Eusebius McKaiser talks sex, drugs and non-racialism with Mmusi Maimane.
Johannesburg - As I approach the restaurant at OR Tambo International Airport, I feel naked, suddenly.
Not because the prospect of meeting a politician inspires denuding, but because I had realised a few seconds earlier, as I got off the Gautrain, that I had come empty-handed to this interview. No notebook. No pen. No computer. No traditional recording device.
All I had was my smartphone, and a draft email to myself with a bunch of themes and questions, which I intended to explore with Mmusi Maimane, who is possibly the next leader of the Democratic Alliance.
While I quit the pretentious world of corporate South Africa many years ago, and so do not feel any compulsion to signal seriousness when I know I am actually serious about my work, some people take the presence of cameras, notebooks and laptops as necessary evidence of a well-prepared interviewer.
So I grabbed a free copy of The Star instead, felt less naked in doing so, and then planted myself in a corner of the restaurant where Maimane and I might have a chance of hearing each other above the airport noise.
The newspaper was spread all over the table – evidence of a well-prepared interviewer? – and I had just finished an objectionably bland chicken mayonnaise sandwich when Maimane approached. I saw his familiar, warm smile before I saw the rest of him.
He cuts a handsome figure, the kind of dude I hated playing in chess tournaments as a kid because I found it hard to be too competitive in the presence of chess opponents who are easy on the eye, or just really nice people. It’s less challenging to be rough with aesthetically-challenged opponents.
Little wonder a friend had warned me earlier: “Don’t let him persuade you to vote DA!”
But the real reason, I realised, that I was unsure whether to be as relaxed as I always had been with Maimane, is that he is now “an actual politician”.
When we first met in August 2011, in Melville, over a quiet breakfast set up by a hardworking DA party faithful who thought we should meet each other, Maimane was a laatie playing politics. He had no politician’s air about him, and we didn’t really do interviews back then. We simply met up and talked politics like two young South Africans who are as into politics as other young people follow their rugby or their hip-hop artists fighting each other on Twitter.
Maimane was, back then, a would-be politician. Now he is an actual politician. But is he a convincing politician (whatever that might mean to you)? I was here at the airport to seek an answer to exactly that last question by opening up several discussions with him about various issues related to the DA, the country’s broader political landscape and, more specifically, his desire to become, in less than two weeks from now, the next leader of the official opposition.
Maimane greeted me courteously, sat down and ordered breakfast. He had a classic English breakfast, but was disappointed that he could not have a croissant to go with it. Still, I had food envy after my cardboard-like sarmie from a little earlier. I tried hard not to see evidence of “actual politician” everywhere, though it was difficult not to, since I witnessed him being too polite with waiting staff – yes, there is such a thing as excessive politeness – and showing exaggerated interest in the banal stories of supporters who interrupted us a couple of times to gush over him, wish him well and politely ask him to take a photo with them.
I never saw this Maimane before. He is now recognisable across the country, and politics is a popularity game, so you can’t blame him for acting like the politician he has become. It did mean, however, a slight shift in the structure and tone of our conversation from previous times.
I helped by being business-like: He declared, after I had asked, that we have about 40 minutes for our chat, and then he must run; in turn, I sketched the themes and questions I wished to explore with him on this occasion, and started out on the first one of these, a question about “values”.
Does Maimane have his own vision?
I say to Maimane that I have not yet heard him articulate his own vision, his own description of what drives him, ideologically.
In all the interviews in which he had been asked what a Maimane-led DA would be about, he has so far always deferred to the party’s new values document. But that document – about whose content I have written before- was crafted before he announced that he was running to be the next leader of the party, and so it can’t really be said to give us an insight into his own vision. It is a party document that comes out of party-specific processes and structures. I want to know what Maimane is about.
Maimane agrees with me. He then sketches his own vision, using several analogies.
He tells me that he has a vision of “destroying South Africa’s Berlin Wall”. Our Berlin Wall separates the “economically included from the economically excluded”. Despite nodding with comprehension, I am offered a second analogy.
