Reply to Alex Matthews
I do not know who Alex Matthews is but he seems considerably overheated, so much so that grammar and sense sometime elude him (see here). He claims that my articles on the current state of the liberal tradition in South Africa are "a personal agenda masquerading as public analysis".
I wonder what on earth he can mean. I have never occupied or attempted to run for any public position and other than a general support of the liberal tradition I have no personal agenda to push. I have had many e-mails from DA members who have read my articles and are somewhat frustrated because I do not side with either Trollip or Mazibuko. Who then, they want to know, would I pick ? Neither and both, I reply.
The whole point of what I wrote was not to make such a choice but rather to situate what the current contest means in the longer context of the liberal tradition and its history. As far as I am concerned, I have no vote in this contest and am quite happy that that is the case. I am a political scientist and historian and my interest is in analysis and understanding.
Mr Matthews, however, has had a rush of blood to the head and he certainly does have a very personal and partisan agenda - as is, of course, his perfect right. But it is ludicrous to say that I "trumpet the alleged merits of maturity" (presumably, in favour of Trollip). Nowhere in either of my articles did I mention the word maturity and nor did I urge Mr Trollip's case. This is simply invention.
Similarly, he says I "trumpet" the dominant role played by Anglophones in the Progs and after. Not really. I merely observe the historical fact of it. Given my analytic purposes, I have to do that. The only real trumpets that I wanted to blow in that article were about the courage of Harry Lawrence and Jan Steytler and the achievements of Tony Leon and Helen Zille. Or again, he suggests that I portray Mazibuko as "a token warlord" and that I equate her with "tribalism, bossism, warlordism, racial patronage". Again this is sheer invention.