A BLACK DREAM WITHIN A BLACK DREAM?: THE PITFALLS OF DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE (DA) LEADER MMUSI MAIMANE MIMICKING USA PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S LEADERSHIP QUALITIES.

“Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from your view,
This much let me avow –
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream,
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream”.
Edgar Allan Poe, American peot, ‘A Dream Within A Dream’.

INTRODUCTION.

In his profile of the then newly-elected Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Mmusi Maimane, New African magazine’s Edward Tsumile wrote:

“He has been dubbed by some supporters as the Obama of Soweto due to his rhetorical skills. Some critics have also fixed on this moniker to highlight his high style, low substance #BelieveGP campaign to become Gauteng’s Premier”. (New African, ‘Will South Africa believe in Mmusi Maimane?’, 19 June 2015).

On the other hand, Joel Pollak, in his Politicseb article, reveals how the former DA leader and current Western Cape premier Helen Zille expressed the wish to have president Barack Obama swapped for president Jacob Zuma to be South Africa’s leader. (Joel Pollak, ‘Why Zille is wrong about Obama’, Politicsweb, 16 July 2015).

Whatever one thinks of Zille’s zany wish, it has the method-in-the-madness advantage, in that it would immediately put an end to the raging DA circus of trying to convince us that Mmusi Maimane is some Obama-lite, or, as New African put it, that Mmusi Maimane is “the Obama of Soweto”.

Were Helen Zille to be granted her wish to have president Zuma swapped for president Obama, we would at least have to deal with the real thing – the real president Barack Obama, and not a fake Obama, who happens to also be Mmusi Maimane, the DA leader.

For now, it does appear like the DA and Helen Zille cannot have a surfeit of Barack Obama mania.

They hanker after the real Barack Obama, whilst cultivating the fake image of Mmusi Maimane as Obama Lite.

But is the DA strategy of cultivating the image that Mmusi Maimane is the Obama of Soweto the right one?

Is Helen Zille and the DA’s love affair with Barack Obama genuine? Is it just an old white woman’s dream about a young, attractive black man in power she knows well she can never have and he would never rule over her?

Or is it just meant only to be used to damn our local black leaders like president Jacob Zuma, who rule over Helen Zille, whilst praising a foreign black leader to high heavens?

The truth is that the sustained Obama mania still raging in certain circles in South Africa, including within the DA, and in parts of the rest of Africa, would come as complete surprise to some Americans.

It would certainly surprise a number of eminent black American intellectuals, including those amongst these who self-describe as African American.

In fact, hardly noticed by many South Africans, a major intellectual argument over the Obama presidency eruted amongst leading African American thought leaders recently.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, recently launched a scathing attack on the views of Cornel West, a professor at Princeton University, regarding the presidency of Barack Obama. The two offer vastly contrasting assessments of president Barack Obama, with Michael Dyson broadly supportive of Obama, and West bitterly critical.

These intellectual giants were joined on their respective sides by their online supporters and followers, in the process splitting black America’s formidable and feisty intellectual class down the middle.

This fascinating African American debate was rekindled a few days ago by Cornel West’s Facebook posting, in which he attacked the book of The Atlantic magazine’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, which appears under the title Between The World and Me.

West feels that Coats was basically giving Obama’s administration an undeserved free pass on major, critical issues facing contemporary America and the rest of the world.

Again the fight was joined by online multitudes.

And again Michael Dyson came to the defense of both Ta-Nehisi Coates and president Obama.

So, president Barack Obama is as much a divisive figure amongst African Americans and America’s progressives, as he is amongst South Africa’s blacks and progressives.

If this is so, why is the DA, Helen Zille and Mmusi Maimane so clearly fascinated by president Barack Obama, to the extent that they anoint their first, key DA black leader “the Obama of Soweto”?

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