Politics Notebook | The Iron Lady in charming mode

HELEN ZILLE, Godzille, South Africa’s Iron Lady, has just scored more black votes for the DA than during the entire election campaign ahead of May 29 this year.

She was a guest on SMWX, the highly popular and influential podcast of Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh (yes, the son of Dali) for a full hour. When I checked soon after, it had already had 100 000 views.

John Steenhuisen would never have had such an impact – perhaps no one else in the DA leadership would have either.

It was a soft interview with Mpofu-Walsh, an Oxford PhD who lectures at Wits, who gave her leeway to tell her life story and comment fully on current affairs without interruption.

Tens of thousands of young black people who watch SMWX every week probably heard for the first time, I should think, about her parents and grandparents’ persecution in Nazi Germany, her own role in the Black Sash, the End Conscription Campaign, reporting on the murder of Steve Biko and black schools in the Cape.

Her explanation that someone’s chromosome count and melanin level should not determine how they are treated would have resonated with some viewers.

Zille shared how dear and courteous Jacob Zuma always was to her – “almost more so than the people in my own party”. He is a “very kind person at heart, but he’s corrupt”, she said.

She calmly laid out her party’s controversial opposition to they way black empowerment is implemented: “If BEE were to uplift the poor, I’d be right there. But it doesn’t do that at all. What it does ... is giving the wealthy and politically powerful a fig leaf to cover up their looting of the state, which just makes poor people poorer and poorer.

“Like Jacob Zuma said to me: ‘I’m not doing anything wrong; I’m just doing BEE’ when he defined state capture. And I said absolutely, I know you’re doing BEE; that’s why we oppose it, because it has nothing to do with empowering poor people. So we are about empowering people who are disadvantaged by the past, not about giving a political fig leaf to powerful people to continue milking the system.”

Here’s part of her analysis of today’s political landscape: “The ANC will be coming apart more and more as we go forward. There are two poles of politics that are important. The one is the pole represented by Zuma and Julius Malema. And that’s the pole that has the vision of the leader controlling the party, the party controlling the state, and the state controlling society. It’s the model that has led to most state failure on the planet.

“On the other side is the DA’s model ... the open society, defending rights and freedoms, the nonracial society running under constitutionalism and the rule of law with a market-based economy that creates jobs. And that’s the model for every successful and prosperous country.

“So these two models are against each other. The one is democratic centralism, which has nothing to do with democracy but is centralism, and the other is the open society that we stand for. The ANC does not know where it stands. So while the one pole that was only occupied by the EFF and Malema at one point, after the big break-up of Zuma, he took over that pole. It is a sign of the ANC coming apart over these two alternative visions for the future of SA.

“And the big fight now between Paul Mashatile and Cyril Ramaphosa in the middle of the presidency around many issues in the GNU shows how those two poles are pulling in opposite directions. And the big question for 10 years hence is who will be the biggest block. Will it be the nonracial constitutionalists who believe in growth and jobs and inclusion, or will it be the national democratic revolution crowd having a supreme leader controlling the party and the party controlling the state and the state controlling the economy and society, which is a doomsday message for SA? It will result in complete collapse. Those are the two choices, and the big question over the next 10 years is which one will build a new majority.”

Zille says South Africa’s future will be defined by who succeeds Ramaphosa as president; it will determine whether the country becomes a failed state or remains a successful democracy.

Watch the interview yourself; it’s worth the time and effort.

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The MAGA worms

The MAGA worm has infiltrated the brains of many white South Africans – a mindless parroting of Donald Trump’s core base of crazies, now dished out daily in South Africa. And with great self-confidence and bravado, because their man has won and is now the “leader of the free world”.

What is utterly repulsive to me is that a senior DA leader, Michael Waters, is a lead singer in this choir.

Waters, an immigrant from Britain, is the DA’s deputy whip in parliament and one of the deputy chairs of the party’s federal council.

This week, Waters posted a popular MAGA meme from America on Twitter/X:

One's first reaction is that of course men should not be given free access to bathrooms and toilets meant for women. Absolutely not.

But that’s not what this is about at all. Waters is stirring up the transgender boogie man that MAGA fanatics love to peddle in. Bearded, moustachioed 150 kg men supposedly love to put on a dress and pretend to be women just to rape women or humiliate them in sports.

As someone who knows a transgender teenager and witnesses their complex, heartbreaking struggle to fit in and make sense of everything, I responded to Waters: “What an ignorant, bigoted man you are. Stop parroting the MAGA bullshit here.”

That was a mistake. Within a single day, more than 800 people lashed out at me on Twitter. I’m a pervert and a pedophile, my wife must have a penis, and so on. Woke has rotted my brain.

Almost everyone learnedly repeats the MAGA nonsense about one or two chromosomes and that God created only a man or a woman.

And then there were dozens who warned that if they crossed paths with me, they would beat me to death. One guy wrote that he hopes my grandchildren are raped so that I will understand.

I don’t quite understand why transgender people stir up people’s emotions so wildly. Is it a reflection of their own doubts about their gender identity, or what? Is it just a stick to beat the “wokes” with?

In South Africa, with its 60 million people, there have only been one or two controversies about this, and these involved schools proposing a “neutral” bathroom alongside those for boys and girls. As far as I know, we have not had a single incident in South Africa where an athlete assigned male at birth insisted on competing against women in sports. Worldwide, among 8 billion people, there are only about two or three controversies about this every year.

So why would an influential politician, from a party that boasts of its liberalism and tolerance, stir up this boogie man here? What does it say about him?

And what will the DA do about it? Probably nothing, because Helen Zille is a woke-hunter too.

If Waters could overcome his MAGA instincts and read a bit, he would discover that transgender people have been among us for thousands of years and have been fully accepted by communities. Only European colonialists began to stigmatise them.

In indigenous American tribes like the Lakota, Zuni, and Navajo, transgender people were referred to as “Two-Spirit” people, and many were shamans. The Roman emperor Elagabalus (third century BCE) was transgender.

Are all these ancient cultures also contemptibly woke?

Let me quote myself from an article about this: “Transgender communities have existed in the ancient era in many civilisations, with considerable historical evidence particularly from Iran, Britain, the Balkans, Korea, Japan and China, and were widely accepted. Plato wrote about a third, androgynous gender as early as 380 BCE.

“Contemporary examples include the kathoey in Thailand (accepted through Buddhism), the bakla in the Philippines, the travesti in South America, the hijra in India, and the khawaja sira in Pakistan. (An official 2009 report estimated there are up to 300 000 khawaja sira in Pakistan.)

“It was only British colonial authorities after the 1860s that deemed hijras in India a ‘breach of public decency’ and launched a campaign against them.”

But please read the entire article here – ask ChatGPT to translate.

♦ VWB ♦

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