DAMME, GIRL!
Phumzile packs a political punch
● A violent storm is threatening to lash Cape Town when Phumzile van Damme blows into a Sea Point coffee shop for our interview.
Van Damme, a smart and street-smart DA MP, is used to violent storms. They tend to follow her. She’s in the middle of one at the moment.
It started on June 18, three days before our meeting and just 2km away at Cape Town’s trendy V&A Waterfront, when she and a white family became entangled in a race row.
Van Damme says the mother bumped into her and swore at her, and the adult son told her to voetsek because she’s black. Van Damme stood her ground. Words were exchanged, insults flew and the woman who packs a political punch punched the son in the head.
The blow, she insists, was in self-defence.
Van Damme is a bringer of peace. At least, that’s what “Phumzile” means. In her family she’s nicknamed “The AK47” because she’s loud, hottempered and shoots her mouth off. “I speak my mind,” she says. “I speak about issues that make people uncomfortable.”
The two-toned tiger tattooed on her arm is her “spirit animal”, she says. “The light side waits and watches … and then there’s the dark tiger. Sometimes the dark tiger takes over.” Like at the Waterfront.
The storm gathered gale-force momentum on social media. “Phumzile van Damme” was one of the top searches punched into Google. She was the subject of hundreds of tweets and retweets. Martial arts movie star Jean-Claude van Damme must have wondered why he was trending in SA.
When anyone asks Phumzile van Damme (and they always do) how she’s related to the enormous Belgian star, the woman who just makes 5ft (1.52m) in her shoes responds: “Why would you ask this question when the resemblance is so damned obvious?”
Van Damme received a lot of support after the incident but she was also lashed by some black people who accused her of being a sellout, and by some white people who dismissed her as “another angry black woman”.
Like the DA’s former chief, Helen Zille, Van Damme is headstrong, but she hasn’t developed Zille’s rhinothick skin yet. After the Waterfront incident, Van Damme says, she sat in her car, shaking. “I was on the edge of a panic attack.”
Being subjected to racism takes an emotional toll, she says. “You feel dehumanised, angry and not seen. You experience racism and sometimes you move on, but sometimes it’s so violent — in words and actions — that you snap. I snapped. Some people told me I should have just walked away.”
But she couldn’t walk away.
“Words carry a history. They carry a lifetime of being a woman, a black woman in SA. Those words have a lot of baggage. I’m not just an MP in a bubble. I’m a human being. The woman treated me like rubbish. The whole family was menacing. What message am I sending if I walk away? That racism is OK? I’m a public representative and have a duty to let racist people know that their behaviour is not OK.”
Van Damme plans to lay criminal charges, but the family have gone to ground.
Feminist granny
Two days later she took a deep breath, slipped into a local designer’s red dress and sauntered arm in arm with her cousin down the red carpet to listen to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address.
That stroll marked the beginning of her second term in parliament. Her first, in 2014 (at 31 she was one of the youngest MPs) also began with a raging storm.
Barely a month after she first graced parliament’s back benches, this newspaper branded her a liar and a fraud in a front-page headline. She was accused of misrepresenting her citizenship, which if true would have disqualified her from being an MP.
There had been a string of errors whereby her nationality had been registered according to birthplace rather than based on parentage, but Van Damme was cleared and her South African citizenship confirmed.
She chooses to remember the saga as something that had a positive outcome. “Ultimately, it was a cathartic experience because I didn’t have a relationship with my biological father’s family and that situation allowed me to get to know them. I met my grandmother a month before she passed away. In that process I was able to forgive my biological father, who I had been angry with.”
Van Damme’s mother, Lynette, had been in her second year at the University of Swaziland when she met Elroy Mayisela, a South African, and fell pregnant. Their daughter Phumzile spent her early childhood with her maternal grandmother, after whom she was named.
“We share the same name and the same personality. She was a feminist and taught all of us to stand up for ourselves.”
Her grandmother died in 2010 and to honour her Van Damme had Let It Be, the title of the Beatles song, tattooed on her wrist. “Even though my grandmother is gone I still feel her here with me, speaking words of wisdom,” she says.
Her mother and father separated when she was a child and Lynette married Hugo van Damme, a Belgian, who adopted Phumzile. When she was 10 the family went to live in Belgium, returning to SA in
1994.
After matriculating, Van Damme studied law and politics at Rhodes University while listening to jazz, hip-hop and heavy metal (“I went through a Goth phase and only wore black, to my mother’s horror”).
