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 poet, ‘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 erupted 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”?
CHAPTER ONE.
To gain insight into the thinking of the DA on why they would anoint Mmusi Maimane as “the Obama of Soweto”, one needs to understand the definition of what a “progressive” is, as defined by the conservative black American intellectual Thomas Sowell, a fellow of the Hoover Institute.
Writing in his seminal book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowelll stated:
“People who call themselves “progressives” assert not merely that they are for changes but that these are beneficial changes – that is, progress. But other people who advocate other very different changes likewise proclaim those to be changes for the better. In other words, everybody is a “progressive” by their own lights. That some people should imagine that they are peculiarly in favor of progress is not only another example of self-flattery but also an erosion of the work of trying to show with evidence and analysis, where and why their particular proposed changes would produce better results than other people’s proposed changes”. (2011, Basic Books. Online).
In terms of leadership, especially in terms of the matter of black political leadership, the question of who is a “progressive”, and who is not, is not a trifling matter.
In his The New Republic article ‘Ghost of Cornel West’, Michael Dyson tells a story of how president Barack Obama once confronted Cornel West and harangued him thus:
“You say I am not a progressive? You are talking shit.”, said president Obama to Dr. Cornel West.
It is clear from this statement of Obama that he would like to be considered a “progressive”.
And it’s conceivable that in trying to project DA leader as “Obama of Soweto”, the DA and Helen Zille may be seeking to portray Maimane as “a progressive” too – meaning someone who will effect beneficial changes for all South Africans.
It is not clear, however, if Mmusi Maimane desires to be viewed as a “progressive”, in the sense in which president Obama clearly does.
Or is Mmusi Maimane content to be viewed as a “progressive” in the most generous and elastic sense in which the conservative Thomas Sowell uses the term “progressive” as denoting everybody who effects some “beneficial” change?
Is the change of leadership by the DA “a beneficial change”, thus a “progressive” thing?
Does this make Mmusi Maimane a “progressive”?
President Obama has in the past six years brought about major progressive changes in the American domestic and foreign policies. He has, for examples, enacted Obamacare, promoted LGBT rights, promoted equal pay for all, appointed progressive judges to the USA Spreme Court, and effected positive changes in USA policy towards Cuba and Iran.
Is DA leader Mmusi Maimane willing to carry out similar far-reaching progressive changes for South Africa.
If Mmusi Mmaimane does not even view himself as a “progressive”, in the general sense the term is used by the forces of the political Left as meaning one who undertakes changes that essentially challenge the status quo in a fundamental way, are the DA and he entitled to talk about “Obama of Soweto”, when president Obama desires to be seen as a “progressive” in the non-Thomas Sowell sense?
Surely the political consensus in South Africa is that the DA, which Mmusi Maimane leads, is certainly a center-right, mainstream liberal political formation, but not a progressive political force of the Left.
Is any comparison between president Barack Obama and DA leader Mmusi Maimane thus only at the superficial level, devoid of any substance and serious content?
CHAPTER TWO.
But it may be in the relationship of both president Obama and DA leader Mmusi Maimane towards what is generally understood as the dominant global “West” that there is considerable merit in concluding that the two young black Democratic leaders in America and South Africa share much commonality, which warrants people like former DA leader Helen Zille calling Mmusi Maimane “the Obama of Soweto”, and wishing to swap president Jacob Zuma for president Obama.
It is also precisely in this shared commonality between Obama and Maimane that Helen Zille is able to bring herself to admire greatly the two young, black Democratic leaders, whilst nursing open contempt and hostility towards other black African leaders in South Africa like president Zuma and other African National Congress (ANC) leaders.
What is the global “West” I am referring to here?
The term global “West” is perhaps best described by Robert J. Holton in his ground-breaking book Globalization and the Nation-State.
In it, Holton writes that:
“…the idea of the West continues to function as the most influential representation of dominant forms of global power. These include the institutions of private capital and entrepreneurship, and the institutions of the nation-state and the interstate system regarded in an – often idealized – sense as open and democratic. This projection of the West is further highlighted by the drawing of sharp contrasts with ‘others’, who can be represented as both different and challenging”. (1998, page 32).
For his part Mahmood Mamdani, in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, writes that:
“The civilizational history of ‘the West’ came to a triumphant climax in the nineteenth century, along with European imperialism. Written from the vintage point of a modern power that had exploded into global dominance in the centuries following the Renaissance, civilizational history gave ‘the West’ an identity that marched through time unscathed. From this point of view, ‘the West’ occupied the center of the global stage, and ‘the Orient’ was its periphery”. (Pantheon Books, 2004, page 28).
