TOM EATON: How to get blown up by a bomb marked ‘stay away’

There’s political theatre. There’s farce. And then there is the episode of Loony Tunes currently being broadcast to an astonished nation.

Critics of the EFF decried its performance at last week’s state of the nation address (Sona) as either cynical theatre or offensive farce. I call it a roaring success. Trapping the ANC into siding with FW de Klerk, just days after he had denied that apartheid was a crime against humanity, was a masterstroke, not only confirming the deepest beliefs of its base but also guaranteeing the sort of media coverage that makes everyone forget the EFF is supported by 5% of voting-age South Africans.

No, the Loony Tune I’m watching is being performed solely by the DA and features a decidedly unwily coyote that, while slouching hungrily along a desert track, has just arrived at a table on which two items have been carefully placed.

The first is a press statement stating unequivocally that apartheid was a crime against humanity, a fact confirmed by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; that the recent denials of that fact by De Klerk and his foundation were both ignorant and offensive to every South African who suffered under it and still lives amid the toxic fallout of that system; and that his retraction on Monday was insultingly tardy.

The second object is two sticks of dynamite, attached to a ticking alarm clock, along with a note reading: “This Is A Ticking Time-Bomb. Get Very Far Away From It. Whatever You Do, Don’t Pick It Up And Press The Clock To Your Ear So You Can Listen To The Ticking.”

And right now, little bits of the DA coyote are floating down all over the desert, along with still smouldering tweets like that of DA MP Ghaleb Cachalia, who lunged for the bomb with both hands: “Big words like Genocide, Nazi, Fascist, Anti-Semite and Crimes against Humanity must be used accurately lest they lose their meaning. Apartheid was a pernicious system of social engineering, discrimination and repression. I too indulged in the hyperbole of youth. I now know better.”

This clumsily hedged denial of reality was immediately retweeted without comment, context or condemnation by Helen Zille, who on Monday announced that she was going to close her public account. Despite her best attempts to “promote Twitter as a platform for rational and civil debate”, it had, she tweeted, “degenerated into a space of distortion, de-contextualisation, demonization, de-legitimation and double standards”. Also some pretty kick-ass alliteration. May her new, private account be a happier and more soothing echo chamber.

To be fair, not everyone who tried to use the explosion to their advantage came across quite so clumsily. Leadership contender Mbali Ntuli was particularly nimble, taking to Twitter to ask interim leader John Steenhuisen if he believed apartheid had been a crime against humanity. Steenhuisen quickly answered “Of course it was”, but text cannot convey tone and the curtness of his reply made it sound as if Ntuli had forced a concession from him rather than an effusive agreement.

Yes, it’s been an enthralling cartoon these past few days. But amid all the bangs and splats and beep-beeping of political roadrunners running circles around inept MPs, some fairly important questions seem to have drifted to the periphery.

The most obvious of these is: why? Why did De Klerk issue his initial denial? Why did his foundation mount such a determined defence of it? And why now? Clearly this was no slip of the tongue: the laborious defence, citing Soviet strategies at the UN in the 1970s, made it clear that this was its ideological position, one that would be stuck to until it becomes politically expedient to abandon it, as happened on Monday. It all feels very deliberate. But to what end?

As SA gets angrier and poorer, might there be a growing anxiety among some old Nats that deals struck in the early 1990s guaranteeing them impunity might start fraying, and that they need to start putting daylight between themselves and the idea that they were responsible for a vast crime; a crime whose perpetrators could be prosecuted and whose proceeds might be seized? Then again, if they really are worried, why would they go out of their way to insult their former victims?

I don’t know why they did it, but I know that dismissing it — either as an offensive but isolated outburst or the ramblings of a politically irrelevant old man — is to underestimate its malice. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate attempt at historical revisionism. It was gaslighting. It was historical revisionism. It was cowardice. It was self-righteousness. In short, it was the old National Party. And it should be rejected with the contempt it deserves.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.