A theory of racial politics that shed light on last year's U.S. presidential election could perhaps have been used to better effect by a new opposition party in South Africa. The theory--promulgated by Shelby Steele, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution--is that blacks who succeed in mainstream America are either race-stoking "challengers" or race-conciliatory "bargainers." While Steele's assessment was dead wrong stateside--it failed to adequately account for Obama's success--his framework was largely valid. Had it been leveraged by South Africans who opposed the presidential candidacy of Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling black-led African National Congress (ANC), things today might look very different for the G-20 nation.
Since 1994--when apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela came to power, and South Africa became a democracy--the country has been stymied by something of a Thomas Frankian paradox. Most middle- and upper-class whites there have refused to vote for the apartheid-ending ANC, even though its neoliberal economic policies--including partial deregulation and inflation targeting--distinctly favor them. Likewise, poor black voters, still seduced by the ANC's liberation narrative, consistently vote against their own economic interests, leaving many of these have-nots worse off still.
Enter COPE, the Congress of the People, a black-led opposition party that emerged late last year and promised to challenge South Africa's racially defined voting patterns. Comprising former President Thabo Mbeki's old ANC allies, it was the first genuine multiracial opposition that threatened to upset the ANC's dominance since the end of apartheid.
The ANC received 63 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1994, and nearly 70 percent in 2004. The largest (and largely white) opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), managed to win the support of many disgruntled whites and Afrikaners who had previously voted for the National Party, led by the country's last white president, F.W. de Klerk. But without significant black support, the DA has never been able to compete with the ANC on a national level. The party, led today by Helen Zille, the 58-year-old white mayor of Cape Town, has made incremental gains, notably winning 16 percent in last week's election, its best-ever total--as well as an impressive majority win in the Western Cape province (Cape Town is its capital), which is largely white and mixed race. In the weeks prior to the election, Zille courted these voters by criticizing the ANC and sensationally attacking Zuma, warning that he was a "one-man constitution wrecking machine."
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