Race issues re-emerge as South Africa prepares to vote

As South Africa gears up to the May 7 election, politicians on the campaign trail have begun to tap into the issue of race in their scramble for votes. The main opposition party tried to appoint a black presidential candidate to shed its white-dominated image, while some black politicians have raised the spectre of apartheid and even called for the nationalisation of white-owned property.

When the late Nelson Mandela led the African National Congress (ANC) to win its struggle to abolish a 46-year-old policy of official racial segregation in 1994, he pledged to build a “rainbow nation” where racial dividing lines would gradually fade.

The ANC has several white ministers in its current government, while the opposition Democratic Alliance has prominent black figures.

But despite the progress that has been made over the past 20 years, “political consciousness is still shaped by race,” says Daryl Glaser, head of politics at Johannesburg’s Wits University.

When DA leader Helen Zille announced that her party had chosen anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele – former partner of the late black consciousness leader Steve Biko – as its candidate to challenge President Jacob Zuma, the ANC accused her of “renting a black.”

The alliance between the two women then collapsed over a power struggle, with Ramphele accusing the ANC of having contributed to the problems by “playing the race card.”

The DA’s parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko, who is black, had earlier been derided by then ANC member Julius Malema as Zille’s “tea girl.”

Malema now heads the Economic Freedom Fighters, a new party that says little has changed since apartheid and wants to nationalise white-owned land, mines and banks.

“There are still people who think white people are created by God to own farms and give you jobs,” Malema told a crowd of farm workers in January in an attempt to lure voters away from the ANC.

Though the ANC has reduced poverty levels and expanded the black middle class, many feel it has not done enough to bridge the wealth gap between whites – who constitute 9 per cent of the population – and blacks, who make up 79 per cent.

The richest 10 per cent of South Africans account for 58 per cent of the country’s income, with inequalities still largely organised along racial lines, according to the World Bank.

The ANC has won all post-apartheid elections with more than 60 per cent of the vote, but the party now faces its first election without the support of Mandela, who died in December.

Violent protests against high electricity prices, water and housing problems, corruption and trigger-happy police are intensifying ahead of the elections – a situation that is tempting some within the ANC to forget Mandela’s principles by reaching for the race card.

“If you don’t vote, the Boers (descendants of Dutch-speaking settlers) will come back to control us,” ANC Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa told one potential voter last year.

The ANC started becoming less open to whites under president Thabo Mbeki – who governed between 1999 and 2008 – Glaser told dpa.

“It was a combination of Mbeki’s eagerness to distinguish himself from (his predecessor) Mandela, his love-hate relationship with the white elite, his falling out with the white left, and a well-founded perception among ANC members that whites still hold a disproportionate share of wealth and privilege,” the professor explained.

Despite its reputation of running municipalities relatively efficiently, the DA has not been able to seriously challenge the ruling party, largely because many blacks see Zille as a “patronising white madam”, as South Africa’s Sunday Times put it.

The DA is supported mainly by white people and coloureds (South African term for mixed-race people), with whites playing “a disproportionate role” in the party’s Western Cape stronghold, Glaser said.

Two black municipal councillors who defected from DA to ANC this week said they had found “symptoms of apartheid” in the party.

Georgina Alexander from the South African Institute of Race Relations rejects such views, pointing out that the DA grew out of liberal parties which fought against apartheid.

“They were white parties, because black people were not allowed to join political organisations,” she told dpa.

But the DA has also changed over the past decades, incorporating more conservative and even racially prejudiced elements. Its free-market ideology opposes the ANC’s affirmative action policies in favour of the black majority, Glaser said.

And yet, the fact that the black middle class has expanded in recent years means that perceptions are changing.

“The main division is now perceived as being along class lines, even if they overlap with race,” concludes Alexander.