New for old, old for new

The principal reality in the ANC at this time is that the only really organised grouping within it is the SACP, which is now intent on a semi-constitutional coup d'etat, in the manner of Adolf Hitler in 1933 (i.e., constitutional in form, dictatorial in essence). The SACP is no less driven by a totalitarian ideology than Hamas, or Hizbollah, which also enjoy substantial popular support, though its ideological sources are of course not the same as theirs.

In my view, the SACP is promoting Zuma for all it is worth because (a) he provides good cover, in a political context in which the naked ambition of the SACP would appear to be just too naked; and (b) he provides a means of access to a very wide ancillary further mass base of support, as the figurehead of a Zulu-led tribalist alliance directed against the more disguised former Xhosa-based hegemony within the ANC of the last almost fifty years.

The ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007 proved that there was very widespread loathing of this Xhosa-led hegemony in the ANC, expressed most sharply by loathing of the Mbeki cabal, which was totally wiped out at Polokwane in elections to the National Executive Committee. Thus its complete withdrawal from the ANC and its formation of Cope, with its principal base of support in the Xhosa-speaking heartlands.

One must assume that the ANC of today is not the ANC of Mandela or Tambo. The broad ethnic alliance of the past, which animated the spirit of the Freedom Charter, and which progressively broke down the organisational barriers that inhibited the ANC from becoming a fully non-racial political party, is now a thing of the past. One most assume that the ANC now has no or very little broad political support among whites, former so-called "Coloureds" or so-called "Indians", especially those of a Hindu background. Since the Congress Alliance of the period of the Freedom Charter looked precisely to this kind of political alliance across racial groupings, the ANC of 2009 is a very different kind of animal.

Further, this is the first time in its almost hundred years' existence that the ANC has permitted itself to be defined so strongly by tribal terms. This invalidates the spiritual premise on which the ANC was founded, which was to put an end precisely to this kind of division.

Similarly, the class project of the SACP - as the real hand that grips the steering wheel that drives the ANC - threatens constantly to negate the cross-class nature of the ANC, as this existed throughout its previous history. Apart from a huge new stratum of apparatchiks from all classes looking to benefit from state placement in a new Zuma/SACP government, with a further huge expansion of the client state (or displacement of old beneficiaries for new), the black professional middle class which placed such high hopes in the Constitution of 1994 now sees its hopes dashed, in the face of a brazen, lumpen power grab.

It remains to be seen whether the very real fears articulated by the leaders of Cope - fears of destruction of the Constitution, of parliament and of the judiciary, and their now frequent references to a very acute state of fear among former "comrades" as they cross each others' paths in the corridors of administration - represent an authentic expression of the disquiet of the new black middle class.

If the ANC were indeed to be losing the confidence of this crucial stratum in the general social and political make-up of South Africa - for the first time in its history - then the ANC of Jacob Zuma would indeed represent a travesty of its former self.

The former SACP was more cautious, too. Whether in its formation of Umkhonto weSizwe in 1961, or throughout the thirty years of exile, or through the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies, it preferred to be heard and not seen. It preferred influence to dominance, and when it did dominate it preferred this not to appear so. This was a supremely successful strategy, which gave leading members of the SACP a massive place in government and in public life in South Africa precisely when the Soviet Union and its empire in eastern Europe collapsed from their own internal contradictions.

But that was then. The SACP now too is a very different kind of animal from the cautious, pragmatic Party of Joe Slovo, of Govan Mbeki, of Walter Sisulu...and of Nelson Mandela... for whom the first article of faith was that the iron fist of the Party should never appear outside the velvet glove of the Congress Alliance.

We are at a time of a re-configuration of black politics in South Africa, in which the old names no longer fit the new realities, and in which reality has to be appraised anew, with fresh eyes.

Simultaneously, the old, old lessons of the apartheid dictatorship - the lessons of the rule of BJ Vorster and PW Botha - are having to be learned again, as new advocates of the old dictatorship advance their claim to state power in the former language of liberation.

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