To most South Africans the ANC is still the liberation movement of Luthuli, Tambo, Mandela, Sisulu and Hani, says Max du Preez.
Of course it is an insult to call people who voted for the ANC on May 7 clowns, ignorant or stupid. It is understandable that many of those voters would experience such an insult as racist.
If you experience or observe racism, you should loudly protest against it, especially in South Africa with its particular history. There should be no compromise on prejudice and bigotry.
I witnessed many people, most of them white, utter this insult after the election results, on Facebook, Twitter, calls to talk radio and letters to newspapers or on news websites: the ANC is corrupt and useless and those who voted for them are thus fools who deserve more corruption and abuse.
It was, to be honest, interesting to see voters in districts marred by violent protests in the weeks and months before the election vote ANC en masse. This behaviour begged further enquiry and insight. The answer could never have been that these voters were stupid.
I don’t have all the explanations, but I have come up with some answers to my own question.
The ANC is still more national movement than political party, in a way that no other party could ever be. Despite the shortcomings of the leadership, to most South Africans the ANC is still the liberation movement of Luthuli, Tambo, Mandela, Sisulu and Hani.
Afrikaners should understand this better than anyone else. The National Party was, to most of them, also such a movement for more than four decades.
My own father was a fair and decent man and his influence saw to it that not one of his children ended up supporting the NP or apartheid. And yet he was an active member of the NP and voted for it until 1994. Voting for any party but the NP would, to him, have meant betrayal of his father, a proud soldier during the Anglo Boer war who spent years in a prisoner-of-war camp in the old Ceylon, and his mother, who spent two traumatic years as a child in a British concentration camp where she lost her mother and sisters.
Take the example of two South Africans that most of us now accept as good, patriotic citizens: former cabinet ministers of the apartheid era Roelf Meyer and Leon Wessels. Both played a constructive role during the transition period and after 1994.
And yet they both stuck to the NP right to the end, despite believing during the last decade of NP rule that apartheid was an abomination.
We’re talking about more than memory. We’re talking about a mix of history, identity, culture and a sense of belonging.
My guess is that most black South Africans give the ANC credit for a new sense of nationhood and national pride – and black pride.
The ANC is the party that brought affirmative action, black economic empowerment and created a new black middle class. Despite its failures, it has hugely improved the quality of life of most South Africans, and 16 million of the poor get social grants.
Some time ago I asked a prominent black political commentator of a liberal persuasion why he wasn’t going to vote for the DA. He agreed with the DA’s principles and policies, he replied, but voting for it would be saying that black people couldn’t govern a modern democracy.
Last week Eyewitness News published a cartoon ostensibly parroting this view that ANC voters were sheep-like. EWN and the cartoonists immediately apologised when the ANC objected, admitting that the cartoon was open to misinterpretation and shouldn’t have been used.
But they really should have been more sensitive, especially after the brouhaha over The Spear painting of President Jacob Zuma.
Having said all that, let’s not fool ourselves. The ANC’s reaction to the cartoon was pure opportunism.
It mobilised and organised the protests, led by spokesman Zizi Kodwa, and whipped up emotions against EWN and the media in general. It led to utterances by protesters and by ANC supporters on social media that the Primedia building should be burned down and that all media houses should be nationalised.
“White journalists” and the “white-dominated media” were blamed, despite the fact that most South African journalists and editors are black and most media houses black-owned – with the SABC the biggest media institution of all.
It came just a few days after extraordinary attacks on the media by, among others, Zuma, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe and ministers Malusi Gigaba and Blade Nzimande. To me, it smacked of a reckless new anti-media campaign.
Perhaps it is also time for ANC politicians to stop calling black DA supporters Uncle Toms, tea girls, and other derogatory names.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Pretoria News