Polokwane and Blood River

There are a couple of things that have struck me as interesting this past weekend about the ANC presidential struggle in Polokwane*. [*for offshore readers: an obscure provincial capital in the northern part of SA.]

Listening to the chat lines, the newscasts on radio, and observing via many television networks, the following thoughts came to mind.

The first was the almost trivial reality that the entire affair was is and shall be driven by dark skinned people mostly, overwhelmingly in fact, of ethnic origin. With the exception of the odd [so-called] ‘white’ skinned newscaster from the BBC or similar, and a random handful of tokenist honorary black podium persons ‘white’ does not exist in Polokwane.

When someone in New Zealand sent me an SMS to ask me where Polokwane was I had difficulty for a moment remembering what it was once called in an era when a gathering of the momentous level represented by this particular leadership contest would have been exclusively white.

I would hypothesise here that Polokwane represents a watershed in the evolution of the new South Africa. Before Polokwane all defect was blamable on honkys and Apartheid. After Polokwane all defects are self-made and sustaining. Apartheid is dead long live togetherhate.

The transformation is utter and complete. I felt almost as I did when, returning to SA in the early eighties after an absence of 7 or 8 years, I discovered that the American v8 motor car era had vanished, never to be seen in numbers again, the [so-called] “White” professional soccer leagues that had dominated Johannesburg and the country life during my youth had disappeared, along with “my” team Durban City, and the idea today that honkys don’t support soccer was inconceivable at one time. Most staggeringly, Texan cigarettes had been toppled from their pre-eminent place as the cigarette of choice for “main Manne”, nailed by the ubiquitous product line extension… wussy filtered Texan.

More recently we have been witness to the almost complete disappearance of the old style [so called] “Greek café and tea room” and its replacement with the 7/11 type petrol station shop. What was thus, for this bloggist at least, most stark about Polokwane was the absolute absence of any Whiteys from the most significant political discourse since 1994, other than the odd, almost stoogelike character dotted here and there.

And that extends most overtly to the chat lines where most of the usual suspects who routinely phone in to the mandatory daily doses of SAFM talk back radio were in notable absentia and the talk was all [so-called] ‘black’ and it was fascinating stuff. [I exclude 702 because they only seem to have [so-called] ‘White’ listeners and everybody manages to sound like they only read Stephen Mulholland and the Citizen; and anyway I find the abusive/abrasive Mr Robbie almost as offensive as his predecessor: the late? John Berks.]

Which brings me to the second observation.

People with a reasonably objective view of history as a series of unfolding large events could possibly see echoes in the history of SA, in the events presently unfolding in the Limpopo province in SA.

Now I have always seen a certain analogy between the former [often despised] leader of SA, Jan Smuts and the present leader of transformed SA, Thabo Mbeki. Both leaders loved to strut the world stage and were/are regarded as major players by those outside the country punching far above their homeland’s natural weight. Both neglected their home turf, and both consequently aroused antagonism amongst their own supporters; in different ways perhaps, but no less fatally…

In both cases we experience a “whoops… what have we done?” effect. Smuts was humiliated at Standerton where he lost his formerly safe parliamentary seat, when people deserted his party and sent us off on a forty-four year journey into the wilderness of complete futility. As I write this it seems Mbeki may meet his ‘Waterloo’ at Polokwane. His disdain for his own people, coupled with an alienating mechanical style has driven them into the arms of a man who may change everything he has done. We await the unfolding in weekly instalments. [we don't expect them any faster. If an event that has been talked about since forever falters because someone forgot to deliver the ballot papers, when voting was the whole point of the exercise, then why should we expect any urgency in dealing with our potentially catastrophic battery of disintegrating issues.]


[Frankly, if our beloved Thabo should win, it will almost inevitably been seen as a ‘rigged’ victory given the disturbing objections by the Youth League and other parties to an electronic voting system. Thus an Mbeki victory may actually split the party. This has happened before in our history, more than once… enough to say it could be a trend. There is no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. Mbeki would then go down in history as the man who destroyed Africa’s oldest political party… not cool, because I have him tagged as Thabo the Great, as my regular readers would know, for his exemplary and as yet unacknowledged success in turning Gauteng {Zone one} into the Brussels of Africa/ Azania, through snagging Midrand as the home of the African Parliament. So to preserve what is left of his legacy he should quit while he’s ahead.]

Now I had been chugging along happily with this thought [ about Thabo and the late General Smuts] until this past weekend. Then sometime in the stretch of spun time after the first failed ballot bit and the next postponed ballot bit and the late arrival of the ballot papers bit and all the eulogising and "machine gun" bringing bits, I had an epiphany in terms of historical analogy.

This titanic struggle in Polokwane reflects a political turnaround of a kind we haven’t witnessed in this country in about six decades. That is since Smuts’s historical failure to read the market in 1948, which allowed the Apartheid regime to slip into power. Then through subterfuge and chicanery and vote rigging and other dirty tricks the scumbags held sway for decades and ruined the lives of about 98.9% of the population. However: Smuts himself, though a philosopher [of sorts], was not an Ideologue. [Unless one considers ‘Holism’ to be an ideology.]

So I realised that like all analogies seeing a comparison between Jan Smuts and Thabo Mbeki is simplistic. The real comparison was to another giant ideologue in our history.

I realised suddenly in that analogous epiphany that we are exiting the neo-Verwoerdian era of Thabo Mbeki, the cold, distant, analytic man who reintroduced racial profiling and reverse Apartheid [now renamed Togetherhate] into our post- revolutionary society. We are, ironically perhaps, entering the era of John Balthazar Vorster the populist strong man, who was a known “hard man” and party enforcer, just as the man from Quattro, the battle scarred Jacob Zuma, presents himself to us today.

There was a supplementary historical comparison observation in the moment Tokyo Sexwale left the stage. I had seen Sexwale as a Rhodesian figure… the rich man dispensing change from a position of moneyed elegance. Now I saw him, perhaps more ominously, as an analogy with the late Harold Oppenheimer who famously quit the banality of politics in the fifties to concentrate on his empire. I wondered if his leaving was an omen.

I also realised then, in passing, that the whole process matters as much to me, the effectively disenfranchised albeit not yet dispossessed honky, as the transfer of power from Verwoerdt to Vorster mattered to the average disenfranchised, dispossessed darky back then, in the days of evil. That of course is why there were almost no honkys, other than tokenists, who called in to the regular radio chat shows during the Battle of Polokwane, which itself took place over the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River.

Different faces same shit.

Keep on bloggin'
NiK is the blogospherian.