Whose line is it anyway?
Last month the DA held a rally in Soweto, where new party leader Mmusi Maimane received a roaring welcome from supporters. An entourage of men led Maimane onto the stage with toyi-toyi moves and slogans.
“Amandla,” shouted Maimane, to which the crowd packed into the hall at Jabulani Technical High School responded: “ngawethu” — with their clenched fists punching the air.
The DA is a liberal party which champions a free market economy. Not only is “Amandla, ngawethu” (power to the people) fundamentally a socialist slogan, it has its origins in the liberation movements, led by the governing ANC.
Critics of the DA say the party’s adoption of slogans like this — as well as the toyi-toyi and the constant reference to former ANC president Nelson Mandela as one of its heroes — is intended to create a false impression among black voters that the party supports leftist policies.
Some, like the historian RW Johnson, say this new phenomenon in the DA “is all deeply, deeply bogus” and the party “needs to sit down and do some hard thinking about itself”. He says the party is losing its liberal foundations through “opportunism”.
However, DA MP Michael Cardo, one of its leading thinkers, says the party has been using the slogans and the toyi-toyi since as far back as 2004, though to a much lesser extent.
“These slogans have over time been assimilated into a broader political culture of protest in SA,” he says. “Nowadays, such protest is aimed at government’s service delivery failures and abuses of power. And often it transcends ideology.”
So, it is just as possible to hear “amandla, ngawethu” at a DA rally as it is at a meeting of leftist social movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Landless People’s Movement, which define themselves outside the formal party system.
Of course, says Cardo, historically, that culture of protest has been driven predominantly through grassroots organisations by black South Africans. “I do not think anyone in the DA would try to claim that Helen Suzman and Colin Eglin were shouting ‘ amandla, ngawethu’ back in the day,” he says.
Johnson says: “What you are looking at is the remarkable power of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s and the way it swept up people of all races into a great crusade. For many this was the emotional high point of their lives,” he says, adding that among those who would have been deeply affected by the UDF was Maimane’s predecessor, Helen Zille.
“They wanted desperately to be part of an all-race pro-democratic movement and they were on a euphoric high about the new SA they were going to build,” says Johnson. “Many of them, infused with this heady brew, were quite daring and brave. You will note how Zille always refers to herself as having ‘struggle credentials’ which, in her own eyes, she earned by various acts of daring in that period.”
One of the themes, maybe even the key one, was “no enemies on the Left”, all united against the National Party and apartheid, says Johnson. “This led even good old-fashioned liberals to find excuses for people who necklaced or butchered or shot or bombed one another, let alone finding excuses for the inexcusable things that happened in the ANC camps,” he says.
He says it then became vital “for such people to embrace Mandela as the fulfilment of all these dreams. They sort of invented their own Mandela, someone who was a saint, not a communist who had lied in court about his party membership, and someone who could virtually do no wrong.
“Zille drank all this in and it affected her leadership of the DA at every point . . . So the same euphoria still applies,” says Johnson. However, Cardo says there may be a few other explanations of why the socialist slogans are more visible and audible in the party now. First, he says, there has been a slow but growing influx of disaffected black voters into the DA.
“Some of them are former ANC or UDF supporters, some of them are from the various strains of Black Consciousness, and others are too young to have known or identified meaningfully with any of those political traditions,” he says.
These disaffected black voters “have found their way to the DA because they can identify with our vision and with our broad values of freedom, fairness and opportunity”.
Second, says Cardo, the DA’s approach to politics has shifted perceptibly over the past eight years. “We have become much more of an extraparliamentary, campaign-based party,” he says. “So while we would still consider parliament as the main arena of political debate and discussion, we have developed campaigns outside parliament on many of our most important issues — like job creation — and taken them onto the streets.” He cites as an example the campaign for a youth wage subsidy, which offers employers tax incentives to employ young people, and the march last year on the ANC headquarters in Luthuli House.
“It’s the kind of political activity that’s becoming more prevalent in the DA,” says Cardo.
He says the ANC does not own these popular anti-apartheid slogans, and the DA does not seek an appropriation of the ANC’s history or its symbols. “It would be a different story if the DA started to claim the Freedom Charter, for example, as its own. That would be wholly inauthentic,” he says.
Johnson says liberalism in the DA has been quietly jettisoned. Key principles like “merit not race” or “merit not colour” have been discarded. He cites last year’s attempt by the DA to make businesswoman Mamphela Ramphele its presidential candidate for the national elections on the grounds that the party needed a black leader to win black votes.
“I am told [Maimane] is a nice young man but I feel sorry for him. He is lost,” says Johnson.