Failed Maimane ‘experiment’ a setback for DA

So, Mmusi Maimane was “an experiment” that “went wrong”.

The DA then reverted to type, and replaced him with the predictable mediocrity of John Steenhuisen, and effectively shored up the complacency of white privilege and hegemony.

It sounds terribly familiar ...

It’s the same across SA.

When you place a black person in a position of influence, you immediately place a network of docile bodies around the new office-bearer to wait for the black person to do or say something “wrong”; things that make white people feel uncomfortable, or make them imagine change, transformation and disruption as “bullying” or “militancy ”— and then conspire to work them out of the system.

There are some parallels with the ways in which many white people have compared the discomfort or inconvenience of Covid-19 precautions (like wearing masks) as “oppression,” as signs of a “dictatorship” or of “bullying,” and stripping of their liberties.

And so, the DA’s two wise men, unselfconsciously, made the decision that Maimane had to go; that he was “an experiment” that had gone wrong.

This is not the first, and will not be the last time that people in power and influence “experiment” with others who are deemed as lesser, or unqualified people — by standards they had set for the “others”.

There is no moral equivalence, though no less odious, but the example of white people experimenting on black people that immediately jumps out, was the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” by the US government between 1932 and 1972.

The purpose of the study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis.

The African-American men who participated in the study were told they were receiving free health care from the federal government, but they were simply guinea pigs — they were experiments.

The US syphilis experiments were also carried out in Guatemala between from 1946 and 1948, and by the physician John Charles Cutler, who also participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

In Guatemala, US doctors infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent of the subjects.

At least 83 people died. Black people, or people who are considered to be undesirable, lesser humans or who threaten those in power, end up becoming dispensable.

The best known of these “experiments” on humans was, of course, during World War 2, when Nazi scientists and technicians conducted human experimentation to find unobtrusive means of using X-rays for sterilising peoples who were regarded as unfit to reproduce.

Hitler found justification for his “experimentation” in American legislation permitting what was described in 1907 as “involuntary asexualisation” in the State of Indiana.

One of the qualifying criteria included epilepsy.

The law was eventually overturned by the Indiana state supreme court, and a new law, a “Model Sterilisation Act,” was designed to withstand constitutional challenges.

Eventually, more than 30 American states passed laws that allowed compulsory sterilisation.

Similar laws were introduced in Norway and other Nordic countries, as part of eugenics-orientated sterilisation programmes in the 1930s.

Norway passed a sterilisation law in 1934.

Sweden would fund the first government sponsored “eugenics institute” and enacted forced sterilisation in the 1930s.

In the 1990s, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard evidence of scientists of the apartheid government who had conducted experiments on baboons in an attempt “to control virility and fertility” among black people.

While these were all scientific experiments, that Tony Leon has publicly stated that Maimane was “an experiment” is at best insensitive, and at worst, a continuation of the Europeans, and their outgrowths around the world, imagining dark-skinned others as material to experiment with; as people who had no agency.

In some twisted way, Maimane was, at least to the DA, a perverse Manchurian candidate.

He was put in place, with the expectation that he would perform, or conform to what was laid out for him.

That he became his own person, grated on the DA’s back room people.

When the CIA had to explain their idea of manipulating a likely Manchurian candidate, one agency official replied: “If you have 100% control, you have 100% dependency.”

In short, the DA allowed Maimane control of the party, but when he tried to make the party more progressive, and transform it to a more representative, presumably more pro-poor party, the old white folk in the party felt they had lost control.

Maimane had to go. They replaced him with the reliable, reliably mediocre, John Steenhuisen, a throwback to precisely what Maimane wanted to break with.

While Maimane’s departure will be a setback for the DA, we will have to wait and see after the next election.

But there are more than enough white people who will vote for the DA, if only as a way to “fight back”, as Tony Leon once said.