Paternal Liberalism, a fox in the lamb's cloth
To reduce the miasmatic white supremacist enterprise that was codified in colonial apartheid only to the routine savagery and dispossession of black indigenous people, is to fundamentally miss the indispensable role performed by 'messianic' white liberalism, to the legitimization of colonial-apartheid infrastructure. Insolent racist bigots and colonial-apartheid white liberals were (are) the proverbial two sides of the same bloody coin. They are both constitutive elements of Western hegemonic logic and construct.
Both the settler bigots and liberals do not accept the historic, cultural and social organizational sovereignty of the indigenous people whose land they inhabit. The bigot (exemplified in De Klerk's erstwhile National Party) is prone to neurotic violence in dealing with the native population, whom he sees as a debased savage beyond human engagement.
The liberal (as exemplified by Ms. Helen Suzman's Progressive Party and inherited by Ms. Helen Zille's Democratic Alliance) pities the native whom she fundamentally regards as backward, childlike and sappy, but unlike her bigoted brethren is convinced that she is on a civilizing mission to imbue a human personality on the native people. The liberal believes this exacting task is ordained, if not by an all-knowing God, then certainly by History. Colonial liberalism is a chromatin to the white supremacist-dispossession complex.
Ms. Helen Suzman embodied colonial apartheid liberalism. She gave a veneer of respectability and legality to apartheid obscurity by participating for thirteen years in its parliament that sanctioned and presided over the systematic humiliation and mass murder of black people, theft of land and resources, and dislocation of the indigenous population. For over two decades Ms. Helen Suzman's party was an all-white party, keeping abreast with the ethos of her day. This did not prevent her and her Progressive Party colleagues for purporting to speak on behalf of the same black people that were not allowed to join her party. Natives are children, and can be spoken for, so reasoned our liberal madam.
In a political tactic of stunning cynicism Ms. Suzman made a moral and political equivalence between the oppressed and oppressors. She incessantly rejected the universal right of the oppressed to take up arms and resist against colonial-apartheid violence. Together with her more bald-faced racist colleagues in the racially augmented democracy that was apartheid, she considered freedom fighters that dared to inflict physical violence on their oppressors as terrorists. This was reminiscent of the Nazi barbaric murderers and their liberal collaborators calling the heroic Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, an act of 'terror'.
Existing in a perpetual moral and political grey area, Ms. Suzman, was to later in her life, align herself with and became an ardent supporter of the Zionist ethnic cleansing project of Palestinians. In this instance Ms. Helen Suzman dispensed with liberal niceties and harassed those like the ANC veteran, Ronnie Kasrils, who correctly drew parallels between the Zionist oppression and dispossession of Palestinians with apartheid South Africa. In her morally vacuous tribe-think, the crimes of the state of Israel, whose brutality the Archbishop Desmond Tutu held made apartheid seem like a 'Sunday-picnic', were to be excused and tolerated because they were perpetrated by Jews of Western descent. Notice the difference between Mr. Kasrils and Ms. Suzman role during apartheid. The former contemptuously rejected the abhorrent idea of racial superiority and its supporting institutions, and proceeded to take up arms against the apartheid state and infrastructure. The latter accommodated her-self within the apartheid state, offering polite and respectable opposition, whilst condemning the 'violence' of the oppressed.
In recent days, Ms. Zille, has been falling over herself to claim the political mantle of Ms. Helen Suzman. For once we agree that Ms. Zille is the true heir to Ms. Suzman. Both are defenders of 'white' privilege and cultural cohesion. On the eve of the last general elections in 2009, addressing her core constituency, white commercial farmers in the Eastern Cape, Ms. Zille waxed "...They want to divide us- that is why Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema are so in love with Orania". This is the essence of this colonial liberal, who governs the Western Cape on the basis of the apartheid induced divisions among non-white communities. She believes in the 'we' of Orania whom she sees as united by race, thus her anxiety about ANC leaders 'dividing us'.
Ms. Helen Zille's Western Cape has some of the highest emigration among black professionals because of systematic alienation and low ceiling imposed on them. Her cabinet is testament to her confidence in the abilities of black Africans and other non-whites. Her views are borne out by the recently released employment equity statistics.
A visitor to Cape Town's Waterfront or other affluent areas' restaurants is immediately struck by the disproportionate representation of our white compatriots among the patrons, and equally of black youths that serve them. Contrast that with another affluent area, Sandton in Johannesburg, Gauteng under the governance of the ANC. In Sandton, one gets a more accurate representation of the South Africa that Nelson Mandela dreamt and fought for. Similarly, Cape Town's affluent eateries and shopping centres represent the colonial liberal (DA) ideal- black people are free to vote as long as they continue to be servants for their white compatriots.
We, the ANCYL, heirs to Nelson Mandela's political organization and legacy, take a hostile view to Ms. Helen Zille and her colonial liberal coterie in their cynical revisionism of history of associating themselves with Madiba who was thrown into the apartheid gulags for his fierce opposition to supremacist rule.
We say take your Ms. Helen Suzman and keep her, but not our Madiba.
>> Magasela Mzobe is the ANCYL National Task Team Coordinator. This article first appeared in ANC Today, the online newsletter of the African National Congress.
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