GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Patricia de Lille’s final resting place

“Harris asked me if I’d ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said he went in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish — hardly worth the twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn’t a bit like the real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris took in. He said: “We’ll just go in here, so that you can say you’ve been, but it’s very simple. It’s absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first turning to the right. We’ll just walk round for 10 minutes, and then go and get some lunch.”

Politics is a fog. To make your way through it you need a map: a set of values and principles by whose light you are able move forward, with purpose and certainty. These ideological guides have many names — socialism, liberalism, conservatism — but, whatever your particular preference, without the accompanying conceptual tool to plot a moral course, you will inevitably become lost. Not just lost, but prone to walking in circles and thus subject to all the attendant peccadillos: hypocrisy, contradiction, insincerity and conceit.

It was a long time ago that Patricia de Lille first plunged into that grand, grey mist that has claimed so many before her, all initially headstrong and self-assured. Decades later, and you can still find her marching determinedly through the haze. 

Look back over her journey, however, and it is difficult to say emphatically where exactly she was headed at any given point, so many times has she switched out her map, about-turned and marched with some newfound conviction in the opposite direction. She will always tell you she knows exactly where she is going, but the vapor trail she leaves behind her is akin more to a scribble than a straight line.

She has recently just ditched her map again, this time to follow yet another new chart, of her own design. She tried to do that once before. It didn’t end well. 

The glory days

 “They met some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had been there for three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it. Harris told them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going in, and then should turn round and come out again. They said it was very kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.”

The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was the EFF of the early 1990s — big on grandiose and violent racial rhetoric (“one settler, one bullet”) and quite big on actual violence too (the St James’s massacre). De Lille couldn’t ever bring herself to totally embrace the raw anger that ran through the heart of the organisation. She, like Julius Malema years after her, would only feign revolution. Nevertheless, she did not lack for effort.

“One settler, one plane ticket” was her line, unsubtle enough to still make the necessary point. She said of white people in February 1994 that “The media should encourage them to leave, to create space for the majority.”

“We want a government of Africans, by Africans and for Africans.”

The map she carried in her hands back then was a binary, uncomplicated affair. Black and white, settlers and Africans, good and evil, there were only ever two paths to choose between. And the one, very clearly, lead straight to Azania, the PAC’s Xanadu. 

“The PAC wants to destroy white domination and is not prepared to share power with the white minority,” she told the Cape Argus in March 1994. 

There was, however, some small wiggle room — whites could discard the settler tag under certain circumstances. “Yes, it is possible,” De Lille explained in 1993. “Immediately a white joins the PAC he’s not a ‘settler’ anymore.” 

De Lille was not without contradiction, as usually happens with demagogues. She wanted whites to leave but she also wanted other countries to refuse them entry: “We need to get countries such as Britain, Canada and Australia to refuse these disloyal racists entry,” she said. “After all, these people migrate to these countries and take jobs that could be done by the locals. That should not be allowed.”

Nevertheless, whether they stayed or went, joined or opposed the PAC, the basic premise stayed more or less the same: “In our situation … settlers are white — they call themselves white, it is the supreme identity that white people have assumed for themselves all over the world.”

De Lille would roam around the country in EFF-like fashion, stoking racial tension and punting her own particular demagogic brand of revolutionary populism. Addressing about 1,000 supporters at a rally in Gugulethu in July 1995, De Lille said: “PAC members should invade farms and take them by force.” Later on, she elaborated on her call: “There is no way one is going to get the land delivered to you on a silver platter. I told the people that they are not going to get their land sitting down. You have to fight for your land. That is what I said.”

Sounds familiar.

She wasn’t all talk either. In July 1998, she led about 100 residents onto a tract of Cape Town municipal property in Pooke-se-bos, near Rylands Estate. The Cape Times reported: “Members of the community who have been squatting for several years on private land in Rylands yesterday invaded adjacent Cape Town city council land with the backing of Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille and support from fellow squatters specially bused in from Mitchells Plain."

“I know I’ll get grilled over this,” De Lille said, “but what the hell.”

De Lille has always had a sense of theatre. In November 1999, she screamed inside parliament at an ANC heckler who had suggested she reveal the names of several rape survivors to whom she had referred: “Shut up! … You must get raped!” before continuing to shout, “You know you must get raped … I wish someone could rape you one day!” 

Alas, all the theatrics weren’t translating into support.

Ahead of the 1999 general election, De Lille said of the PAC’s prospects: “We are very serious about moving away from the 1% perception party and that we said our target is to reach 35%.” As it turned out, the party ended up with 0.71% and the writing was on the wall.

In 2000, the DA was formed. Later it would prove to be her bête noir. But she wasted no time framing it as a vehicle of oppression, particularly where coloured voters were concerned: “The bottom line here is not an ideology but race. I can’t explain why, to use the liberation phrase, ‘the oppressed should vote for the oppressor’. Inside myself I’ve said it, ‘I know I am an African’, but many of our coloured people still need to come to terms with this.”

