You hear this question all the time. The country is a mess. Corrupt to the core and its the poor bearing the brunt. It’s the ANC’s fault. Zuma himself is corrupt. Yet why the hell do they – the poor balck masses – still vote for the man?
There is a subtext: They can’t think for themselves. They must be irrational.
This does not wash with me.
Perhaps its because I’m an Afrikaner that I have some insight as to why these poor “uneducated” black South Africans are sticking with Zuma.
In 2007 during the build up to the rugby world cup the Times of Lonhdon published, no less than three of those articles you get in the British media from time to time. Naked prejudice about South Africans and Afrikaners.
First Jeremy Guscott explained how the new South African assistant coach, Australian Eddie Jones, was too cerebral for South African sensibilities.
“Jones is shrewd in the play-making department and, given enough time, he is a coach who can teach Habana and the South African backs the sort of precision moves we have seen from Australian backs for as long as anyone can remember. It will be touch and go, and I have serious doubts that he has had the time necessary to transform guys raised in a culture of one-dimensional, unimaginative, brutally direct back play in a few weeks”
If that seems innocent – wait there’s more. Stephen Jones chimed in on clever Mike Catt. Catt is an English speaking South African now playing for England.
“Yet it is in the head and not the body where Catt can indeed make the difference. The body aches and fades as the years go by, but out on the rugby field, as the wisdom of the years and the hits is absorbed, the mind can become sharper. Catt’s unerring tactical nous can be a prodigious weapon, and especially in the Bok context next Friday.
In life, as in rugby, to ascribe a characteristic to a nation can be deemed at worst as racism, and at best a sweeping generalisa-tion. So it may be harsh to say South Africa lacks leadership, that so often all the power and fury goes to waste because there is nobody to shape it.”
Jones makes no mention that Catt is a born and bred South African. This is because Jones does not consider English South Africans as South Africans. He is just too refined.
Chris Hewitt, an English South African himself, wrote a few days later comparing props – South Africa’s Os du Randt to England’s Matt Stevens. Stevens is of course also English speaking, but also a born and bred South African. Hewitt does acknowledge that Stevens is South African, but the two are different:
“Tomorrow, he (Os du Randt) will have the pleasure – or otherwise – of scrummaging against a fellow countryman. Matt Stevens, promoted from the bench as a result of Phil Vickery’s two-match suspension for making the clumsiest football tackle ever seen on a rugby field, may be a very substantial individual in terms of pounds and ounces, but he is not of Afrikaans stock. Rather, he was born in Durban and is every inch the western liberal gentleman.”
What is fascinating about Anglo prejudice is that it is so unaware of itself.
It was also with amazement – and a sense of recognition – that I read the following lines from Peter Hitchens – in an otherwise well researched piece about Zuma in the UK Dail Mail a week ago.
“He makes no pretence of being Westernised, and delights in wearing traditional Zulu dress, leopardskin, loincloth and all. He has an excellent singing voice, as I can testify.
He comes from the deep heart of Zululand, where his home is surprisingly modest but guarded by a modern security fence. It lies in the Nkandla district, in the lovely Zulu highlands a morning’s drive from the Victorian battlefields of Isandlwana, where the Zulus destroyed a British army, and Rorke’s Drift, where a small British force survived against enormous odds.
South Africa’s largest tribe are a proud fighting people, and Zuma will not be a mild leader, as Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, his two forerunners, were.
This, not the far-off world of Cape Town, is the real South Africa. It is currently tense and frightening, as well as obviously poor and ravaged by AIDS.
Young men, brought up in the warrior spirit, wander in angry and resentful groups, strikingly unlike the more peaceful Xhosas to the south.”
and…
“He completely lacks the Westernised polish and smoothness of Mandela and Mbeki.”
South Africa had a leader before who lived in a humble home and was disparaged by better educated Europeans. He was described by Lord Milner as being full of “panoplied hatred, insensate ambition, invincible ignorance.”
That leader was Paul Kruger, a man that received no formal education. Today Kruger is still revered for his leadership before and during the Boer War.
Am I implying that Zuma is a Kruger in the making. We simply don’t know that now.
But Zuma appeals to many ordinary South Africans. He is the leader that speaks most like them, behaves most like them and shares their background. This is a very powerful thing.
These South Africans are not irrational. Even if a recent poll found that the majority of South Africans think that Zuma is guilty of the corruption charges against him. They are by and large as good as anybody comprehending the evidence.
But they see something else too. Prejudice. And its impact is felt personally.
They feel excluded, and they sense people are ganging up against Zuma for the same reasons they have been marginalised. Being uneducated, unsophisticated and different.
What’s more they see other better educated South Africans getting away with the same or even worse behavior.
That’s why they are standing up for Zuma.
As the man in Bakerton demonstrated, I don’t think Zuma is getting a free ride to do as he pleases either. If he does not deliver he will be in for a hard time from the very same constituency.
If you find this support of Zuma shocking I have little sympathy. What did you expect? This is Africa remember.
In the mean time spend a little time wondering why the poor unwashed should trust your gushing rage now if you never said anything about Mbeki’s reign?
PS: This is one of the reasons I find the DA’s stop Zuma campaign so ill-advised. For many this is not just a call to reject Zuma. This is a call to reject them.
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1 The Afro pessimists are restless // Jun 17, 2009 at 7:50 pm
[...] white, and thirdly English bias against Zuma. I had previously written here about white and middleclass bias against [...]
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