Multiple moments create a glimmer of hope for SA

One of the most fascinating observations about the proposed Government of National Unity (the concept itself is being strained to the limit) is the unspoken subtext to the negotiations — how it dealt with the problem of race without talking about the problem of race.

Here was a black dominant party (the ANC) deciding to go into co-leadership with a white dominant party (the DA), at least as far as their face of leadership is concerned. Tongue-in-cheek, I suggested on X (formerly Twitter) that for the first time we have a mixed-race government.

This is what drove black populists crazy. How dare the ANC go into cahoots with a white party! Follow some of the comments on social media and you will sense the rage. Unimaginable. The white DA? Cyril [Ramaphosa] has sold out the blacks. Meaning? There is a solidarity of race that should determine all our choices, including our unity partners regardless of the political realities in front of us.

Cyril should have gone with MKP and the EFF as allies of first choice because of their race. It is as raw as that — race matters in the first and the final analysis.

As a critic of the powerful, I have to admit that I have in recent weeks admired the ruling party on a number of fronts. The ANC accepted its loss at the polls. They showed a necessary humility, declaring that the people had spoken and that lessons have been learnt.

They further realised, correctly, that an alliance with the DA reflects, at least numerically, the will of the majority of the people.

That is a maturity that has been remarkably missing over these past 30 years as arrogance and impunity tainted governance in this country. So, hats off. Well done, Mr President and your team.

I find the screaming media headlines irritating. "GNU under threat". What a load of rubbish. What did we expect? An easy agreement? Of course the parties are fighting over numbers of ministers and kinds of portfolios. That’s what hardball politics is about. We are new to this, at least at the level of national government.

Inching forward, we are also making slow but vital progress on race in other areas of South African society.

When last Saturday a young man called Sacha  Feinberg-Mngomezulu came on as our flyhalf against Wales, I was seriously chuffed. Ever thought you’d see that combination of names in one person on a rugby field?

And when the brilliant No 10 kicked over a 60m penalty his surname could have been Zuma-Zille for all I cared; his talented boot helped win us the match.

Needless to say there was the usual racist claptrap on social media about this son of an English father (radio presenter) and a Zulu mother (advocate).

We tend to forget how far we’ve come.

The other day I partnered with a colleague from Penn State University, Prof Susanna Klausen, to bring back home Dr  Zureena Desai, perhaps the most famous case of racial persecution of a loving couple from the apartheid years.

Desai was a talented hematologist of Indian descent working at Coronationville Hospital in Johannesburg who had fallen in love with Dr John Blacking, an Englishman lecturing in anthropology  at Wits University.

The white police followed them home, sat in trees peering into their bedroom, and arrested them for “conspiring” to have sex in contravention of, wait for it, the Immorality Act.

They were given suspended sentences and one-way tickets out of the country, and would settle in Ireland.

I made the point at the seminar at Stellenbosch University earlier this month that even though the laws had changed (you can now love and marry whom you want) our behaviour had not — most South Africans still make choices for love or politics based on their sense of racial identity.

What a great time to be alive in SA when in politics and sports we are starting to find each other as our researchers also achieve at the highest levels of science and culture.

It might have skipped your attention but let me boast about two dear friends of mine, who respectively won two of the largest prizes in the academic world.

The philosopher Achille Mbembe at Wits University won the 2024 Holberg Prize, one of the most recognised awards in the social sciences and humanities.

And the psychologist Pumla Gobodo Madikizela at Stellenbosch University won the prestigious 2024 Templeton Prize as someone who “harnesses the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it”.

Perhaps this time Seamus Heaney’s oft-quoted poem does apply to our beautiful country where it seems once more that ‘hope and history rhyme’.