Both president Obama and DA leader Mmusi Maimane lead two influential Democratic political formations in their respective multi-racial countries, which are dedicated to upholding, and not fundamentally challenging, this status quo system of historical global power of the West, which has been predicated on the deliberate exclusion of billions of non-white “others’ in the globalized world of today.
It is no wonder that “Obama of Soweto” has never opposed policies of president Obama such as the multi-trillion dollar bailing out of Wall Street banks following the 2008 Great Recession in the USA, Obama’s wishy-washy condemnation of racist white American cops’ wanton killing of innocent young African Americans, Obama’s involvement in NATO’s rogue and illegal aerial bombardment of Libya, which resulted in the extra-judicial execution of Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi and illegal ‘regime change’ in that country, Obama’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Obama’s Drone War across the globe, and Obama’s tacit support for France’s re-colonization of Mali and Ivory Coast.
These and other such right-wing policies stake out president Barack Obama not as a “progressive”, but clearly as a fervent supporter and enforcer of the interests of the global West, as defined by Robert J. Holton and Mahmood Mamdani.
They stake out Obama as a deeply reactionary black political figure bestriding the globe like a menacing pro-white privilege Colossus.
The net effect of these rightwing Obama policies is to reinforce the West’s position as a global hegemon, whilst also reinforcing the weak position of regions like Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East as global peripheries.
In this crucial sense, president Barack Obama had absolutely no right whatsoever to aggressively confront Dr. Cornel West and say to West that he is “talking shit”, for saying that president Obama was not “a progressive” president.
It is not clear if by the sobriquet “Obama of Soweto” the admirers of Mmusi Maimane, like Helen Zille and other DA leaders, hope that Maimane will one day emulate Obama in also reinforcing and enforcing the position of the West as a global hegemon that upholds global white privilege and the marginalization of Africa and other global peripheries. (See also Chantall Presence’s piece ‘Maimane our new Obama’, ANA, 18 April 2015).
It is not coincidental that the DA’s Vision 2029, which Mmusi Maimane unveiled recently, veers away from many values and principles first propounded on by president Obama during his address on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior-led March on Washington, including on the acute state of the African American family and the black child in America.
DA’s Vision 2029 also circumvents president Obama’s intentions in launching his My Brother’s Keeper initiative.
South Africa still awaits to see when “Obama of Soweto” will launch His Brother’s Keeper.
Helen Zille’s new-found admiration for family values though bears uncanny resemblance to similar and unfortunate utterances by president Obama regarding the beleaguered African American families.
In addition, it remains a deep mystery shrouded in enigma as to why president Obama, a black man, has found it easier to effect commendable change in the USA’s half a century policy of hostility towards the tiny island of Cuba, a Communist-ruled and white Hispanic-led country on the USA’s doorstep, whilst he remains so resolute in upholding USA’s 15 year destructive, unjust hostility towards, and sanctions on, Zimbabwe, a black African-led country that holds regular democratic and multi-party elections.
The official position of both the DA and Mmusi Maimane on a range of issues echo this aggressive hostility of president Barack Obama towards Zimbabwe.
All this underlines the severe political pitfalls of mimicry of president Obama’s leadership qualities by Mmusi Maimane and the DA.
Why would two very talented, highly educated, erudite and good-looking young black politicians find it so easy to agree to serve two historically white-led parties in two countries – the USA and South Africa – which were for centuries blighted by white supremacist racism, and which continue to serve the hegemonic agenda of the global West?
Can these two leaders – Barack Obama and Mmusi Maimane -, individually and respectively, make a decisive and clean break with the hegemonic global West’s status quo to earn for themselves the moniker “progressives”?
CONCLUSION.
Before rushing to christen Mmusi Maimane the “Obama of Soweto”, many of Mmusi Maimane’s admirers should have heeded the words of the former general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), previously the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), Moses Kotane, written in his 23 February 1934 Letter from Cradock to the Johannesburg District Party Committee.
In this memorable, historic letter Kotane wrote, amongst other things, that:
“What I have learnt from my recent study has further strengthened my old conclusions (known only to a few leading elements in our Party) that our Party has and is suffering owing to being too Europeanised. That the Part is beyond the realm of realities, we are simply theoretical and our theory is less connected with practice. If one investigates the general ideology of our Party members (especially the whites), if sincere, he will not fail to see that they subordinate South Africa in the interests of Europe, in fact, ideologically they are not South Africans, they are foreigners who know nothing about and who are least interested in the country in which they are living at present, but are valiant ‘servants’ of Europe”. (See Communist University Online Website).
It is clear that in the way it has created an ineffable political idolatry around president Obama, the DA and its leader Mmusi Maimane, the so-called “Obama of Soweto”, are committing the types of mistakes Moses Kotane, the leading South African Communist, warned his Communist Party against more than eight decades ago.
