by Z. Pallo Jordon, Amandla
Liberalism regards the individual as the ultimate social and
political agent, endowed with a number of rights. The ideology also
acknowledges that individuals live in societies and are not totally autonomous.
Consequently it also recognises a number of societal obligations the individual
should fulfil in order to co-exist with others. In the continent of its birth
liberalism proved most attractive to the propertied classes who had embraced
the anti-feudal ethos of high social status attained through individual
achievement rather than through birth. As propertied persons the early liberals
were, however, very distrustful of the working poor and the property-less, whom
they saw as venal and easy to corrupt. The franchise and attendant political
rights were therefore to be enjoyed by the propertied classes and extended to
the other classes on the basis of merit, demonstrated by a certain lifestyle.
At its birth in the19th Century Cape Colony, South African
liberalism emerged into the midst of an expansionist European settler colonial
society in which class, race, ethnic origin, religion and even home language
directly impacted on a person’s status. Liberalism was a political current
among the White settlers and fraught with ambiguities and contradictions.
These are captured in the persons of Thomas Pringle and
William Porter. Pringle, the abolitionist and pioneer of a free press,
identified with the Africans’ resistance to colonial subjugation. His poem,
‘Makanna’s Gathering’ is an unequivocal endorsement of the defensive wars of
resistance waged by the Africans against Boer and Brit.
The other renowned liberal, Porter, was a clever imperial
political strategist. As Attorney General of the Cape Colony he was largely
responsible for the 1853 Cape constitution that was deliberately designed to
counter the weight of the Afrikaner vote by encouraging a compact among the
propertied classes of all races. Porter famously remarked: ‘I would rather meet
the Hottentot at the hustings, voting for his representative, than meet the
Hottentot in the wilds with his gun on his shoulder’.
South African liberalism’s split personality can be traced
to the decades preceding the opening up of the mines in 1867. The humanism
integral to liberalism persuaded men like Pringle to raise their voices against
racism, slavery and colonialism. But the liberals were also integral to the
colonial settler society and saw their future within it. Like his European
contemporaries, Porter and his supporters distrusted the poor. In the Cape
Colony the working poor were coloureds and Africans. The Cape franchise thus
had both a class and racial dimension.
For African and coloured voters the Cape franchise was the
token of their citizenship, the promise of an expanding floor of rights as
equal subjects of the British Empire with the whites. For the strategists of
empire it was a political instrument to impose and secure British hegemony in
South Africa by containing the Afrikaners, on one hand, while co-opting the
black propertied classes as junior partners, on the other. The Colonial Office
in London regarded the Cape franchise as a device to build a multi-racial bloc
amongst the propertied classes as the bulwark of empire in Southern Africa.
Concrete material and political interests undergirded Cape liberalism.
In exchange for the surrender of Boer sovereignty at
Vereeniging the British surrendered the political rights of their erstwhile
African and coloured allies in the Cape. The Cape franchise was sold down the
river at Vereeniging, a betrayal confirmed by the 1905 Native Affairs
Commission at which the colonial system that evolved into apartheid was first
elaborated. The 1905 Commission charted a new path for South Africa in which
only whites would be citizens and all blacks would be reduced to subject peoples.
The tattered shreds of the Cape franchise were swept away in 1955 when the NP
finally disenfranchised the coloureds.
For most of the 20th century the overwhelming majority of
whites refused to accept and embrace the verdict of history: that it was
impossible to unscramble the historic omelette that South Africa has become.
Twentieth century white South African politics was dominated by ever more
dangerous attempts to deny and reverse the reality that black and white lived
together in a common society, in which powerful centripetal forces were
knitting them ever closer together.
Running like a blue thread through the history of South
African liberalism is a readiness to defer to white prejudices that has been
consistently repaid in the coin of unambiguous rejection. Left to their own
devices after the removal of the Natives Representatives, for the next 25 years
the white electorate denied every liberal, save Helen Suzman, a seat in
Parliament.
The recommendations of the Fagan Commission of 1946
represent the farthest that post-war South African liberalism was prepared to
go in embracing a common society. One of Fagan’s findings was that African
workers were destined to displace whites in virtually every sector of the
economy.
Smuts downplayed the significance of the Commission’s
findings for fear of confirming the NP’s ‘swart gevaar’ electoral rhetoric in
1948. It remains a matter of speculation what direction South African politics
might have taken had Smuts had the political courage to run on the Fagan
Commission’s recommendations in 1948. Fear of the conservatism of white voters
persuaded him to be cautious.
The vision of the liberals of the 1950s was essentially
integrationist. They sought a state designed, defined and dominated by the
white minority, into which ‘deserving’ blacks would be integrated on the basis
of merit. As Percy Qoboza once explained, there was degrading racial
presumption implicit in the notion of a qualified franchise that assumed that
any white tramp was competent to have the franchise, while the African editor
of an important daily newspaper was required to demonstrate his competence.
South Africa’s liberals tried for decades to merge
elementary democratic principles with a political order that would give the
white minority veto power over the will of the majority. During the early
fifties they thought a qualified franchise, applicable only to blacks, would
achieve this. Liberals accepted that white and black lived in a common society,
but it would be on terms determined by the whites.
