COALITION LESSONS FOR LIBERALS
With talk of ‘moonshot’ and ‘doomsday’ pacts dominating political talk in South Africa, it’s worth revisiting the suggestions Olive Schreiner made more than 120 years ago about coalitions, minority parties and the moral high ground
Are coalitions good or bad? Given the chaos unfolding in municipalities across the country, it’s a question that’s top of mind for most South Africans — as is the issue of just how much power smaller parties should wield, and how such governing arrangements could be structured.
A turn to history may prove instructive. Back in 1896, Olive Schreiner — one of the most astute political minds South Africa ever produced — set out such rules after observing her friends join a disastrous coalition.
This followed the formation of one of South Africa’s first coalition governments, established by prime minister Cecil John Rhodes in the Cape Colony in 1890.
Rhodes had come to power after prime minister John Gordon Sprigg stepped down when he failed to get his Railway Bill through parliament. An agreement was made with the Afrikaner Bond that Rhodes, the MP for Barkly West, would step into the position of prime minister with their support.
Rhodes would, in fact, remain in a coalition with the Afrikaner Bond right up to the Jameson Raid in 1895/1896. But his first move as prime minister was to appoint a “cabinet of all talents”. It included two right-wing Bondsmen, as well as three of Schreiner’s liberal friends: JW Sauer, John X Merriman and James Rose Innes.
None of the three men was particularly keen on Rhodes or the Afrikaner Bond. As Merriman wrote about his inclusion in the cabinet, “[I have] a good many things to gulp down. I therefore hardly like to predict a very long life for our craft … [and] I cannot say that I feel either proud or pleased.”
The liberals had, after all, been at war with both Rhodes and the Bond earlier that year over their attempt to pass the “strop bill”. It proposed the reintroduction, after more than 60 years, of the whipping of black servants. By persuading several members of the
Bond to vote against the bill, the liberals won that argument in parliament.
Schreiner, for her part, argued that the bill had all the hallmarks of a “semi-barbaric” society. And, shortly after the bill’s defeat, she wrote a satirical pamphlet in which she had God send Rhodes to hell for his support of the proposed legislation.
Still, as part of Rhodes’s cabinet, Sauer, Merriman and Rose Innes had to gulp down some particularly toxic legislation. One was the Franchise & Ballot Bill, which sought to exclude many black voters by increasing the monetary voting qualification from
£25 to £75. (Back then black and coloured men could vote in the Cape as long as they earned £25 a year.)
The three liberals had helped to defeat a similar bill some years before. On that occasion, Merriman had declared that parliament had “no right” to rescind the rights conferred upon nonwhite voters. The three stood up, they said at the time, for truth, liberty and justice.
But that had been while they were in opposition. Now, in 1892, they were in a coalition government that left them obligated to vote for the clearly racist legislation Rhodes and the Bond wished to push through. The Franchise & Ballot Act almost caused Rose Innes to resign from the cabinet. As he wrote to Merriman, “my inmost soul abhors the whole thing”. And, he said, working in the cabinet had “an atmosphere heavily charged with carbonic”.
To Schreiner’s disgust, her three friends voted to bring the bill into law and, in so doing, badly damaged the multiracial voting system in the Cape. Ironically, Rose
Innes’s presence in parliament was largely due to the black vote in his eastern Cape constituency. The editor
Tengo Jabavu had worked as his election agent to secure the black vote in his seat.
Interestingly Rhodes’s coalition with the liberals came to an end when Rose Innes uncovered corruption. What became known as the Logan Scandal, a dodgy tender given by their fellow cabinet minister James Sivewright to his friend James Logan, led to a public scrap between the liberals and Rhodes. And Rhodes ultimately re-formed his cabinet without them.
A year after the scandal, Schreiner sat down to write a lengthy political pamphlet that would ultimately be published under the title “The Political Situation”. It is a remarkable document, spelling out many of the ills of a growing regressive racial policy. Corruption and racism would, she claimed, destroy the Cape if they were not defeated.
The one thing that was clear to Schreiner was that coalitions with the corrupt capitalists and racists would never work. “One of the main aims of all governments,” she wrote, “must be the defence of its weaker members from the depredations of the stronger.”
South Africa, under the control of the “monopolists” would end up like a “cake from which all the plums have been carefully extracted, or like a body when the vultures have visited it, leaving nothing but bare bones”.
But how, she asked, was this to be corrected? Having witnessed the three liberals in coalition with Rhodes, and the disasters that ensued, she tried to come up with a new solution. The liberal leaders of the Cape, she claimed, had boarded the ship of the racist and corrupt. As she wrote: “The bitterest wrong which leaders can inflict upon their crew is when they take service on the enemy’s ship.”
In doing so, they had made it hard for people like her to openly criticise Rhodes
they had prevented other liberals from attacking Rhodes’s ship “for fear of wounding them”.
But if these liberals were to betray the cause, as they had by voting for the Franchise & Ballot Act, then “there is nothing to be done but to fire, regardless whether you bring down your own absconded leaders or the enemy; and this, even though they may have been partly actuated by a desire to impede the enemy’s sailing powers when they took service”, she said.
Schreiner’s conclusion was that coalitions in which liberals joined other parties with completely different ideals and ideologies would never produce progressive politics. She was not, in other words, a fan of the idea that you can reform a corrupted government from within.
“Men have turned politics into a game, and are playing to make points,” she wrote, and there was a desperate need to counter this trend.
So, if coalitions were out of the question, what did Schreiner suggest? First, she argued for a liberal “Progressive Party of South Africa” with a leader who was “profoundly in sympathy with the movement, with a gift for organisation”. But such a man, she wrote, had yet to be found.
Nevertheless, she believed the foundations for a progressive party should begin with the attempt to set up branches in every small town across the colony. These “driblets of progressive thought” would slowly grow into rivers.
One of the fears that liberals had at the time was that an open expression of their beliefs would alienate a conservative electorate. Being a woman and unelectable, Schreiner had no such qualms.
Schreiner was, of course, aware that a party expressing progressive values would win only a tiny percentage of the seats in parliament. But the Cape’s politics had always been about small parliamentary majorities and there was often the need for what we now refer to as “kingmakers”.
Yet, despite the fact that a progressive party could well be such a “kingmaker” and demand a place in cabinet, she believed it should forgo “the sweets of office”.
Joining the cabinet, she said, would only weaken the party. In any event, smaller parties’ power would not lie in joining coalitions; any government that lacked a solid majority would have to bring them on board to ensure their bills made it through parliament. Their power, she argued, would be far greater than their numbers; they would be able to influence policy by agreeing to vote for only the legislation they approved of.
Schreiner believed that if such a progressive party could be formed, and if it could hold to its ideals, it could engender a change in voters’ attitudes; they would slowly be persuaded by the party’s moral and principled political stands.
In post-1994 South African politics, no party has attempted to hold its moral ground in this manner. And, sadly, even in Schreiner’s time those around her didn’t attempt anything like the kind of party she proposed.
In fact, in the 1898 Cape election Schreiner’s liberal progressive brother, WP Schreiner, joined forces with the Afrikaner Bond to defeat Rhodes and was made prime minister. But the forces of the monopolists and racists proved too great for him. Just a year later the monopolists swept him aside and went to war.
One of the main aims of all governments must be the defence of its weaker members from the depredations of the stronger
Olive Schreiner