Will South Africa Be Okay?. Jan-Jan Joubert
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in many years. Within hours, the FF Plus captured the sentiment of Afrikaans speakers and devotees of the language (of all political persuasions) in their statement that they would aggressively oppose Lesufi and endeavour to unite all opposition parties in Gauteng against him. Where was the DA?
The fourth case highlighted by sources in the FF Plus is closely related to the third example above. It concerns the events at the Hoërskool Overvaal in Vereeniging, which was unjustly targeted because of the school’s policy to use Afrikaans as medium of instruction – as the South African Schools Act indisputably allows.
The school became the target of mass action by political parties such as the EFF, as well as other pressure groups, to change its language medium. Lesufi led the chorus by targeting the school rather than supporting the governing body. As the pressure built up, the signals coming from the DA indicated discomfort rather than support for the school. The right to tuition in Afrikaans wasn’t proactively and boldly defended by the Gauteng spokesperson on education for the DA – the party which up to that point had basically enjoyed absolute blanket support among that school community.
Once again the FF Plus grabbed the opportunity. It was reliably learnt that it was ultimately the national minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, who, out of her own conviction, intervened and defused the situation by pointing out to Lesufi that it really wasn’t fair to expect a school to change its language policy without any prior notice.
Whatever the merits of the case, the FF Plus sided more unequivocally than the DA with the traditional DA voters, namely the school and its parents. It wasn’t that the DA specifically sided against its voters, but it was lukewarm in its response, and as the biblical book of Revelation warns in the letter to the church in Laodicea, all too often lukewarm water is spat out.
The examples were piling up, and the tide was starting to turn.
A few days later the tide became a tsunami with the fifth example: the Schweizer-Reneke case. Schweizer-Reneke is a town in North West that is fast gaining a disproportionately big reputation for the posting of controversial photos on social media.
In this case a teacher, Elana Barkhuizen, had taken a photo in a colleague’s classroom which showed black and white children seated at separate tables. The photo was sent to parents of the children and shared on social media. Without waiting for an explanation from the teacher’s side, the DA’s national youth leader, Luyolo Mphithi, labelled the issue as racism. Mphithi was supported by the DA’s national leader, Mmusi Maimane. The DA leader in North West, Joe McGluwa, welcomed Barkhuizen’s suspension.
After several days of great political tension and the threat of violence in Schweizer-Reneke, which had once again made national headlines with an Afrikaans speaker in the dock, Barkhuizen’s suspension was declared unlawful by the Labour Court and it was ruled that she was free to return to work.
During a dramatic and emotional media conference organised by the trade union Solidarity, a vulnerable and shocked Barkhuizen gave an account of her horrific experience. She widely found favour as someone whose entire life had been unjustly and comprehensively disrupted, and whose professional integrity had been grossly and baselessly insulted. Yet again it was mainly Afrikaans people, and specifically Afrikaans-speaking whites that already felt targeted, who took the events to heart.
While the DA had harshly and mistakenly condemned Barkhuizen, the FF Plus waited until all the facts had come to light, and then supported Barkhuizen. It was on every level the right thing to do, and the events at Schweizer-Reneke signified the moment the tide turned strongly in favour of the FF Plus. But this was merely the final nail in the coffin. The DA’s loss of support among some Afrikaners had a long lead-up.
Shortly before the election the FF Plus took advantage of another situation. The company MultiChoice threatened to withdraw its sponsorship of the Ghoema awards for Afrikaans music, because a music video featuring the singer and political polemicist Steve Hofmeyr had been nominated for an award. The FF Plus raised objections and said Hofmeyr was being discriminated against. They also portrayed it as an assault on Afrikaans music, on Afrikaans, and thus on Afrikaans speakers. This strategy found acceptance due to the mounting perceptions of fear and alienation among the section of Afrikanerdom susceptible to the FF Plus’s message.
There is, of course, another, larger section of Afrikanerdom who want to have nothing to do with Hofmeyr and who – Hofmeyr or no Hofmeyr – will never associate themselves with the FF Plus, and whose questions about the DA don’t include the FF Plus as a possible answer, but we deal with them in the chapter on the DA’s challenges.
Up to now in this chapter, we – like the FF Plus and its leader himself – have largely focused on the push factors that alienated voters from the DA, with the FF Plus as near-passive recipient of voter support. But there were also pull factors, things the FF Plus specifically did right in the election campaign.
Something that immediately struck me about the FF Plus’s strategy was the placement of their posters. You couldn’t move in the vicinity of any Afrikaans school without the FF Plus suddenly being a factor on the lampposts. They also fished in other ways in waters where the fish were plentiful, for instance by focusing in North West on places with a high concentration of whites – anchor points, as Solidarity calls them – rather than spreading their posters over sparsely populated areas. Hence centres such as Rustenburg, Potchefstroom and Klerksdorp received an avalanche of FF Plus posters.
The FF Plus decided to use Hofmeyr as the voice of its radio ads, which would irritate many Afrikaners intensely but inspire an equally intense minority. He is a divisive figure about whom few Afrikaners feel neutral – some believe he says what they feel and that he is actually a nice guy, while others perceive him as vulgar, despicable and racist.
Furthermore, the FF Plus learnt and shamelessly stole from the DP campaign of 1999, as shown by the ‘Slaan terug’ (Hit back/Fight back) slogan. It was a simple, negative, somewhat childlike campaign. Fight back with what? With ten MPs? And do people really still buy such infantile slogans as ‘Now or never’? Is ten seats ‘now’, or is it ‘never’? But this strategy undeniably worked for the FF Plus, so good for them.
What the FF Plus articulated was a kind of unfocused rage and exasperation on the part of some – and I emphasise some – Afrikaners. It’s a sentiment I won’t pretend to share – it’s fundamentally not how I was raised – but it’s something to which I am regularly exposed by virtue of my work and that I seek to understand to the best of my ability. By openly declaring that I don’t share it, I’m not trying to delegitimise it either. So let’s see how we can try to put this rage into words without identifying with it.
It is, in brief, the feeling that you are blamed for everything that goes wrong in South Africa while in actual fact you are doing your best to make everything work by personally working hard. It is the feeling that your children will be blamed forever for a past they had no part in. And it’s the feeling that the current government is really incapable of improving the country because infrastructure is collapsing, few new things of value are being created, foreign investors are scared off, domestic investors are chased off, productivity isn’t valued and there is little economic growth, so what will be left after everything has been redistributed?
If these frustrations, which are experienced by any rational person to a greater or lesser extent, start dominating your political thinking and directing your political choice, they turn into a kind of desperate rage that has found an unexpected echo and the appearance of an acceptable face in the anti-immigrant parties of Europe, the Brexit movement in Britain, and the Trump grouping in the United States. It’s a hitherto unfashionable school of thought which has acquired a voice (and hence votes) and is now becoming cocksure – who knows for how long. A strange characteristic of this grouping is that they have a plethora of platforms they use continuously, and yet they believe they are not being heard. They want to articulate their rage repeatedly, actually blare it out like a car without a silencer, and if you don’t agree with them, they think it’s because you don’t understand them. But you do understand – that’s why you disagree with them!
While anyone can appreciate the frustrations of such voters, many people get stuck on where the FF Plus votes