Zuma, Malema need to take note
The new DA leader brings a new dynamic to the scene that could resonate with young blacks
FORGET about the politics, although that is the reason we have come to know of him. Forget about the politics of race too, even though our society is the paradigm for the world on how race can be brutally politicised.
Listening to Mmusi Maimane give his acceptance speech after his election as the leader of the traditionally white Democratic Alliance, it became clear that he will need to be taken much more seriously by Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema and the parties they lead, because of the hope he is intent on projecting for young black men, and despite his intimate partner, black women too.
I was struck by several things Maimane said in his speech, one totally off and a couple positive. On the downside, Maimane promised that the DA would build schools while they – I wasn’t sure who “they” were to whom he was referring – are tearing down statues. If “they” are the students, he has been misinformed, or worse, doesn’t get it. Anyone who has taken the time to listen to the students will know they are terribly keen on learning, but no longer in conditions characterised by colonial and racist symbolism.
More seriously, black students are tired of being told they aren’t smart enough while having curricula that freight values of coloniality and white patriarchal supremacy shoved down their throats. For his own sake, if not his party’s, I hope Maimane’s party will build schools in which his black child will not be made to feel he is only there because of the generosity and intelligence of whites, where he will not be taught to second guess his natural ability because he is not quite white.
But you can’t ignore the pluses. And if I was Zuma or Malema, I would sit up and come up with some fresh ideas to check the DA under its new leader. The first of the positives was when he said that the DA is not a party of racists and homophobes. I read the part about racism to be addressed not only to the DA’s political opponents, but also those inside his own party who still nurse anti-black attitudes.
What made me sit up and listen ever more closely to “governor” Maimane though was when he spoke about his 25year-old cousin. Like Maimane himself, the young man grew up in Dobsonville.
The new DA leader implied that because of the bad quality education black children receive in township schools, his cousin had dropped out, started abusing drugs, and got lured into crime. The young man is unemployed and perhaps, as many young black men, unemployable.
Maimane used the miserable circumstance of his cousin to score a political point against the education black children receive in township schools, of course. Notwithstanding, as anyone else who is moved by the goal of educating black children to realise their natural gifts and the often hollow gift of political freedom, Maimane’s point on the conditions that compromise the life chances of black young people struck a chord in me.
Whether you voted for the DA in the last election or not, the election of a young black man from Soweto to head a historically white party heralds in another phase in the ever-shifting socio-scape of South Africa.
Since Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters moved South Africa – whether forwards or backwards is another matter – while Jacob Zuma and the ANC continue to represent the new-but-now-ageing status quo, there is less distance between Maimane and the former, than Maimane and Zuma even though both might like suits. Both Malema and Maimane represent something new in the not so new South Africa, even if younger forms of masculine blackness each represent is different.
It is how Maimane spoke about the bleak prospects of his young black male cousin, an observation that is given weight by the fact that, as he said, he grew up in the same township, that must give pause to the other black men. Unlike Helen
His journey will ignite their hopeful imagination, the possibility of climbing to the top
Zille, he knows, not abstractedly but in a visceral way, what it means to be a young black man growing up in a township.
Even more troublingly for Zuma and Malema, Maimane’s black male self may come to represent for many young black men the possibility of aspiring, and transcending, one’s humble beginnings.
For some black people ambition is too audacious and in that they will find reason not to embrace the DA under its new black hope. For others, his journey will ignite their hopeful imagination, the possibility of climbing to the top.
What should excite observers of black cultural and gender politics is the model of black manhood Maimane brings into the field of social relations. It’s a form that might have been inferred from the choice of his sexual object, as Freud called our partners.
You don’t have to like the kind of black manhood Maimane apparently represents. However, it is decidedly good for the continued work to liberate black South Africans from retrogressive gender and race politics, as it is for the future of black people the world over, to have more, and hopefully egalitarian, black male leadership, representing a variety of masculinities.