As the Cape Independence Advocacy Group got ready to march back to the early 1800s this week, I found myself watching a strange video on its Twitter page.
A very young man with an English accent was standing on a beach holding a large fuzzy microphone, apparently to make it clear he had important things to say and hadn’t just popped over from Oxford for a boys’ weekend away with Chalky and Bunting and the rest of the lads.
“At the heart of all the Western Cape’s problems,” he said, “is one criminal organisation: the African National Congress.”
I don’t know how Wednesday’s march went, but the pictures on Twitter made it look quite festive, a bit like the swivel-eyed love-child of Brexit and Africa Burn.
Now, readers of this column will know I haven’t sent Christmas cards to Luthuli House for many years now, but even I had to blanch at the dishonesty and ahistorical chutzpah of his claim.
According to the CIAG’s own website, the five largest problems facing the province are poverty, unemployment, racialism, lawlessness and ANC rule. Fair enough. But you don’t have to be a historian to know that all of those crises have their roots fixed firmly in SA’s colonial and apartheid past. I love slagging off the ANC as much as the next guy, but blaming the party for the legacies of the last 300 years is like blaming gangrene around a wound for blasting the hole in the first place.
The young bloke, however, was plunging onwards.
“The people of the Western Cape have never elected them,” he insisted, “and in every election we make it more clear that we don’t want them.”
Again, I don’t know who this person is, so I can’t speculate on whether he was lying deliberately or just revealing his ignorance. Perhaps it’s best to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is too young to remember that the Western Cape voted for the ANC in both 1999 and 2004. And while it is true that the ANC’s share of the Western Cape vote dropped from 2014 to 2019, it actually increased between 2009 and 2014.
Then again, facts don’t really matter to people who have bought into a dream.
I don’t know how Wednesday’s march went, but the pictures on Twitter made it look quite festive, a bit like the swivel-eyed love-child of Brexit and AfrikaBurn; a safe space for fantasists to let all their isolationist, nativist fantasies hang out in public, safely contained by the system they’re trying to leave.
On Thursday, however, I was reminded of just how wild these fantasies are as the City of Cape Town got on with trying to secure a much smaller but much more real and valuable sort of independence.
It’s early days yet, but the relative silence around mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is speaking volumes. In the five months he has been in office there have been no scenes of chair-throwing or jug-smashing, no orgies of outrage, no Twitter storms, no pronouncements of his inherent evil by opponents of the DA (or by closet DA voters). All I’ve heard are quietly approving testimonials by apolitical people who know him, and cautious praise from people who’ve worked with him.
On Thursday, he was back in the news again, this time quietly announcing that the National Treasury has apparently ended years of stonewalling and has agreed to allow Cape Town to conduct a feasibility study into the city running its own rail network.
Of course, this could go nowhere. Enoch Godongwana allowing Hill-Lewis to crunch the numbers is one thing; devolving the authority of the state to the only non-ANC province is another.
It is, however, a clear win for Hill-Lewis and for the beleaguered, self-sabotaging DA, and a lesson to secessionists everywhere in how you actually get things done in the real world: carefully, slowly, with massive amounts of consultation and, most importantly of all, with the cautious approval of the government of the country in which you live and whose constitution you protect and serve.
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