LOCAL GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS
Ayanda Mdluli|Published
Growing up in Inanda, Ntuzuma and kwaMashu in the 1980s and 90s, you did not read about the Gusheshe. You heard it.
You heard that deep, guttural roar of the BMW 325i E30 late at night, followed by AK-47s, followed by silence. When that sound faded into the distance, it meant someone had outrun the apartheid police again.
Before I get to Helen Zille’s recent campaign trail, you need to understand what that car really was.
Ithemba lama humusha was never just a car. The BMW 325i, and later the 325iS, was mechanical excellence weaponised for township conditions: a limited-slip differential, rear-wheel drive, perfect weight balance and enough nimbleness for narrow kasi streets. With a claimed 0 to 100km/h time of 7.5 seconds and a top speed of 225km/h, and later tests putting the 325iS at 7.42 seconds and 226km/h, it easily outran standard police vans.
That is why it became the ultimate getaway car. Bank robberies, cash-in-transit heists, carjackings: if you were serious, you needed a Gusheshe. It was nicknamed ithemba lama humusha, the hope of the hustler, the thug, the swindler. Uku-humusha means to push, to con, to force your way through.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, political instability created a vacuum in the townships, and violent syndicates filled it. In Soweto it was amaSinyora. In our communities and in Johannesburg, it was the Jackrollers, infamous for terrorising townships, robbing banks and forcibly abducting schoolgirls from classrooms.
They deliberately used stolen Gusheshes. They lowered their suspensions, which was illegal at the time, shot in the air and turned the car into a symbol of fear. To be respected as a criminal, you needed a Gusheshe. Most of those men, social misfits who lived by the gun, are no longer alive.
Yizo Yizo, the early 2000s television series captured it perfectly and without filter. Set in a fictitious township school, Supatsela High, the series follows the progress, demise and resurgence of the school’s youth as they grapple with the criminality of out-of-school youth (Chester), their sponsor (Bra Gibb) and their school-going friends (Papa Action). Chester and Papa Action were not heroes. They were what happens when trauma, patriarchy and lawlessness are glamorised. They maimed, they killed, they took what was not theirs. Communities feared them.
That is the archive this car carries. Yes, spinning has since been reclaimed as a motorsport, a way of honouring the dead at funerals and a legitimate culture. But you cannot wash that history off with tyre smoke.
That history matters now because South Africa enters the local government elections on 4 November in a state of extreme fragmentation. Never before have we seen more than 500 parties contesting a ballot.
This is not a healthy democracy. This is engineered division. A fragmented system does not serve the majority; it serves elites and big business, who benefit when the people cannot unite around a single, coherent programme.
Any attempt to unite the majority under one political direction is immediately branded a “coalition of doom” by the DA. It is disturbing what corporate interests have done to the psyche of the average South African voter.
But this piece is not about the 521 parties. It is about how easy politicians think it is to pander to Black voters.
Forget the free T-shirts, the streetwise twos and the alcohol in stadiums. Look at the stunt.
The Nasrec minstrel show
On 17 October 2026, DA mayoral candidate Helen Zille addressed party members at Nasrec as the party wrapped up its Johannesburg campaign. She made a dramatic entrance in a BMW 325iS, popularly known as a “Gusheshe”, whose roaring engine drew cheers from the crowd. Clad in a white pantsuit, she waved to supporters as the car, associated with township culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, added a distinctly kasi flavour to the event.
Days earlier, she had appeared in a video behind the wheel of a BMW 325iS, wearing a bucket hat and glasses while executing donuts and high-speed manoeuvres on a racetrack.
Some called it clever. I call it a minstrel show.
Minstrel shows were a popular form of American theatre from the early 19th to the early 20th century. White performers in blackface caricatured the singing and dancing of enslaved people for the entertainment of a dominant group. They reduced the complexity of Black life into a stylised, exaggerated performance.
Zille’s rapid adoption of township car culture (spinning, bucket hats, shisanyama visits, amapiano soundtracks) is a contemporary equivalent. Rather than holding intelligent, door-to-door, one-on-one conversations about policy, about what differentiates the DA from the MK, ANC and EFF on land, spatial apartheid and the township economy, she performed “kasi flavour” as spectacle.
I have not seen her sit with educated Black people who will challenge her ideological disposition: her views on colonialism, on what she calls “woke culture”, and her repeated line that her biggest fear is the DA going woke, that “once you go woke you go broke”. Where is that debate?
Is this all we are?
As Black South Africans, we must do better at holding politicians accountable. It cannot be that when they look at us, all they see is Gusheshe, amapiano, votes and shisanyama.
Is that all it takes to soothe us? A 75-year-old veteran politician doing rounds in a car that once terrorised our mothers?
This is misguided appropriation. It appropriates a culture born out of pain, without acknowledging the pain. The Gusheshe is not a neutral cultural artefact. For those of us from INK (Inanda, Ntuzuma, kwaMashu), it reminds us of nights where people slept under beds, of our female peers taken by Jackrollers, of the trauma that Yizo Yizo tried to warn us about.
To take that car, ithemba lama humusha, and turn it into a campaign prop without ever addressing the humusha, the systemic swindling of Black South Africans out of land, economic power and dignity, is the height of political minstrelsy.
We are not gullible. We are not a monolith that can be won with a spinning car, a maskandi or kwaito playlist. If you want the Black vote, come with a plan for the township economy, for title deeds, for infrastructure that does not flood every January in KwaZulu-Natal, for schools that do not need Chester and Papa Action to teach us about violence.
Don’t come with fireworks. We have heard enough gunshots mistaken for fireworks already.
Ayanda Mdluli is the Editor: Thought and Opinion at IOL.
The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of IOL.