“It’s a bit like driving on the M1. One the one side is Sandton, and on the other side is Alexandra, and the two do not meet.”
That societal divide has to be broken down, he tells me. Of course, where the analogies themselves break down, despite being vivid and dramatic, is that we do not wholly live apart as South Africans. It is worse: My domestic worker travels from Alex to my apartment in Sandton, earns peanuts compared to me, peers into my middle-class life, washes and irons our clothes, cleans the flat spotlessly, and then returns to relative poverty in Alex after work. Her poorer, crowded and more conservative world isn’t separated by a Berlin Wall from my sparse, quiet, liberal Sandton-world.
My world depends on her cheap existence, depends on her easing my middle-class lifestyle, and facilitating my routines, and deprioritising her own dreams and secret goals that she values deeply but which she might never realise.
This matters because it shows that while Maimane is not worse than other politicians, he certainly isn’t a clear break from what we are used to. If he was a clear break from the usual suspects, then the public speaking impact of a dramatic analogy would be less important to him than full and accurate material analysis of the relationship between Sandton and Alexandra.
Still, the most obvious puzzle about his reflections on the different worlds South Africans live in is that he never really sketched me his own values, and political ideology, as I had invited him to do. He had almost forgotten what I had asked, so caught up had he become in his Berlin Wall analogy, and in the end all he had done was to have shared with me a truism instead: that if we do not find jobs for the unemployed, our country will continue to be an eyesore when we travel on the M1.
I agree. And surely so would his main opponent for the leadership job, Wilmot James? I still don’t know Maimane’s distinctive vision or political ideology. But maybe visionary leadership is passé? I don’t know.
Social Policy
Our most animated conversation was probably about social policy. I don’t know if I caught Maimane off-guard here but there was an unusual number of grammatical pauses during this part of our conversation. I told Maimane that there’s an imperfect test of how committed someone really is to liberalism by asking what their views are of various social policy debates: sex work, drugs, assisted suicide, etc.
The idea isn’t that one and only one view constitutes a liberal or the liberal view, but rather that certain kinds of reasons are more or less liberal than others.
Being a good sport (translation: Maimane isn’t an aesthetically-challenged interviewee), I told him upfront what my agenda was when we started talking social policy. I wanted to see just how liberal he was; and, in addition, I wanted to see how Maimane’s Christian ethics – he is a preacher in his non-political life – sits next to his liberal leanings.
Maimane thinks sex work should be decriminalised, and even regrets some of the ways in which the DA government in the Western Cape responds to sex work, and sex workers. It ought to be entirely one’s own choice whether or not one wants to sell sex for monetary compensation, and the law shouldn’t police one’s choices on this matter.
I confess that this warmed my liberal heart.
Maimane hinted that if any of his children engaged in sex work one day that it might be a different matter to him then, but he at least distinguished his family politics from public policy.
On the other two sample social policy debates, his answers were less clear-cut.
He is not sure if marijuana, for example, should be legalised. He can see the importance of individuals having a say in what they want to puff on, or what flavour cookies they want to chow, but he thinks that the state may have an interest in stopping itself from picking up the costs of drug addiction.
His worry is that a drug like marijuana could be a gateway to harder drugs and that the public health costs that society would shoulder must compete with the rights of individuals to smoke whatever they choose to smoke.
I didn’t pursue Maimane’s response because I share his method here: It isn’t intrinsically illiberal to think a particular drug’s casual usage possibly shouldn’t be legalised.
The balance between the ethical entitlements of the individual and legitimate societal interest in reducing the social consequences of self-harming, must be struck, and it is struck by having regard for the empirical facts about the impact of drugs on individuals, families and society-at-large.
Maimane seems to assume here, I thought, that the social disadvantages will probably outweigh the gain of individual autonomy being respected, but at least he wasn’t settled on the question, mindful that there are empirical assumptions that need to be fully tested.
Similarly, he tells me that the regulatory framework for assisted suicide would need to be very carefully investigated and considered before he would feel comfortable to vote in favour of assisted suicide.
