Zille made a mistake and DA intolerance has made it worse
The perverse truth about the DA running Helen Zille out of town over her tweets about colonialism is that in its collective mind, it had no choice. The best Zille can do is to let the matter go, to abandon the fight against her suspension and to work towards advancing the liberal cause.
This is not to say the DA’s federal executive did the just thing when it suspended Zille, but it does mean it understands well enough that it needs to win votes, even the votes of people who do not understand the difference between an opinion and party policy. Votes are votes, yes? And then there’s Zille. What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all? It was a long flight. Airports are hell and ORT is the worst. Whatever. The fact is, the woman made a mistake. She apologised.
Of course, she didn’t mean it. We know this because she said so, but she is not believed. She is not believed by the great unwashed and not by the squeaky-clean DA. It is, after all, the party she built and its leader-turned-backbiting-ingrate, Mmusi Maimane, is the man she made.
The party’s federal executive probably thinks it has patched up the crisis well enough to get on with the business of unseating the ANC. The trouble is, there is a niggling suspicion among the unbelievers and the militantly acquisitive masses that there is a truth about themselves buried somewhere in the semantic fraughtness that the debate about colonialism has become.
Zille used the wrong word. What she saw in Singapore, what we all see and admire about developed societies, is not colonialism but the consequence of colonialism as a conduit for development. Her mistake was to confuse the idea of European colonialism with the concept of modernity — that is, the rejection of blind faith in authority and the embrace of reason.
This is an easy mistake to make. It is easy to correlate a colonial heritage with technological advance, but it is mistake. Colonialism did not advance the colonised, freedom did.
The Machiavellian idea of free republics over monarchies allowed us to observe free markets as human behaviour, to subject the state to the will of the people, to separate powers, to acknowledge the individual as sovereign.
The opposite of modernity — agrarianism, blind faith in authority, traditionalism, patronage — is deeply seated in the South African consciousness.
It is perhaps the most insidious of all the nasty consequences of colonialism.
It is what gave us the latter-day ANC. It is what motivates the Zupta conspiracy to usurp the Constitution. Colonialism is the opposite of modernity and development and freedom. SA is being recolonised and, again, it is for the same venal purposes as that of the original colonisers.
The fact of colonialism is that all living organisms colonise and all societies compete for resources, but the apparently paradoxical observation of humans in competition is that they succeed because they co-operate. This is what we must live with, cognitive dissonance notwithstanding. The entire planet is now colonised by humans and any advance from here onwards will depend on how well we co-operate.
WHAT SHE SAW IN SINGAPORE IS NOT COLONIALISM BUT THE CONSEQUENCE OF COLONIALISM AS A CONDUIT FOR DEVELOPMENT
The DA federal executive’s mistake was to ignore jurisprudence despite the proof that Zille’s intention was the opposite of atavistic colonialism. It suspended her pending a disciplinary hearing but, in truth, it had already pronounced her guilty and sacrificed her for the sake of the party.
The DA faithful might view this as necessary to contradict the nagging suspicion that it is a party of white supremacists and coconuts, but all that is has achieved is to show that it is intolerant of error and as ignorant as the perpetrator of the offence. SA’s salvation lies in acceptance and tolerance. Kragdadigheid is the last thing we need. That went out of fashion along with Afrikaner nationalist hegemony.
It might seem good for the party, but is it good for SA? We ask this of the ANC and we should ask this of the DA. Political leadership defined by its united opposition to the ANC is not enough. That gives us a watered-down version of the ANC. Who needs that?