The Liberal Party found it increasingly difficult to manage
this tension in its politics. Ghana’s independence in 1957 had set in motion
the rapid decolonisation of the African continent. Patrick Duncan used his
journal, ‘Contact’, to cover these unfolding African events. By 1962 the
Liberal Party was ready to embrace a universal franchise and was remaking
itself as a predominantly black party, supportive of majority rule. Patrick
Duncan, the most radical among them, ended his life as a member of the
Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).
The Liberal Party opted to disband when the NP statutorily
banned non-racial political parties. The Progressive Party (Progs), explaining
that this was the only way to retain a foothold in Parliament, bowed to the
racist ban and expelled its black members. For well-nigh 20 after this the
Progs managed to hold on to exactly one seat in Parliament.
For diametrically opposite reasons, both white and black
South Africans distrusted liberals and found liberalism unattractive. The
gestation of South Africa’s liberal democratic Constitution was ironically a
dialogue between parties from the opposing poles of the political spectrum –
the ANC on the left, the NP on the right. Representing constituencies that were
suspicious of liberalism, in the process of finding each other in negotiations
they arrived at the common ground of the institutions of liberalism.
Racial oppression and apartheid in South Africa were the
institutional framework brought about by the development of capitalism in a
colonial environment. It required mass action, in which the individual was
often subordinated to the collective, to bring it down. Liberals played a very
marginal role in these developments.
Because they have historically preferred reformist instead
of revolutionary methods, liberals have invariably locked themselves into white
South African politics, making them hostages of the racially privileged whites.
The poor performance of the Progs after 1963 indicates that it was only the
wealthiest whites, fearing no competition from blacks, who were ready to relax
the regime of racial oppression.
For two decades after 1910 black leaders clung to the
illusion that political moderation on their part would persuade a critical mass
of white voters to elect a reformist government that would incrementally
abolish racism. But Liberals made no headway among a white population that
recognised and cherished its status of privilege at the expense of the blacks.
Liberals consistently opted to yield to the prejudices of the whites, leading
to a parting of the ways in the post-war years.
‘The Africans’ Claims’, adopted by the ANC conference in
1943, defines the divergent paths hewn by those who had formerly been allies.
Democracy in South Africa would inevitably result in the political dominance of
the African majority. As this was an outcome whites found unacceptable, the
liberals preferred to compromise democratic principles and capitulate to racial
bigotry. In opposition to the integrationist project of the liberals, the
liberation movement put forward a national democratic revolution. The
liberation movement’s vision is captured in the preamble of the Freedom
Charter, as ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it!’ But this would only
be realized by a democratic transformation that would amount to a political
revolution.
A South African nation, defined not by race, colour, creed
or ethnic origins, was considered an extremely radical idea during the
mid-1950s. By the 1970s it had become so commonplace that only the most
dogmatic racists and ethnicists rejected it. Yet at that moment the party that
had become the flagship of liberalism, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), was
still not comfortable with a universal franchise. When it finally did embrace
this basic democratic notion, the PFP hedged its bets with a policy of
federalism, explicitly designed to thwart what it delicately called ‘majoritarianism’.
After the revival of a mass movement in the wake of the
Soweto uprising, those liberals who had overcome their fears of African
majority rule found ways of cooperating with the movements of the oppressed.
Despite their own misgivings they discovered that the ANC had acquired a
growing hegemony over the struggle for change and in order to be relevant they
had to relate to it. Liberals, who remained fearful of democracy, sought and
found temporary allies amongst homeland leaders, toyed with various constitutional
models or tried to stimulate dialogue among the antagonists.
As the system of apartheid unravelled during the 1980s,
liberals could be found spread among a number of political trends. On the
right, the Institute of Race Relations, the Urban Foundation and a few smaller
bodies that had recently discovered the evils of apartheid on the right. On the
left, the Five Freedoms Forum, the End Conscription Campaign plus smaller
bodies affiliated to the UDF. In the centre was the Institute for a Democratic
South Africa (IDASA). There was also a new phenomenon, which Thabo Mbeki dubbed
‘the New Voortrekker’. The 1988 elections indicated shifts in the tectonic
plates of white political opinion. A few liberals were elected on the PFP
ticket. But in CODESA I and II the liberals were a sideshow.
Liberalism remained an isolated minority trend among whites.
The NP’s impressive showing in the 1994 elections demonstrated that the
majority of whites still supported the party of apartheid, perhaps in the hope
that it would thwart the ambitions of a democratic government.
The political practice of our liberals tends to be
ambivalent, betraying a lingering scepticism about the political capacity of
the poor and non-propertied. South African liberals express this in insulting
references to our general elections as ‘racial referenda’.
Under Zille’s leadership, liberalism’s flagship, the DA, has
finally come to terms with the post 1994 political settlement and dropped its
‘fight back’ posture. It is trying to appeal to black voters by appropriating
the language, style, the icons, images and totems of the liberation struggle.
Perhaps one’s final verdict could be the words of Oscar
Wilde: ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!’
