Cold, calculated unity in a cause that has no substance

It is heart-warming to read about the toenadering between entrenched royalty and litigious republicans making common cause of land reform at a time and in a country where skin-deep identity is advanced as casus belli.

Yet there is nothing strange about parties that identify along racial markers to delineate differences and then put those aside to achieve a shared goal. In an SA context of war, for instance, black warriors joined white warriors against the Boers not long after their own war against British imperial forces, as did blacks join white kommandos against the invading uitlanders.

In the trenches faith is revived and usually trumps facile notions of supremacy; when their intertwined bones bleach on the veld, who knows who belongs to what.

Now the papers are reporting the imminent agreement between King Goodwill Zwelithini and rights lobbyist AfriForum to stand together against the ANC’s intention to promote an amendment to the constitution to facilitate expropriation without compensation. Does this mean SA’s warrior tribes are getting together again?

Probably not. Sorting out which bit goes where through the media is going to be tricky. Business Day ran a story by veteran Reuters reporter Ed Stoddard in which he described AfriForum as a right-wing nationalist group and Zwelithini as a monarch in control of 2.8million hectares of land through the Ingonyama Trust. No mention of the washing of the spears, nor of bittereinders fighting to the last man.

And then there is the gem in which Mail & Guardian reporter Ra’eesa Pather calls AfriForum an “Afrikaner supremacist group”, while neglecting to describe Zwelithini as an unelected ruler who has threatened to use land reform to manipulate elections in a constitutional democracy.

So it goes for most of the reports across the mainstream spectrum, none reflecting on the possibility of toenadering (roughly rapprochement). Not because there is none, but because it is old hat.

The simpler possibility is that at a time of cultural insecurity, as reflected in identity politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, for want of a snappier platitude. For AfriForum, having actual blacks as partners in a cause is a political windfall impossible to resist. Ditto for Zwelithini because, you know, the gold standard is still white people with lawyers.

There is more to it, of course. The two parties represent deeply conservative people. They uphold traditional values and they resent change. Monarchists rule by virtue of their hold on the land; AfriForum’s constituency hopes to retain some sort of authority by virtue of holding sway on the land issue. Neither party is willing to bend the knee and swear allegiance to a unified state and a sovereign nation greater than the sum of all cultural identities of SA people.

So they unite dishonestly in a cause that has no substance. As former president Kgalema Motlanthe put it in his high-level panel report, “land hunger and dispossession serve as the basis of national grievances”. National grievances, economic ones mostly, will not be alleviated by perpetuating SA’s vast peasant class in fealty to traditional leadership. Nor will it be by creating enemies and uniting against them.

What is missing here is anything heart-warming. Cold, calculated expedience will hold only as long as either party gets what it wants, and in this case that possibility is already dead in the water. Race as a cultural indicator is passé. It never came to anything meaningful and it sure as hell won’t now. Even AfriForum agrees.

As for monarchy and the supposedly traditional culture from which it draws its rationale ... monarchy stands in the way of modernity, predicated as it is on supplication and patronage. The whim of a rent-seeking despot never has been and never will be in the interest of the people so subjected.

SA is so much more than tribes, tin-pot despots and delusional nationalists. Their mixed-up bones will bleach on the veld and no one will be able to tell them apart, or care.