Nelson Mandela is famously reported to have said: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." Helen Zille has mastered the art of speaking to the hearts of Black people in pursuit of what can be correctly named a white supremacist agenda, which is essentially anti-Black.
The best political trickery is yielded by a WHAM strategy: basically, to Win Hearts and Minds. But significantly, the hearts. There is a debunked notion that Black people are driven by feelings, and that if you can get to their emotions you have them where you want them. This seems to be the political strategy of the conservative, if not racist, Democratic Alliance to win the City of Joburg vote.
The DA has no chance to win the city election if it relies on the white vote alone or predominantly. White residents make up only about 20% of the population in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ). Zille can only ride to the mayoral chain through the Black vote.
Understanding this challenge, Zille is playing the cultural appropriation game. She started by associating with one of the CoJ's biggest soccer teams, Orlando Pirates. This played to the hearts of the majority Black voters, and now she has appropriated gusheshe ithemba lamarhumusha! The spinning culture on a BMW 325i is at the heart of Black township urban subculture.
This subculture operates outside the formal rules and is seen as defiant of authority. Zille has plugged into the subculture to lull the suspicion of white presence in the Black block.
Zille is not alone. Johann Rupert, facing the real existential crisis of white business being exposed as the enemy of the Black majority at the height of the Radical Economic Transformation era led by President Zuma, found himself in a moment when Stellenbosch was associated with the much-hated white monopoly capital. Rupert bought a soccer club and named it Stellenbosch Football Club.
In this single move Rupert removed the sting associated with Stellenbosch by associating the name with a thing dearly loved by Black people. Evil genius move!
Rupert, like Zille, understands the emotional appeal of these cultural practices to the Black community. They are exercising the art of winning hearts, as observed by Mandela. One of the fathers of the Négritude movement, a precursor to the anti-colonial struggle, Léopold Senghor of Senegal, famously coined the phrase "emotion is Negro, reason is Hellenic".
This binary division of the African essence was criticised as inscribing racist colonial tropes. But Senghor was providing an instructive perspective. Emotions matter. But even more importantly, emotion can betray you. It is this betrayal that people from the enemy camp, such as Zille and Rupert, are calibrating to lull the antagonistic Black response to white power.
Zille has done this exploitation of Black culture in the past, with the butchering of Brenda Fassie's popular hit song Vulindlela. She also would drape herself in Xhosa woman's gear and prance about. These moves steer the emotions of the natives as association and acknowledgment. It's the best way to use emotion to lull the senses.
Moving from the Xhosa representations of the Western Cape to the Johannesburg urban cultural expressions for political gain is a smart move, albeit a colonising, if not downright patronising, one. But Zille knows the extent of Black alienation created by the neglect of the ANC. She is politically cashing in on these failures by normalising herself as one of the excluded, marginalised victims of ANC misrule.
Black experience under her party's rule in the City of Cape Town tells a completely different story to the 325is' identification with the margins. The City of Cape Town in many ways reflects the tale of two cities. One functional, with perfect municipal services, and the other dysfunctional, with open sewers running in the streets. One over-protected by the police, the other left to the mercy of gangs! One white and the other Black, and never shall the twain meet.
So divided is the City of Cape Town that an apartheid wall has been built on the way to the airport that passes the marginalised Black zone. It's a little like saying: let them kill each other, the city has nothing to offer them! That's the reality of DA rule stripped of its appropriated Black symbols for deception.
The Black majority of the City of Johannesburg must pierce the fog of emotional deception that lulls their critical faculties, in order to make sober decisions for the good of the majority! They need to see through the ideological games played by Zille to deceive them into a slumber, with real cost to their wellbeing as citizens of the city.
As Zille runs doughnuts with the gusheshe, driven by Black labour, whilst playing the role of director who takes all the credit, the city must refuse the charms of Helen and ask: if you failed the Black people of Cape Town, why would you care for the Black people of Johannesburg?
As Zille waxes lyrical in her performance, the voters of the CoJ must ask: if the DA cares for all, how come it returned over R800 million meant for housing to Treasury? This is a city with about half a million Black people who are without houses! The priorities of Zille and the DA are clear, and they are not with the poor and the Black.
The real shining legacy of Helen Zille is the shiny, prison-like Bekkiesdorp settlement. This development was established exactly twenty years ago as a temporary transitional camp. The people live in unlivable tin houses that are so small they create the atmosphere of a Nazi gas chamber. Indeed, the inhabitants are treated as less than human. Thrown into a dust bowl and forgotten!
The CoJ voter must look beyond the dizzying zigzag of the much-loved and admired BMW 325is running doughnuts on dusty streets and look at a substantially different future from the one sold by subcultural gimmicks.
* Andile Mngxitama is a Member of Parliament for the MK Party. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL