A pinch of salt with the flaming outrage
AN advertising spot that shows a South African flag in flames to represent our country’s destruction by the ANC.
What an outrage! We should all unequivocally condemn this monstrous slur on the part of the DA.
For starters, it’s untrue. We all know for a fact that long before the official symbol of the nation could go up in a puff of smoke, an ANC comrade would have stolen it. (Fortunately, there is always another comrade at hand to replace any charred or missing piece of coloured cloth by means of a corrupt multimillion-rand tender.)
The television spot is a computergenerated depiction of a paper flag lying on what appears to be a grill. Over the course of some 33 seconds – as an off-camera voice warns that “life will only get worse” under a “coalition of corruption” between the ANC, a violent EFF and the Zuma faction – the paper spontaneously ignites.
It crisps to a pile of ashes as the black-South African accented voice intones, “This election is about survival”. Then, in response to the words “Unite to rescue South Africa, vote DA”, the flag is miraculously restored to wholeness.
Perhaps not the high point of creative originality, one must say. But not too shabby either. It’s certainly a succinct encapsulation in half a minute of the stark choice confronting voters on May 29.
Our country is demonstrably a wreck; the only point of contention is how, by whom and over what period it conceivably might be resuscitated. Nor is there any doubt that powerful partners in the tripartite alliance favour an alliance with the hard left; at a Worker’s Day rally last week, the president of the Cosatu union federation said as much.
Despite this dire background, or perhaps because of it, the anti-DA backlash has been fierce.
The ANC is outraged, or pretending to be, and there hasn’t been such self-righteous spluttering from the commentariat about what are the acceptable limits to political metaphor and artistic licence for at least a decade.
Ramaphosa wrote in a tweet on the social media platform X that the ad was “treasonous”. “The national flag is a sacred symbol of our unity and existence as a nation and to burn it is despicable. Any organisation that commits such an act, especially in the name of political expediency, is an organisation that seeks to destroy our country, that seeks to destroy our country’s unity and collective identity.”
Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Zizi Kodwa foresees dire consequences. The DA’s advert has the potential to “sow division and hysteria in our nation”.
Kodwa said his department’s director-general, advisers and its legal unit had all been instructed to provide urgent input on legal recourse against this “abhorrent and unpatriotic desecration” of a national symbol.
All this huffing and puffing should be taken with a pinch of salt. There’s about as much chance of DA leader John Steenhuisen seeing the inside of a courtroom as there is of state looters like the Gupta brothers experiencing a similar fate.
These are the closing weeks of a highly contested general election and one must also allow for the media’s insatiable appetite for faux outrage, especially when it comes to the Official Opposition.
There’s a little bit of irony here. The opposition parties in general and the DA in particular seem to love waving the flag. DA speakers invariably have the flag on the podium at any public event. In contrast, the ANC at its party events only displays the ANC colours and ANC flags.
Of course, neither flying the flag nor not flying it is a reliable indicator of political sincerity or national feeling.
We have a national flag so striking that in the 30 short years of its existence it has become one of the most identifiable flags in the world.
Funnily enough, like the democratic transition itself, it is a happy accident, the result of the boer maak ’n plan national ethos aligning with pressing circumstances.
The ANC had wanted a clean break from the past and instead of entrusting the task to Fred Brownell, the State Herald of the time, it held a national design competition which drew tens of thousands of entries.
Unfortunately, they were uniformly atrocious.
With just weeks to go, the transition committee asked Brownell to pull together something as a temporary measure. The flag he produced, which blends with genius the politically significant colours of our history – green/black/gold and red/white/blue – was an instant hit and all talk of it being temporary quickly faded.
As the ANC asserts, our unconventional Y-front flag, with all its emotional resonance, is the symbol of the best of South Africa. However, the country and nation of which the Brownell flag so caught the mood in 1994 is not the country and nation of 2024.
That is what the DA advert pithily captures, which is probably why the ANC and its media apologists are so put out.