper education and training. Lawlessness has become the hallmark of the ANC government. By its policies and practices, the party inadvertently ensures that historic patterns of inequality and deprivation become ingrained features of our landscape. Little wonder it has resorted to racial politics to obscure the truth.

For its part, the DA talks a nonracial game, but only within the white-led world where privilege is left intact. It has tried to write race out of its policies entirely, suggesting a “colour-blind’’ approach that few beyond the confines of the cloistered Institute of Race Relations take seriously.

This is the racial pattern of our politics, what communist theorists once called “colonialism of a special type’’, which hypothesised that SA’s colonial patterns of power and exploitation differed from classical colonialism only in that the colonists would not, one day, go home.

Yes, we all want a country that is better run than it is now, and where there is real and sustained upliftment for people at the sharp end of centuries of neglect. No one in SA, least of all whites, should take any comfort from the fact that, for now, that dream has been deferred.