“For you, potholes and sewage in the streets. For me, an enormous salary, a new BMW and lavish improvements to my house.” This is in fact what ANC candidates in the local elections are promising their voters, while they say they are promising them Heaven on Earth. Everybody knows this. But I don’t think you can accuse them of lying.
I think that they are just playing in a sort of ritualised political game (described very well in Eric Berne’s 1964 book, Games People Play). They are acting in a sort of pantomime. The voters, knowing the ANC will betray them yet again but still voting ANC, behave like the audience in a pantomime.
In pantomimes, everybody knows that the Dame is a man. Britons know that Dame Edna Everage is Barry Humphries; South Africans know Evita Bezuidenhout is Pieter-Dirk Uys. But no TV presenter, interviewing either, would dream of saying, “You’re a man!” It would spoil the game. Similarly, in South African politics, there are all sorts of games we are required to play knowing full well they are false.
Service protests seem part of the pantomime. Poor black people, living in wretched municipalities ruined by the ANC, regularly stage violent protests against disintegrating roads and open sewers. Then at election time they vote ANC again (or EFF, which is just a version of the ANC).
We all know how to improve local services: vote DA. I have reservations about the DA’s policies but there is no doubt about their excellent record in local government. If the people in a crumbling black municipality voted for the DA, they would get better roads, water supply and sanitation. They know this but will not vote for them. That would spoil the game. Instead, black Africans flee from districts ruled by the ANC to districts ruled by the DA and, once there, vote ANC (and probably calling the DA racists on top of it). That is part of the game.
Woke white South Africans play the game as enthusiastically as ANC politicians. They claim to support racial affirmative action, BEE, transformation and employment equity while knowing they are all disastrous. They would not dream of sending their own children to schools with 92% black teachers (as required by employment equity), with teachers appointed by affirmative action. But if you said to such a woke white parent, “Why don’t you send your children to a black township school rather than that posh white school?”, she would look at you with blank amazement for even asking such a question. On the radio I often hear a woke white presenter, who sends his own children to white schools, stating that affirmative action is essential to “redress the legacy of the past”. He knows how to play the game.
Anti-colonisation is another part of the game. Black Africans love most things the European colonialists brought to Africa, and want more. They love the writing and technology the Europeans brought. They love, with less obvious reason, the religions, languages and sports they brought, and often prefer them to their own. When Helen Zille pointed this out, she was condemned as a racist, even by fellow DA members. She wasn’t playing the game. UCT students know how to play the colonial game. They agree almost completely with Cecil John Rhodes about the superiority of British culture and especially the need to make English the universal language, but they make a big show of tearing down his statue.
Eric Berne gave examples of what happens to people who don’t play the game. Miss Black, a young social worker, joined a USA government welfare department. Her task was to find employment for “indigent” people. The game was this. The department would find jobs for what it considered hopeless young people; they would soon fail at the jobs, and come back to the department for more welfare. This made everybody happy. The people in the department loved thinking how awful the whole economic system was, and how useless these indigent people were. The indigent people loved the feeling of self-pity and resentment against a cruel world. Miss Black didn’t know how to play the game. When she found a person a job and he returned after a week, she shouted at him to get another job and stick to it; otherwise, she said, she would stop his welfare. He did so. He did work hard, and was successful in his job, and made himself rich and happy. The other people in the department were furious when they found out, and she was nearly dismissed.
I suppose this would happen to the DA if it did run a black township and did provide employment and good services. The Daily Maverick and the Mail & Guardian would howl at them for being brutal racists. If any politician succeeded in making us believe that all people are of equal worth and should be treated in the same way, that promotion should be strictly on merit, and that help should be given because of disadvantage and not race, she would be denounced as a racist and a right winger, and ordered to go on a course of Critical Race Theory.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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