Zille’s nostalgia is no basis for a political programme
She’s been doing a bit of international travel in 2017. In March, as we all know, she was in Singapore. I was nonetheless surprised to espy Western Cape Premier Helen Zille in the small Belgian village of Damme this week; had she not just returned to Cape Town after a trade visit to Ghana?
Still, there she was — or so I thought — outside the decaying walls of an old Flemish church, caught in a moment of precarious balance on a large ball. Okay, I’ll admit, I knew it wasn’t her. What caught my eye was a sculptural installation in an open-air exhibition by Alain Cool.
Yet I felt that I recognised an allegorical Helen Zille when I saw the title: De man die de tijd stil wil zetten (The man who wants to stop time).
The figure in the work is a kind of inverse Atlas — as if, instead of holding the world on his shoulders, he is trying to stand on it, presumably to keep the globe from turning. But the earth spins relentlessly on. Those who attempt to halt it risk falling off.
Cool’s sculpture made me think of Zille because, the night before I encountered it, I had read her tweet about how watching Johnny Clegg perform in his Final Journey World Tour “filled me with nostalgia for a time when it was ‘progressive’ to build bridges, not break them down”. Now, I’m all for nostalgia when it comes to music. The radio station I listen to most of the time when driving around Belgium is Nostalgie. It delivers on its promise: shameless nostalgia for Gen X listeners who came of age in the 1980s.
It occurs to me, however, that a musician wouldn’t want to be consigned to stations such as Nostalgie — and I’m pretty sure that Johnny Clegg is uncomfortable about the nostalgia of Zille and her ilk.
When Clegg was building bridges in the 1980s, SA was lurching between states of emergency as the National Party government clung to power. Zille may feel nostalgic about that period because as an anti-apartheid activist, she felt unambiguously on the right side of history; nowadays the moral terrain in terms of racial dynamics is too complicated for her liking.
But nostalgia is no basis for a political programme.
In a follow-up tweet, Zille mused: “Sad thing is: today, Johnny Clegg would probably be accused of ‘cultural appropriation’.” Well, actually, no. Clegg’s artistic and linguistic isiZulu immersion was precisely the opposite of the superficiality, superiority and opportunism that the term “cultural appropriation” properly entails. One can celebrate Clegg as a musician and remain sceptical of “the uses of nostalgia” among white South Africans.
I would really rather not have to write about Zille’s Twitter feed. Yet someone in Zille’s position – given her institutional role and her public voice, never mind her influence on “one million permanently dyspeptic Twitter followers”, to quote Peter Bruce – must be called out every time she makes some lazy, sniping comment about race in SA.
Likewise, I have no choice but to oppose DA figures of Zille’s faction who complain relentlessly about critiques of ongoing white privilege (their favourite tactic is to use “identity politics” as a derogatory phrase; “woke” is their nastiest sardonic adjective). Most recently, in the wake of neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, Zille minion and writer at the DA Jacques Maree declared triumphantly that “toxic identity politics has emboldened and encouraged toxic right-wing hatred”. Another strand of this specious argument holds that white nationalists are only responding to a climate in which white people are made to feel hyperconscious of their race when they would rather be able to say “I’m colour-blind” or “I don’t think about race” — a bit of wisdom from Brendan O’Neill (Spiked Online) that also got Zille’s stamp of approval.
Don’t be fooled by the wistful tone: this is the truly toxic practice of false rainbowism, behind which hides a desire to avoid the hard work of living in the present rather than in a fabricated past.