There would come a day, however, when De Lille would not just vote for the oppressor, but ask for a vote on the oppressor’s behalf.

In the interim, she drifted off. In 2002, she stated: “I am only going to spend 10% of my time in Parliament, which means I’ll be a de facto-absent member. I’ve decided I’ve got better things to do.” And she meant it. That year she attended only 12 out of 80 sittings of the National Assembly.

A brave new world 

“They picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they went along, until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze. People who had given up all hopes of ever getting either in or out, or of ever seeing their home and friends again, plucked up courage at the sight of Harris and his party, and joined the procession, blessing him. Harris said he should judge there must have been 20 people, following him, in all; and one woman with a baby, who had been there all the morning, insisted on taking his arm, for fear of losing him.”

In June 2003, De Lille announced a new venture. She used the floor-crossing legislation to defect to herself and start a new political party: the Independent Democrats (ID). It was a profitable decision. As an MP, De Lille received R380,760 annually, but now, as the leader of a minority party, consisting of just two public representatives, she would receive R408,600 every year. With that, R270,276 from the state to cover the ID’s national expenses and a further R125,727 from the Gauteng legislature, in lieu of the party’s solitary MPL.

In turn, she adopted a second and altogether different ideological map, one defined by a love of the constitution, parliament and ostensible nonracialism. Gone was all the racial hate and animosity. She was now a proud, patriotic social democrat.

While in the PAC, De Lille had suggested in November 1994 that “The name ‘South Africa’ now belongs in the dustbin of history,” as, she argued, it reeked of colonialism. In launching the ID, she declared, “The ID is a party of the new SA, for the new SA.”

She set about the business of whitewashing her record, where appropriate. Asked on Radio 702, soon after the launch: “Did you ever say white people should leave the country?” De Lille replied with some enthusiasm: “No! I never ever said that.”

You can take the actor out of the theatre….

In her inaugural ID speech she complained: “Politicians from across the political spectrum have exploited the fears and ambitions of our people for cynical political gain,” seemingly without irony. Later on, she went as far as to write: “I caution leaders not to use ethnicity to garner support”.

Whereas once she had led a land invasion, in 2003 she told the Cape Town Press Club: “Under no circumstances do I support land invasions.” 

In 2002, De Lille had defended former president Thabo Mbeki’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” towards Zimbabwe. She said then, “There is an issue of sovereignty” and “There are procedures you need to follow. We have tried our best, but what more can you do if the people you are talking to don’t listen?” But, in the ID, new map in hand, she regularly berated the ANC government for failing to take a hard line. 

You can only contradict yourself so much in politics. As soon as it becomes a habit, it will come back to bite you. 

Of the ID itself, De Lille had promised that it “refuses to make promises we cannot keep”. It was another cruel irony that the party’s endless honeymoon with the media (a relationship that seemed immune to De Lille’s many and various failings as ID leader) would eventually slip past the point of no return when, in 2006, forced to choose between siding with the ANC or the DA for the Cape Town mayoralty, she went with the ANC. 

“We are not going to back Nomaindia for mayor and that is non-negotiable,” De Lille had promised her voters in February 2006. After the vote in question, she said: “The reason we supported the ANC on the mayoral vote was based on our (shared) anti-racism and pro-poor principles.”

It was the quintessential unkept promise and decimated what little trust remained for her party. In truth, the death of the ID had been some time in the making. De Lille, riding a wave of widely disproportionate media publicity had predicted that the ID would get between 10% and 12% of the vote, or 20 to 25 seats in parliament, in the 2004 general election. On the day, she managed 1.73% or seven seats, but it was enough to keep the fantasy alive. And so she marched on, ever further into the fog.

By 2009, however, and after the fundamental betrayal of her voters she had overseen in Cape Town, the ID all but vanished from the public radar. The party managed 0.81% back then, and just four seats, all the way back down to the PAC levels of old. 

Much of this was because De Lille, generally, didn’t seem to have the faintest idea where, exactly, it was she was headed. She made much hay out of the fact that the ID was “independent” — not the ANC or the DA — but she spent as much time deriding both parties as she did cosying up to them. She slammed the ANC as failing fundamentally to deliver anything, incompetent and directionless, and would then vote with it in parliament. In 2005, the ID supported 32 out of 34 ANC national budget votes, opposing only health and defence.

Her confusion would lead to bizarre contradictions like, just 12 days before the budget votes, calling for the public works minister to be fired, on the grounds that she had “failed to utilise her department’s budget for three consecutive years”, only to then vote for her and her budget in parliament. 

That’s the thing about these one-personality parties. They are inevitably built on little more than the ego of one individual, not on any consistent ideological foundation. And while they are fun to begin with, as soon as people realise the whole project is really just an extension of whatever the given protagonist had for breakfast, they shrink and die. 

