Mmusi Maimane, it turns out, is an EFF supporter. Just at the moment the EFF was at its most vulnerable, bleeding leadership to the MK, they receive a shot in the arm from a former “Liberal”.

But just how liberal was Maimane when he was in charge of the DA? Not very. He supported BEE, and under him, the party campaigned on it. The party’s media team praised the homicidal psychopath Winnie Mandela, and made an explicit policy of indulging land invaders.

He ranted about white privilege and geared the party toward ANC-like redistributive policies. Leon Schreiber has praised these policies, but then he is a socialist himself, and a worshipper of Fabian politicians around the world.

What makes Maimane interesting is not the socialism, but the racial dimension. And he is not alone. Other spurned black leaders from the DA have also taken hard woke or black nationalist stances.

Rather than leaving the party by saying “these people are pricks and I can’t work with them, but I still share the same political values”, they have consistently racialised their experiences.

Most visible of these has been Herman Mashaba. Formerly a leading figure in the Free Market Foundation, and a big supporter of capitalism, Mashaba was released from the party for disagreements over management style (i.e., he was both less efficient and less malleable than his colleagues), as well as for policy - he is staunchly anti-immigration.

Mashaba went soft on BEE in his new party, composed of many former DA luminaries, but did not become particularly hostile to white people until this year, when he was finally treated to more extreme forms of duplicity and betrayal by the DA.

Aside from the big lie of the “multi party charter”, which was largely just a stalking horse for the DA’s electoral ambition of forming a coalition with the ANC without spooking the public, there was also the betrayal in Tshwane.

While the DA has slung its insults at ASA for their defection to the ANC camp, Mashaba has his reason - punishment.

The DA tried to strike a deal with the ANC to give them a minority government in Ekurhuleni in exchange for a DA minority government in Tshwane. The ANC did not go for it, and leaked the details of the deal to the coalition partners who were about to be shafted.

Mashaba naturally took umbridge, and the only move he could make to show the DA that this was unacceptable, was to cross the aisle. Thus was Cilliers Brink removed as mayor, and the Metro handed back to the goons in the ANC.

But then Mashaba lost his mind. Most of the past month or two has been endless diatribes against white people in general, and the DA in particular. A typical missive will read thus:

“South Africa has officially entered a new era of the National Party using a different tactic to regain power. What they have fundamentally missed is that we now live under the democratic system, not an evil and brutal system of Apartheid. Some of us are awake and extremely vigilant.”

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So what’s going on here?

I believe that what it says about South Africa in general is that the ideological landscape is still defined almost entirely by race. The legal and economic dispositions  characterised as Liberalism are largely seen as a function of white society.

As we have highlighted in other articles, black people and minorities have an extremely strong tendency to align along political party divisions. only 4% of the lack population vote for minorities, while only 10% of the minorities (give or take 5% depending on the election) vote for majoritarian black-nationalist parties.

Consequently, there may be some truth to the perennial accusations from black nationalists that (at least some of) the black individuals who seek success in “white society”, rather than going to war with it, are in fact doing so for white approval.

For those for whom this situation is the case, a rejection of their abilities, a ceiling on their ambitions, can hit harder than in the absence of this aspiration for trans-racial esteem.

A “normal” person (assuming complete emotional neutrality about cultural and ethnic differences is normal) would hold grudges merely against the individual.

But racial consciousness is an almost unavoidable dimension in a multiracial society. I say almost, because there are a few people who do act in a naively racially-ignorant fashion, but even the arch nonracialist Helen Zille is conscious enough of these dynamics that she has insisted on a 22% ceiling for DA support, to prevent entryism by covert black nationalists.

And her experience comes precisely from these two individuals - Herman Mashaba and Mmusi Maimane - two men whose liberal credentials looked peachy keen, but in practice preferred racial ingroup preference.

And their experience of the DA in turn, is of an organisation with a racial ingroup preference of its own. DA members don’t generally perceive it this way, but there is a key distinction here where ideas and people intersect.

It is that minorities benefit from nonracialism and a relatively freemarket system, whereas the black majority benefit from egalitarianism and affirmative action. And that dichotomy remains the characteristic racial-ideological distinction which defines the characteristic power struggle within South Africa today. It defines the motive behind the defection by these two men (and others) from the nominally liberal framework within which they attempted to launch a political career. And it defines the networks and ideas within which they seek refuge in the aftermath.

The truth is that, as much as we feel we are done with the past, the past is not done with us.

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