Читать книгу Until Julius Comes - Richard Poplak - Страница 15

In which the Democratic Alliance promises to march to Luthuli House, to present a demand, wrapped inside a proposal, for 6 million ‘real jobs’ to the ruling party. And then doesn’t show up.

They never came. They said they would come, a big blue army armed with a document demanding jobs, jobs, jobs. But they didn’t arrive. They had other things to worry about. Divorce, you see, is a bitch.

In many respects, this non-delivery of a fatuous document filled with funny maths encapsulated the travails of a die-hard ANC supporter: always waiting for something; nothing comes. In this case, absent was a phalanx of blue T-shirts and blue banners, worn and carried by Helen Zille’s last remaining faithful.

One could almost imagine the DA legions walking up Johannesburg’s Sauer Street towards the brutalist concrete high rise that is the ANC’s lair, all set to exercise their constitutional right to freedom of speech. According to the DA press people, the march was not cancelled, but rescheduled. If it got nasty, as it was likely to, Zille and her henchfolk would be spirited back to Rosebank, while the rank and file duked it out in the streets. At least during the infamous Marriage, no DA member took an actual bottle to the head. Young people do dumb things, and they would do dumb things were the DA to arrive at Luthuli House.

A thought the DA may want to consider: just because it’s a constitutional right to eat ice cream for breakfast every morning doesn’t make it a smart lifestyle choice.

Anyway, the anti-march non-rally rally kicked off around 9 a.m., with a few hundred chanting faithful waving the usual ANC banners, wearing the usual T-shirts, my favourite of which read ‘Decade of the Cadre’ (I’ll say). I was also sorry to note the slow creep of red berets intermingling with the standard ANC design language, and while I understand that the South African Communist Party has been sporting red since the palaeolithic age, it very simply ruins the green, black and yellow colour palette, an observation that serves as my final fashion criticism of the election cycle, hopefully.

Shortly after arriving, I fell into chatting with an SACP member named Zweli.

‘So what’s the deal here this morning?’ I asked, after showing him an email of the press release that promised, in lieu of the non-march rally, an ANC ‘blitzing campaign’ in the Johannesburg CBD. He looked confused. ‘We’re here to protect the revolutionary house,’ he told me.

‘But hasn’t the DA march been cancelled?’

He smiled. ‘They seem to cancel many things. But we are here in case they are coming.’

By this point, orange cones and plastic barriers had been randomly placed along Sauer Street, shutting down traffic for those on their way to the very work the DA has pledged to create so much more of. When it comes to the ruling party, however, you’re either in the dancing circle or you’re not, and those in their vehicles were not.

The ANC’s campaign party truck was parked on President Street, under the gaze of the library building’s friezes depicting Goethe, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante and friends. These concrete literary giants, forming a row on the northern wall of the library’s edifice under which the party truck was installed, seemed to regard what was happening below with recognition, as if they were thinking, ‘Yup, there was lots of this crap in my day, too.’

On my way to a prime viewing spot, I encountered the provincial treasurer of the students’ union, and we fought through the crowd together. He wore boxing gloves and a slingshot around his neck. I told him that he looked ready.

‘We are ready,’ he said. ‘We are ready.’

Jessie Duarte, the ANC’s Deputy Secretary General, provided the warm-up act, if that’s the proper way to describe it. She addressed, as everyone seems to these days, ‘the youth’.

‘Helen Zille’s husband is a lecturer at UCT,’ she reminded the faithful. ‘But he doesn’t want you there. The ANC is saying, “Not on our watch!”’

The crowd had filled out with a representative ensemble of those unable to find work in this country: old women, and young men in their prime. ‘Today,’ Duarte promised them, ‘we are not going to waste this day. We heard in the news that the visitors are not ready. If they come next week, next year, we will be ready. Now, what we are going to do is political education.’

Which meant handing out pamphlets and dog-eared copies of the manifesto to taxi drivers and passers-by.

Duarte went on to blame the current anti-march non-rally rally on ‘Stan Greenman or something’, a presumed reference to the American pollster Stan Greenberg, who has advised everyone from Bill Clinton, evil monster vegetable maker Monsanto and, wait for it, the ANC itself. He ditched the ruling party in 1999 because Thabo Mbeki’s stance on Aids horrified him, and in 2013 agreed to provide his services to the DA, in no small part because of a long-standing friendship with the party’s national chairperson, Wilmot James. Greenberg has described his role as that of ‘an outside adviser to the existing local DA polling operation’, and he’s been bullish on the DA’s polling numbers. But he would be.

The DepSecGen, however, saw a conspiracy: ‘[Greenberg] says, “Go to the ANC, because they will react violently.” But this is not America. This is South Africa,’ implying that the incoming DA marchers, should they ever arrive, would be handed cups of Oros and reams of ANC literature, and not be provoked into a street war.

Later, I got talking with two younger comrades, one wearing a black beret and a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of an AK-47. Mpumi told me that he and his comrades would have stopped the march if it had occurred. ‘This is our house,’ he said, pointing to the HQ’s concrete facade. ‘This is our heart. The correct place to go with their grievances is the Union Buildings. Go to Pretoria. Don’t come here.’

I asked him about the DA’s septimana horribilis – the brief, disastrous Mamphela marriage –presumably all the fault of Stan Greenberg. ‘It was empty, there’s nothing to talk about. It’s a sign of desperation to get black voters. It’s a rent-a-black mentality. They want a BEE president. But, let’s be honest, Mamphela Ramphele is not really that black.’

By now, the rotund Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, had been hoisted onto the party truck. He held aloft the storied manifesto. He addressed ‘the youth’.

‘There has been a divorce in the DA,’ said Mantashe. ‘Because the divorce was complicated, they did not arrive. They wanted to storm the Bastille. Very ambitious. Very ambitious.’

Not really. The DA was happy to gamble with the safety of their supporters; so too was the ANC. It’s just people, and there are lots where they came from. But what would have been welcome was if the official opposition had pulled back from all the stunt work and started to campaign for the 2014 general elections like a sophisticated political party, and not like COPE’s nursery-school wing. The DA didn’t need provocative marches. They just needed a week that didn’t make them look like schmucks.