Race, Ethnicity, Politics, and the Election in South Africa

Because of South Africa’s tortured racial past, we should never underestimate the power that race and ethnicity play in the country’s politics. But South African society, and indeed, African societies generally, should not be reduced to squabbles over “tribalism,” a simplistic reductionism that journalists in particular find seductive. When  “tribalism”and ethnicity seem to be the defining characteristics in Africa one can almost always be certain that beneath the surface the real issues are about politics and access to power, which might break down along racial or ethnic lines, but which are not of necessity determined by them.  

The election campaign in South Africa right now reveals both the lingering past but also the peculiar dynamics of contemporary politics in the much-ballyhooed “New South Africa.” As an example of these peculiarities, who would ever have imagined that Jacob Zuma would defend the “Africanness” of Afrikaners in the same week when Helen Zille would offend the Afrikaner supporters of the Freedom Front? Meanwhile COPE’s presidential candidate Mvume Dandala (who has been campaigning extensively, if understatedly) asserts that South Africa is not merely a “federation of tribes” and that “We are first South African, not Zulu, Xhosa, and the others.” Dandala does not seem to fare well in a charisma-driven Dandala-versus-Zuma competition, but perhaps COPE is tring to move away from the politics of personality and iconography that has so characterized the ANC, for good and for ill, for the past fifteen years.

Meanwhile the campaign itself accelerates in scope and intensity as the weeks leading to the election turn to days and the reality of how epochal this campaign is begins to hit home. The ANC may well confirm the prognosticators’ belief that the ruling party will retain control of the country, but the devil will be in the details. Will the ANC lose support? If so, how much? Will Desmond Tutu’s words about how he fears for a Jacob Zuma-led South Africa sway voters one way or the other? Will the Congress of the People step up and become the official opposition? Will it control sections of the country, such as the Eastern Cape? And will the Democratic Alliance hold on to its core constituency, especially in the Western Cape where it did well in by-elections held this week? Will the ANC lose enough support that it has to govern in a  coalition? These questions and many others will occupy a great deal of space in this blog in the weeks to come.