It is also clear that the DA leadership is too theoretical about Barack Obama and has not grounded its Obama mania in the realm of concrete South African realities. In mimicking president Obama, the DA leadership unwittingly seeks to Americanise the politics of democratic South Africa in the era of Jacob Zuma’s presidency.
There is also ground to conclude that, to paraphrase Moses Kotane, “if one investigates the general ideology ” of the current DA leadership, “if sincere, he will not fail to see that they subordinate South Africa in the interests” of what Robert J. Holton and Mahmood Mamdani call “the West”.
These DA leaders under Mmusi Maimane, and previously under Helen Zille, behave as if democratic South Africa and indeed the rest of Africa are incapable of offering compelling leadership examples to emulate, and that there is no way Mmusi Maimane can be, say, The Desmond Tutu of the DA, but has to be nicknamed “Obama of Soweto”.
The current leaders of the DA behave as if they are “valiant servants” of “the West”.
How come Helen Zille, Mmusi Maimane and other leaders of South Africa have gotten away with this offensive leadership parody of the leadership qualities of president Barack Obama on the South African political stage, to the extent that they glibly speak of “Obama of Soweto”?
After all, this political posture by the DA leaders runs the real risk of buttressing the unfortunate historical position of South Africa and the rest of Africa as merely “peripheries” of the dominant, hegemonic West, as postulated by Robert J. Holton and Mahmood Mamdani, as I indicated above.
South Africa cannot and should not be an imitation of another country, however high in esteem we may hold such a foreign country.
My answer would be that an important lead to understanding how this came about is found in Mark Curtis’ article ‘Psychological Warfare Against the Public: Iraq and Beyond’, which appears in the book Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 2004.
In this article, Mark Curtis makes the inordinately vital point that it is just not enough for media to criticize a wrong policy or government position. It is also equally important to subject such a policy or position to “ridicule”. (page 76).
The sickening pretentiousness and shallow political mimicry on the part of the DA and its leaders that DA leader Mmusi Maimane is “Obama of Soweto” deserve not just hostile, sustained criticism, but also blistering ridicule and total lampooning.
That Mmusi Maimane slavishly, and without any scruples whatsoever, imitates another black leader, albeit an African American USA president, is not reason to condone this blatant political trick to self-identify with some of president Barack Obama’s global appeal, undeniable charm and adoration, because it constitutes what Thomas Sowell would rightly condemn as demeaning “self-flattery”.
It should not be allowed to stand even for a fraction of a second.
Soweto deserves much better than “Obama of Soweto”.
At least Soweto deserves its own son authentically as simply Mmusi Maimane, the first black DA leader.
Nothing less, nothing more.
In his book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell makes the controversial point that:
“…originality is not essential to the definition of an intellectual, as long as the end product is ideas”.
But shouldn’t societies, like the South African society, insist that “originality is essential to the definition of a party political leader, as long as the end product is acquisition, and the wielding, of political power”?
Should South Africa continue to bear with such parodies as “Obama of Soweto”, or with the ANC’s Tokyo Sexwale as “the Donald Trump of South Africa” during his now-defunct Apprentice TV show?
Is the Nelson Mandela-inspired black dream of creating a string of uninterrupted pipelines of strong, inimitable, authentic, outstanding, ethical, committed and beyond-reproach-like-Caesar’s-wife black leaders slipping through our collective South African fingers like liquid substance, in the same manner “a dream within a dream” slipped, like golden sand particles of the ocean’s shore, through the tender and loving fingers of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe’s imaginary character?
Asked by Isaac Chotiner in the Slate magazine of 13 July 2015 as to what the effect of a black president leaving the White House executive office will be on black people, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a columnist for The Atlantic magazine, responded by saying that:
“Yeah, I think people are going to be depressed as hell. I think people are going to be depressed about Obama not being in office”.
For our part as South Africans, we should use the coming absence of Barack Obama from the American presidential office in eighteen months as a golden opportunity to insist on getting for ourselves an unvarnished, unobstructed measure and deeper appreciation of the political character and leadership qualities of the DA leader Mmusi Maimane, way beyond the farcical and tragicomic “Obama of Soweto” leadership syllogism.
In this way, unlike Ta-Nehisi Coates, we would then not be depressed by president Barack Obama’s departure from American executive office in the next eighteen months.
Instead of feeling depressed, we will recite Maya Angelou’s epic poem ‘Still I Rise’.
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24TH CEDIA Blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
19 July 2015
Written by:
Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi (MA History)
Founder and Executive Chairman
Chief Researcher, Analyst and Business Strategy Advisor
School of Economic Diplomacy and International Affairs
(SEDIA)
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