She was involved in the ANC-aligned South African Student Congress on campus but became disillusioned with the ANC when Jacob Zuma came to power. “I identified with the DA’s policies and realised, hey man, I’m a liberal. I joined the DA as a staffer.”
At first her mother, an academic who teaches heritage studies and had worked as an ANC courier in the 1980s, was not impressed with her daughter’s newfound political home.
“Family dinners … Oh! My! God!” says Van Damme. “After a glass or two of wine my mom would shake her head and say, ‘Oh, that DA of yours …’ But now she’s happy. When she was doing her PhD at Rhodes she joined Daso [the DA Student Organisation]. She was the oldest member and everyone called her Mother.”
Even though her mother came to the party, Van Damme has had to endure many insults since joining the DA — “sellout, tea girl, 702 black, Uncle Tom, house negro, coconut”. She dismisses them with a shake of her head. “Bring me an intelligent argument, let’s talk politics and debate ideology, but I’m not 12; the insults bounce off.”
Even her critics agree that she has worked diligently as an MP and the DA’s communications spokesperson. She fought for an inquiry into the rot-riddled SABC and left teeth marks all over the corporation’s former chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, and former communications minister Faith Muthambi.
Van Damme also led the DA’s fight to have British propaganda peddlers Bell Pottinger expelled from the UK’s PR regulatory body for stoking racial tensions in SA on behalf of the Guptas. The move helped pull loose a thread that eventually unravelled the firm.
Political typhoon
Van Damme’s husband, who she refuses to drag into her public life, understands what it means to be married to a politician. He knows that during election season he will see her only when she comes home to do laundry (not his laundry; she’s a feminist).
Long hours in the political trenches take an emotional and physical toll. In March she took part in a protest outside the Medupi power station in Limpopo and was confronted by security guards. “I was shoved, manhandled and assaulted.”
She tweeted about the incident and some people told her they were pleased she’d been attacked, saying she deserved it. She shrugs off the hate.
“If I wanted everyone to like me, I’d sell ice cream. If you have enemies, it means you have stood up to something, so cheers to that,” she says. “Politics is tough, but I’m tougher.”
After we met, the Cape Town storm caused flooding and left the streets strewn with branches. It subsided a day later. The Van Damme storm, which had caused such chaos on the byways of Twitter, also died down — that is, until Zille decided to wade in.
Zille, responding to a tweet about a YouTube video on “the other side of the story” made by a right-wing, conspiracy-theory-spewing troll, said she wished the white family involved in the Waterfront altercation would give their perspective.
“It is hard, in these circumstances, to work out where the truth lies,” Zille wrote.
Van Damme saw red and the dark tiger took over. In a torrent of tweets she accused Zille of invalidating her experience and joining the mob, bringing up Zille’s controversial colonialism comments and charging that the former Western Cape premier regularly goes against the DA’s values.
The Van Damme storm blew up into a category 3 political typhoon with Jean-Claude van Damme again wondering why on earth he was trending in SA.
Then Van Damme put away her thumbs and the typhoon was downgraded to a category 1 hurricane.
Despite this and other racist incidents in recent times, Van Damme is adamant that racism has not become worse in SA: people are just filming it more.
“Racists are in the minority,” she says. “I travelled the country during the election and saw that most people just want to get on with their lives. There are still racist elements — those people need to be taught that it’s not OK.”
She says South Africans are skilled at skirting difficult conversations. “I’m not, and that’s why people think I’m controversial. I’m not controversial. I’m frank, which makes people uncomfortable.
“We need to stop being quiet about racism. We need to stop walking away. We need to speak up.”
She says she believes that the negative perceptions black and white South Africans have of each other need to be destroyed.
“We need to have more conversations about each other’s lives, share our stories and try to understand each other. We all need to make an effort to listen,” she says.
There have been whispers that Van Damme has ambitions to take over the party and become the DA’s next leader. She shakes her head.
“Politics is my life purpose because, and I know this is a cliché, I want to try to make a difference. I have a platform in parliament and believe in the DA’s vision to build a South Africa for all, but I’m not hungry for power. I’m not interested in power games. I’m just interested in doing my job, and doing it well.”
She looks at her watch. She and her husband have plans to go the movies. She’s returning to the scene of the crime — the V&A Waterfront. I wonder if they are rescreening Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ... or perhaps A Perfect Storm.
If I wanted everyone to like me I’d sell ice cream’