Cape Town - DA leader Helen Zille says she is far from discouraged by fierce criticism from some quarters of the party’s “Know Your DA” campaign and is only too happy for the controversy to rage right up until election time.
“We love a controversy,” she said on Monday at the launch of a film of the party’s repackaged history, which has been mocked by the ANC as trying to “borrow” Struggle credentials.
The 13-minute film shows DA leaders such as Zille, Patricia de Lille, Joe Seremane and Wilmot James in their younger days, when they were variously members of anti-apartheid organisations such as the Black Sash, the United Democratic Front and the Pan Africanist Congress. It also features leaders of the anti-apartheid Struggle, including Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko.
But there is a strong focus on the work of the two Helens - Suzman and Zille - in opposing apartheid.
Suzman is shown “confronting the leviathans of the National Party” - as Zille put it - during her 13-year tenure as the Progressive Party’s only member of the apartheid Parliament.
Zille is credited with exposing the truth about Biko’s death in detention while she was a reporter for the Rand Daily Mail and for volunteering her home as a safe house for activists on the run from the security forces.
DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko said at the launch in Cape Town on Monday that the party did not “spend a lot of time looking back”, but it could not allow ANC leaders such as Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin to stand up as they had on Workers’ Day and “tell lies about who we are”.
Zille said the reason the campaign reflected the views of ANC leaders such as Mandela and Albert Luthuli on Suzman’s work was not that the DA needed ANC validation, but to expose current ANC leaders who wanted to deny the DA’s roots. The party had come to realise that many people did not “know the truth” and it would be starting the election campaign “on a losing wicket” if it did not correct this.
The film was to be used in a nationwide programme of “house meetings” where DA activists would invite people “who had never before heard our untold story or who had never voted for the DA” to view it in nine of the official languages, Mazibuko said.
The aim was to reach a million people directly in the next two months.
Zille said, however, this was just a “pre-election” phase to “sort out that little matter of the past” and the election campaign itself would be run on the future and what people could expect from the party in government.
Political Bureau