Again, I wasn’t interested in the granular detail, to be honest, because both Maimane and I did not have nexus facts at our disposal. How the state guards against undue pressures that lead someone to falsely communicate a desire to hasten the end of their life, is crucial.
Someone who is going through excruciating pain and terminal illness, for example, might genuinely wish to die sooner rather than later. But, equally, perverse factors like the financial burden of staying alive, might lead someone to choose to die when in reality they wish they did not have the option to die sooner than Mother Nature intended.
Something jumped out at me as we chatted about this application of liberal ethical principles to tricky social policy questions: Maimane hasn’t given this stuff much, if any, thought before. Sure he has his own personal intuitions, but I don’t think he has hit the pause button, stepped away from the minutiae of party politics, and thought long and hard about what a liberal might think about such policy questions.
No doubt some supporters of Maimane will point out that many other politicians are in the same boat. Agreed. But isn’t your candidate meant to bowl us over? You don’t do that by telling us that your candidate is just another politician. He is meant to set a new standard, no?
The most interesting bit of our discussion, and the part that I would have thought would really be good PR for Maimane, I am unable to report on because it was off the record. So telling you, without showing you, will be tricky. But put it this way: Maimane convincingly, and gently, explained to me that I had made rough, false assumptions about Christian ethics.
In reality, his own views on Christian hermeneutics are not conservative. He differs with his wife, for example, on gay rights. He is, he tells me, fully supportive of gay rights.
A crystal clear example of his commitment caught me pleasantly by surprise. If I was his adviser, I would have tried persuading him to not self-censor the example. But he prefaced the example by marking it “not for reporting”.
I tell you why I mention this at all: Because if you have a principled commitment to liberal theological positions, then why would you think twice about sharing examples of when your convictions were demonstrated, practically?
Answer: Maimane is calculating now, thinking tactically, like a politician, and not quite the man, as he later insists, who is solely driven by a commitment to principle. If the latter was true, he would happily tell you himself what it is I am being cheekily vague about here. Put differently, I think in 2011 he would have told me the story without fear of it being reported; but now he is an actual politician.
Is he a liberal, then, on social policy? Hard to say. While he passes the informal liberalism-test on sex work, the extent to which he prioritised societal interests, and regulatory frameworks, in our discussions on drugs and assisted suicide was more ambiguous. I would have liked to hear a more passionate and distinctively liberal articulation of individual autonomy when it comes to drugs and assisted suicide, but then again my brand of liberalism isn’t everyone’s cuppa, I guess.
Maimane tells me that he certainly thinks of himself as someone running for the leadership position of a liberal party. But he doesn’t think it makes tactical sense to bang on about the word ‘liberal’ all the time. The reason for this is that the word is divisive inside and outside the party. And so, he tells me, when he refers more often to concepts like the free-market he knows that he thereby signals an actual commitment to liberalism without invoking a word that divides people. And he certainly thinks voting delegates care about these things: “Voters want to be attracted to you politically and that means, in part, having a philosophical identity that they like.”
It isn’t that he is disinterested in an explicit debate about liberalism. But without mentioning names, he tells me that people who constantly go on about what liberalism means, and whether or not the party is still liberal, are not “inviting debate”, which is why he ignores them. These critics simply want to use the word liberal “in order to admonish” other people rather than to set up, and invite, genuine discussion and debate. He is probably right. Critics and analysts, myself included, are not beyond motivated reasoning. But whether his own reported remarks and views mark him out as a liberal is for supporters, delegates and the public to decide.
Non-racialism
I couldn’t end our discussion without asking him what on earth he means by “non-racialism”.
Both him and Eastern Cape DA leader Athol Trollip have been going on about non-racialism over the past week. But I know that Trollip is clear what he means by it: colour-blindness.