De Lille has admitted as much in effect. Asked about the ID these days, she says her goal was to become the first woman politician to lead a political party. Hardly an act of public benevolence.

Besides, ahead of the constitutional negotiations in 1993, De Lille had said, “Women are strange animals. They’re petty and jealous and I don’t see why they should be represented at the negotiating table when very few of them have any contribution to make.” But at least they had De Lille, whatever their collective shortcomings. 

Of the official opposition, De Lille said — in response to a typically loaded Mail & Guardian suggestion in 2005 that the ID risked becoming “just another DA” — “Oooh, no, never ever, never, never ever,” before continuing to state emphatically that “The DA will remain a white boys' club — a small white boys' club — with the main focus to try to take SA back to where we came from, to maintain the status quo of apartheid.” 

But, as they say in politics, never say never.

Strangely, as De Lille’s electoral prospects steadily declined from negligible to nonexistent, she seemed to be growing closer and closer to the racist, apartheid-loving, oppressive DA; especially in Cape Town, where the last of the ID’s electoral support was holding out valiantly against the coming of the night. Until, in 2010, the two parties formally merged. “I can therefore proudly state today that this is a marriage that will last, because very importantly it has the blessing of our members,” De Lille boasted.

Time for a new map.

Squaring the circle

“Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze. ‘Oh, one of the largest in Europe,’ said Harris. ‘Yes, it must be,’ replied the cousin, ‘because we’ve walked a good two miles already.’ Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at last, they passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris’s cousin swore he had noticed there seven minutes ago. Harris said: ‘Oh, impossible!’ but the woman with the baby said, ‘Not at all,’ as she herself had taken it from the child, and thrown it down there, just before she met Harris. She also added that she wished she never had met Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was an impostor. That made Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained his theory. ‘The map may be all right enough,’ said one of the party, ‘if you know whereabouts in it we are now.’”

De Lille’s time in the DA, you feel, was all a big act; certainly if you go by her own recollection. The party was always racist, she claims. And it hated her in particular. But hate seems to have been a powerful, motivating force for De Lille. She hated joining the DA. She hated being elected Cape Town mayor. She hated being the DA Western Cape leader. But, because she is a martyr, she did it all regardless.

And the money was nice too. Most of that latent hate actually seemed to manifest retrospectively, after various ethical problems around her leadership surfaced. But she managed to suppress it all until then, in the name of unity, one presumes.

For the most part, and when she wasn’t suppressing her hate, she did a good job as DA mayor. But the map she now held in her hand didn’t sit well at all. Constantly she would champ at the social justice bit. It must have been hard for De Lille. Way back when she was on the path to Azania, liberalism, never mind the DA, would have made her choke on her contempt. This was, after all, supposedly a party that wanted to return SA to apartheid.

Perhaps she was of the “I can change the DA from the inside” school of thought. Such a sentiment would not have been inconsistent with the monumental ego that drives her forward and is, typically, the last refuge of the vanquished.

Being in government did force De Lille to rein in her impulses even more. Whereas once she had suggested white people be encouraged to leave but simultaneously refused entry to other countries on the grounds that they inevitably would set about taking “jobs that could be done by the locals”, now she would be forced to take a impassioned stand against xenophobia. “We need to take a stand, together, and make it absolutely clear that we will not stand for this in SA”, she wrote in 2015. She even had the cheek to throw in the spirit of Ubuntu, where once the spirit of Uhuru reigned: “Ubuntu prescribes that the humanity within all us of must be valued and cherished.”

One way or the other, you can be pretty sure the DA didn’t change her. All it did was send her off in some new direction; one she cared nothing for. If the ID had taken her all the way back to 0.81%, ideologically the DA took her way past her first political incarnation, all the way back past group think and racial nationalism. She probably didn’t even recognise the liberal monster staring back at her in the mirror. It was never going to last.

The allegations against De Lille are many and various. Infamously, at one point, she sent an SMS to water and sanitation mayoral committee member Xanthea Limberg, who was sitting on the City of Cape Town panel to select the city manager, in September 2016. It read: “I want to keep Achmat, so please score him highest.”

Politically, whatever else De Lille got up to (and the Bowmans report suggests it was a fair deal) the SMS was all the DA needed to get rid of her. Clear, easily understood, captured in a screenshot and unforgivable really, it remains a mystery as to why the party never put it front and centre. But its failure to do so, along with the protracted and confused nature of its various internal and external inquiries, allowed De Lille to generate enough smoke to obscure everything.

When she left, it was at least with a portion of her reputation intact. A larger portion, less so, but enough internal belief remained to arrive at the conclusion that it was, once again, time for a new map. 

