As part of his address (“Building an African liberal agenda”) to the DA federal congress in April this year, DA leader Mmusi Maimane said, “We recognise the spirit of ubuntu — that I am who I am through other people.”
The idea of ubuntu features fairly regularly in Maimane’s rhetoric. He has suggested that in 1994, “we had our differences but, in the spirit of ubuntu, in the best interests of our country and its future, we united around our shared goals”.
That was thanks to the late former president Nelson Mandela who, Maimane says, instilled values such as “compassion, forgiveness, kindness, humanity and Ubuntu” in the South African people. More recently, he said 2017 was, for the DA and SA, a chance to recommit “to economic advancement, the rule of law, accountability, constitutionalism and ubuntu”. That didn’t work out as planned, but, as they say, it’s the thought that counts.
There seems to be some agreement as to the general parameters of ubuntu (get into the details and it quickly becomes very philosophically messy). Mandela — Maimane’s ideological spirit animal — put it like this in 2006: “A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food and attend to him.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, along with Mandela, has probably done the most to popularise the idea, said in 2008: “Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our inter-connectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality — ubuntu — you are known for your generosity.”
Whatever happened to the DA’s African liberal values? Of African brotherhood and sympathy for your fellow traveler? Because there seems to be precious little of it on display. All this “us and them” talk is as un-ubuntu as you get
Whatever the definitive definition, the idea would seem at the very least, and in its best sense, to be underpinned by values such as compassion and empathy, human solidarity and a generosity of spirit. Essentially, love thy neighbour as you might love yourself.
(Some of the ideas inherent to ubuntu take on entirely different and more worrying connotations in a nationalistic environment — the ANC used the idea to justify not arresting Omar al-Bashir — but that is a separate discussion, and if the DA wants to embrace the idea, the least we can do is engage the party on its own terms.)
So, the big question is this: if the DA is all aboard the version of “African liberalism” Maimane has defined, and central to that is the spirit of ubuntu, how does one square that with the party’s recent hard-line, cold and even brutal attitude to immigration? If, as Maimane says, “I am who I am through other people”, if ubuntu is all about selflessly helping a weary traveler, generosity and inter-connectedness, what are we to make of the DA election poster that read: “All South Africans first”?
And how are we to understand Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba’s suggestion that all informal traders and illegal immigrants are harbingers of ebola, or his declaration: “Health of our people first”?
Un-ubuntu
Whatever happened to the DA’s African liberal values? Of African brotherhood and sympathy for your fellow traveler? Because there seems to be precious little of it on display. All this “us and them” talk is as un-ubuntu as you get.
And, as ever with the DA, don’t think the party hasn’t clearly and absolutely set the bar on this front, when it comes to the ANC. In 2015, when our South African brothers and sisters were butchering their African neighbours with screwdrivers (ubuntu has always been more of a fantasy than a practical reality), in one of many xenophobic outbreaks, the DA was all over the lack of ubuntu.
Take this excerpt from a May 2015 speech by DA MP George Mari, who argued the attacks would have been avoided had South Africans been taught the values of ubuntu: “Under the ANC leadership, people have forgotten that we are part of the whole continent. South Africans have forgotten that during the apartheid era many of our struggle heroes sought refuge in these neighbouring countries.”
Well quite, George. Only the DA seems to be the one who has forgotten that these days.
Maimane declared in 2013 that “Africaness is defined by one’s commitment to the issues and lives of the African people. And nothing can better measure that Africaness than one’s commitment to the spirit of ubuntu.” You wonder how the DA today holds up against its own standards. Maimane’s “Africaness” (whatever that is) appears today rather conservative in nature.
Helping the party forget is the strategic advice of Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, the master of dog-whistle election campaigns centred around immigration (Crosby’s 2005 campaign for Michael Howard, a Conservative briton, revolved around the ominous slogan: “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”).
Crosby, a right-wing conservative, now has Maimane’s ear and you can be sure Maimane likes what he hears. Sad to the see the DA, a liberal party that is supposed to stand up for the weak and vulnerable, jump on the populist bandwagon.
Binary politics
Like so many debates in SA, the issue of illegal immigration has become absolutely binary. The South African public mind really is a pathetically simple beast. Criticise callousness and you are a weak softy who wants open borders. The idea that you can be tough on the causes of illegal immigration and compassionate towards the people affected, is just a bridge too far for most. They cannot compute.
Certainly the DA can’t. Its rhetoric on the issue is devoid of compassion, particularly for the horror so many immigrants have fled and the abuse and hate they suffer within our borders (such as they are). The party’s attitude is entirely punitive.
Why would an “African liberal party” hire someone like Crosby? “Africans don’t fear each other, they love each other, that’s where ubuntu comes from,” the DA’s Pule Thole argued in 2015. But that is not the DA of today: it is in the fear business now, and “foreigners” are the well from which it draws its increasingly poisonous water.
So, what does one make this contradiction? The options are not great, as far as the DA is concerned. The first is that all Maimane’s posturing about ubuntu is nothing more than that, as is so often the case with the man: an empty, meaningless platitude to generate the impression he values “Africaness”, its ideas and traditions; but, in truth, what he really values is conservatism, nationalism and indifference.
The second is that the DA does really care about ubuntu, at least in the best sense of the idea, but it cares more about votes. And in pandering to all the latent animosity and resentment towards illegal immigrants (and, frankly, immigrants in general) it has decided this is the best way to make a quick electoral buck. That at least would explain Crosby.
Take your pick. But it doesn’t matter which way you cut it, the DA’s approach to this issue is as hypocritical as it is devoid of humanity. And on that subject, let’s leave the final word to Maimane himself, who in 2015 had this to say: “I have seen people being beaten and necklaced, and their property destroyed … Our humanity is slipping away from us, and we cannot allow that. We cannot stand by as fellow human beings are tortured and murdered.”
How does one’s humanity slip away? Slowly. And it does not start with a brutal about-turn. It starts by suppressing the very things that animate it. On that front, the DA is fully invested in exorcising the much-vaunted spirit of ubuntu from its midst. You wonder what will remain when it is fully vanquished.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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