THE ELECTIONS THAT SHAPED SA, FROM SHAKA AND CECIL TO CYRIL
Authors use wit and laughter to shine a light on a serious subject
The new book Spoilt Ballots lays bare, in the course of a comprehensive history of SA, just how far people will go to get elected, and then stay in power.
The book uses a chronology of SA’s elections as focal points to explain the key issues of the times, and unravel the implications of their outcomes. Richard Steyn did this astutely in his recent book Seven Votes, concentrating on the period just before and just after World War 2, the title referring to the slim parliamentary majority which took SA into war on the side of Britain in 1939.
Spoilt Ballots scans a wider, 200-year horizon, and takes a far lighter tone, bordering on the satirical. Witticisms and wordplay proliferate, like the caption of a photograph, “Louis Botha: Generally a Boer, but also a British general”, or the subheading “Detention, deficit, disorder” capturing the growing chaos and repression, press gags, economic decline and protests of the mid- to late-1970s.
This is political history explained partly through jest — a pun-a-page, chuckle-per-chapter frolic through an otherwise dismal story of colonialism and culture clashes, and how they mutated into the tragic triumph of racism.
It’s a style which is a speciality of co-authors Matthew Blackman and Nick Dall, whose previous book, Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in SA, from the VOC to the ANC, dissected the greed and graft suffusing politics to a staggering extent long before Jacob Zuma.
Their new book illustrates how electioneering dirty tricks have remained unaltered for centuries. Bribery, propaganda and information wars, intimidation and voters roll manipulation, smears, swart gevaar and similar identity politics have simply been fine-tuned to suit the period. Then, if all failed to give the desired result, unscrupulous powermongers demand recounts, or appeal to a higher power (sometimes of dubious legal authority) to overturn what the voters decided.
The proof-points of 2016 and 2020 in the US still resonate, so we know that skulduggery occurs even in distinguished democracies. What has always been dramatically different in SA is the degree of rancid racism permeating its politics, souring the backdrop to elections until 1994 — and tainting them still, but in a different way.
In dissecting the motives and actions of a vast array of politicians, the book is also a comparison of the bottom-feeders who sucked away at the peace and prosperity of future generations. In the early part of SA’s history, there can be little doubt about the identity of the worst: Cecil John Rhodes, Southern Africa’s Vladimir Putin of the late-1800s.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt used Rhodes’s destructive obsession — “I would annex the planets if I could” — to introduce the section on imperialism in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, a frequent reference point for Blackman and Dall. Rhodes, they write, “was a megalomaniac very rarely touched by reason”.
In the run-up to the 1898 Cape elections – the first secret ballot in SA — Rhodes tried every trick in the book, including channelling propaganda via the press he secretly owned.
Though Rhodes won his district, his party lost
the election by just two of the 80 available seats. But, refusing to forfeit the premiership, he tried to force a recount; when that didn’t work he appealed to the colonial secretary, Lord Milner, to simply allow him to stay in charge. As the authors note, this rings a familiar bell to 2020 in the world’s supposedly leading democracy.
As Spoilt Ballots progresses, from the middle of the 20th century the competition for SA’s most venal electoral candidate or ruler is fiercer. Readers can take their pick from, among many
Library/Photo12
others, apartheid architects DF
Picture
Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd,
Ronan
justice minister
Images/AFP/Ann
Jimmy “It leaves me cold” Kruger who revelled in the 1977 police murder of
Gallo
Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, or the instigator of the “total onslaught” mentality of intransigence to change, PW Botha, who turned SA into a military state in the 1980s.
Digesting this challenges the notion of government for and by the people. Shouldn’t we cease being naive about elections as a mechanism to give power to the right kind of leader? The amoral or dogmatic politicians almost always win, perhaps because the nature of seeking power inevitably attracts those already holding some.
Even those legislators who genuinely want to serve often get distracted by government’s process — or tempted astray by corrupt influences.
Or, they get trampled by the more belligerent, dominant incumbents, like Paul Kruger, who relentlessly bullied and cajoled rival Piet Joubert during the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek’s 1895 electioneering, or PW Botha, whose pit-bull approach neutered Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the official opposition Progressive Federal Party from 1979 until 1986.
Almost 20 years later the Thabo Mbeki cabinet appointed Slabbert as head of a task team to recommend electoral system changes. The report was completed in January 2003, then gathered dust for another 20 years. Its ideas may have made significant improvements to our electoral structure and the accountability of those in government, but the report was ignored.
It may even have gone up in the smoke of the recent parliament buildings fire.
Perhaps the most important election in the country’s history wasn’t an election at all. In 1992, whites were asked in a referendum if they supported the path to reform and a new constitution. Had the answer been “no”, it would have sparked civil war, Nelson Mandela warned at the time.
The result was 68.7% in favour. Now, 30 years later, it’s strange to read that the margin was inadequate to convince all parties to the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) to proceed — yet the National Party insisted that 70% was needed for progress on key decisions. As a result, the ANC reinstituted mass action, sparking fresh waves of violence.
We forget how fraught the times were; between April and July 1993 alone, Chris Hani was assassinated, the AWB attacked the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, and Apla murdered eight worshippers in St James Church in Kenilworth, Cape Town. When it eventually happened, the 1994 election was a “miracle birth”, according to the authors.
Unfortunately, 1994 is SA’s only uplifting elections story. Despite the amusing spin, a degree of discomfort cuts through Spoilt
Ballots. Seething resentment and racism, economic frustration, callous and ignorant policymaking, electoral dysfunction: actually, these aren’t funny.
There are consequences to elections, and while it is easier to view a dismaying course of history through a lighthearted lens, questions arise. Why, for instance, do we prefer provocative candidates, or those who provide entertainment — even vulgarity — to pepper the serious process of democracy? Notwithstanding the courage of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr
Zelensky, do Ukrainians now wish they had taken their 2019 election more earnestly, rather than voting in a comedian? Do Americans realise they are paying the price for electing an egomaniac and suspected crook in 2016?
After Zuma, South Africans shouldn’t need another warning, but Spoilt Ballots is a reminder to resist voter apathy and to do due diligence on candidates’ characters. After an election we have no convincing basis to complain about our politicians, because we voted them in.
All elections are crossroads.
And SA’s next one, in 2024, is more vital than most. Will it empower a leadership with a firmer moral compass, able to steer our progression to a more capable state? Or will it be another notch on the downward slide to a failed state? Spoilt Ballots is a fine read, but if it holds true as a historical record, we’re in for a lot of poisonous rhetoric, false promises, and very little change.
Nick Dall retails for R308