The final frontier

“Harris didn’t know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to go back to the entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part of it there was not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability of going back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite direction. About 10 minutes more passed, and then they found themselves in the centre. Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what he had been aiming at; but the crowd looked dangerous, and he decided to treat it as an accident. Anyhow, they had got something to start from then. They did know where they were, and the map was once more consulted, and the thing seemed simpler than ever, and off they started for the third time. And three minutes later they were back in the centre again.”

It’s been quite an ideological journey for De Lille. There was the rampant racial nationalist, or “pan-Africanist” if you prefer; the nebulous, fence-sitting social democrat, who could not decide who her friends or enemies were; and the robust liberal, a disposition she was forced to stomach in the DA. 

Now we have a new incarnation — the “Good”  party. Good luck working out what that is about. De Lille seems to be making it up as she goes along. The vague collection of platitudinous nothings she has assembled on her make-shift website are about helpful in determining her moral code as a Bob-The-Builder toy set. And it’s all a bit transparent too.

She says she wants to “do good”, but on the day she launched the brand, she ran a full-page, petty and whining assault on the DA in the City Press, wherein she reverted to all the slurs of old (“white boys’ club” etc). Predictable really. So, when you look past the clichés, this seems to be a revenge project more than anything else. And if she needs to patch together the pretence of an actual philosophical framework, well, that is all by-the-by. That has never stopped her in the past.

So effectively has De Lille cornered herself ideologically that these days, all she can claim to stand for are things like “democracy” and “the constitution”. Or that she is “against corruption”. They are the kind of ideas you take for granted in politics. But for De Lille, they are all she has left.

Hate and revenge might well be a good ideological fit for De Lille. She seems to have exhausted every other world view and she must have a fair amount of the stuff welled up inside, given how long she has been forced to hold her tongue and pretend she is all about individual liberty.

One thing you do notice, every time De Lille abandons her last ideology for a new one, is how little effort she puts in to explaining to the public how it is, exactly, she has so fundamentally changed her outlook. One of the things the politics of ego teaches you is that when people are invested primarily in your personality, they don’t really care about morality — any ideology will do, and they will follow regardless.

She and whatever remains of her ever-shrinking pool of zealots certainly won’t care. All that matters to them is that she has yet another new map, and this time she definitely knows the way. Forward!

SA is one of the few places in which you can get away with this kind of chameleon-like politics. The media generally cannot distinguish socialism from liberalism and is so obsessed with personality, it couldn’t give a toss if you seamlessly move from the PAC to the DA, as De Lille has done.

What matters is the individual character of the central protagonist, and the theatre of it all. And De Lille has always delivered on both fronts.

But of the actual script she is reading, it’s anyone's guess. Tomorrow she could join the IFP. It tells you all you need to know about De Lille, that when she and the DA were locked in their final death throes, all options were on the table: would she join the EFF? Would she start a new party? Maybe she would be the ANC’s premier candidate in the Western Cape?

The media could speculate in this way because all options were on the table. De Lille has always been everything and anything. She doesn’t really stand for something in particular. And so, on any given Sunday, she will be whatever she needs to be. And any party will do.

It’s all a bit desperate. She has even been forced to appropriate the ID’s old colours. And that experiment was a sorry failure to be sure. You kind of feel sorry for her: it’s a bit like Custer saying, “Let’s give that last stand one more try,” as he stands on a pile of bodies, gazing into the distance.

The idea of a Good Party is the perfect resting place for this weary traveller. It means nothing. And in this amorphous, vacuous political graveyard, she will eventually die, surrounded by the fog she has been trying all her life to find the way out of.

But not without a fight, to quote Helen Zille. Maybe, just maybe, she can kick and protest enough to cause the DA some pain in the Western Cape in 2019. If she can, she will die happy, with hate in her heart. And her acolytes will be able to build a mighty shrine to her fearless leadership. The only thing is, no one will ever be able to find it.

“After that, they simply couldn’t get anywhere else. Whatever way they turned brought them back to the middle. It became so regular at length, that some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take a walk round, and come back to them. Harris drew out his map again, after a while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told him to go and curl his hair with it. Harris said that he couldn’t help feeling that, to a certain extent, he had become unpopular. They all got crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper, and the man came and climbed up the ladder outside, and shouted out directions to them. But all their heads were, by this time, in such a confused whirl that they were incapable of grasping anything, and so the man told them to stop where they were, and he would come to them.

They huddled together, and waited; and he climbed down, and came in. He was a young keeper, as luck would have it, and new to the business; and when he got in, he couldn’t find them, and he wandered about, trying to get to them, and then he got lost. They caught sight of him, every now and then, rushing about the other side of the hedge, and he would see them, and rush to get to them, and they would wait there for about five minutes, and then he would reappear again in exactly the same spot, and ask them where they had been. They had to wait till one of the old keepers came back from his dinner before they got out. Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge; and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way back.”

[Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1889]

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.