When Trollip competed with Lindiwe Mazibuko for the position of DA parliamentary leader, he told me bluntly in a radio interview that the race of the candidates should not even be a tie-breaker between them if they are both competent. He also added that he wants poor black voters to vote him for as a competent leader and politician rather than seeing him in racial terms. Recently he has captured this view by urging a return to Mandela-era motifs of a rainbow society.
Maimane, in my view, gave me a thoroughly dishonest view here. He tells me that for him non-racialism means, first and foremost, being recognised and seen as black but not being oppressed on the basis of his skin colour. If that means, he added after I explained my understanding of the Trollip-view, that he differs from Trollip, then so be it. But I told Maimane that I think he is adjusting his public view to suit what McKaiser thinks about race.
I seriously mean that, as indulgent as it reads. Not one – and anyone can check this claim – reference to non-racialism in the past ten days or so, on the part of Maimane that is, came with the explanation that by non-racialism he means that he wants to be recognised racially. I don’t even know if it is coherent to define non-racialism as ‘recognising that I am black’. In fact, in other interviews that I followed closely, as I study Maimane’s career, he explicitly contrasted his use of “non-racialism” with the ANC’s “racial nationalism”. If he isn’t a race nationalist, why should I believe that his definition of non-racialism is the same as many in the ANC from whom he distances himself on other platforms, in other interviews?
Anyways, non-racialism cannot mean “recognising that I am black”. It is the opposite: a call for racial categories to either be eliminated, or, less radically, for racial categories to carry as little moral and policy weight as possible, as part of a project aimed at transcending the history and impact of racism.
I do not for a moment believe that if this question was posed to Maimane by, say, the editor of an Afrikaans, traditionally-white, newspaper, that he would have given that answer. He was gaming.
But he didn’t stop there. He also added, for good measure, that the difference between him and Wilmot James is that he, Maimane, “recognises race as a proxy for disadvantage” while James, much to Maimane’s “shock”, thinks that “disadvantaged whites and disadvantaged blacks should be treated the same”. [Read interview with James here]
Maimane says that when he heard James recently argue this view he – Maimane - almost fell off his chair.
So, there you have it: Maimane both hates racial nationalism, and is an advocate of non-racialism, but a non-racialism fan who self-identifies as a black person and wants “first and foremost” to be seen as black.
You, dear reader, can try a) to square this circle; and b) match this answer with the ways in which Maimane handles race on platforms where he is not being engaged by a writer who is a race realist. I don’t believe him. He is as colour-blind as Wilmot and Trollip, and should own that colour-blind position and learn how best to articulate and defend it. After all, there are no mathematical truths in race discourse, so why adjust your responses to the context of a conversation?
A parting shot: On public speaking, and Obama-imitation
By now Maimane was in danger of missing his flight, and I was two delicious cappuccinos down, so we hurriedly settled the bill, and I tried to squeeze in my final question as we walked out of the restaurant.
I wanted to know, finally, whether it bothers him that some think he is imitating Obama with the “hope” theme of his campaign and the motivational speaking devices. I also suggested to him that some people think his accent changes depending on who he speaks to or where he is speaking.
His response? “When people say I try to sound like Obama, what they really want me to do is to speak and sound like President Jacob Zuma! Why would I?”
I wished him well on his journey to Cape Town, and he laughed at me for giving him a hard time. I must say that, unlike the Iron Lady of Cape Town whom he will likely succeed, he has a healthily thick skin for engagement, and I hope that remains so in years to come.
He joked that I liked another senior DA politician more than him, but I think he doesn’t realise that I am not in the business of liking or disliking politicians. I am in the business of observing them, engaging them and constructing argument for deeply subjective views I hold about them.
As he walks off, I try my luck one last time: “Do you think Makashule Gana will beat Athol Trollip for the position of chairperson?” He tells me who will win, in his view, choosing a name that is different to the one he then says he will, in fact, vote for. He is prepared, in his view, to back the person who will likely lose that contest.
I can see he is pleased to have surprised me. But I am not a voting delegate. Let’s see what happens in Port Elizabeth next weekend and whether this pastor-politician has accurate predictive powers.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.