The Democratic Alliance's current campaign, "The Untold Story of the DA" has elements of revisionism that are deeply regrettable.

Starting first with its controversial campaign, the DA's memorialization of its history seems highly selective and breathtakingly cynical if not misleading. The pamphlet accompanying its launch was riddled with errors. Even the iconic photograph of Helen Suzman with Nelson Mandela had a whopping wrong caption - "Nelson Mandela with Helen Suzman, DA Founder."

In fact, this picture was taken in 1990, a full decade before the DA was founded. Suzman was hardly a founder of the DA and in fact quite publicly criticised its formation, telling the press in August 2000 that the merging of the DP and NNP into the DA was "a big mistake" and that the parties should have entered into an election pact, and not a full blooded alliance for the December 2000 local government election.

The most meticulous and thorough account of it was written by the man who in fact was the DA founding leader, Tony Leon, in his 2008 autobiography "On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa." I know the book well, since I had the opportunity to launch it.

The Party would do well to familiarize themselves with this very useful reference work for contemporary South African history and politics. There are some wonderful photographs in it of Nelson Mandela with his arms around Leon.

The great Madiba even wrote the shout line on its back cover, writing of Tony Leon: "Your contribution to Democracy is enormous. You have far more support for all you have done than you might ever read about.''

Mandela was prescient in his words back then, since five years later Leon has simply disappeared entirely from the script of his own party's official narrative! But if his party, which stands on the back of his own prodigious efforts to build it into the force and size it is today, had consulted Leon's book they might have saved themselves some of the other howlers which appear in the error-ridden pamphlet: "DA - We Played Our Part in Opposing Apartheid." It states for example that Helen Suzman was the founder of the "party known today as the DA in 1959."

In fact for all her brave and principled accomplishments, Helen Suzman was not the founder. She was but one of 11 MPs who broke away from the United Party in 1959, and although she became the most famous (and for thirteen years sole MP of it) member of the party, she never held any leadership post in it.

This then leads us to another 'inconvenient truth'. The party known today as the DA consists of several parts and in the Western Cape, where the DA actually governs, the biggest component of the party originated from the much detested New National Party, with whose muscle the DA finally managed to win control of the Western Cape and the City of Cape Town.

In order to suggest that the party has an unbroken record of fighting apartheid, the pamphlet goes on to state incorrectly that for 36 years it was "the official opposition - opposing apartheid." The truth again is a casualty of this airbrush.

Between the years 1959 and 1994, one of the DA-originating parties, the Progressive Federal Party, only held the title in the white parliament of Official Opposition for just ten of the 35 years in question. For the rest of the time the vacillating United Party, and later, the extreme right wing Conservative Party, were the major opposition parties.

The DA has much to celebrate without embellishing its historical achievements. Liberalism has a rich and noble anti-apartheid history and just as the United Democratic Front (UDF) was a broad umbrella mass democratic movement, just so liberalism had a wide umbrella of all kinds of organisations that opposed apartheid.

In fact many liberals were involved in the UDF and other organisations. These ranged from the SA Institute of Race Relations to Black Sash and an array of opposition parties. With this harvest came a diverse leadership so that today, the DA can claim to be a truly non-racial party with an equally non-racial leadership, and some powerful women at the top. There is no need to spin, and the party would do well to heed a maxim of Leon's leadership. - never get your facts wrong as opposition.

This article first appeared in Die Burger.

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter