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This excerpt from Helen Zille’s Not Without a Fight was published with permission from Penguin Random House South Africa and is currently available from all leading book stores.
After the 2009 election, the position of parliamentary leader was contested by Athol Trollip and Ryan Coetzee. I supported Ryan, with whom I had built a strong and functional relationship. Athol won. It had been a divisive battle. Ryan was expected to win, until a final switch in support of some caucus members the night before the vote.
Some of the research staff, whom Ryan had mentored, had actively supported him, against the party’s rules. Now Athol was in charge of the parliamentary operation. It took some time for the party to get back on an even keel again.
As in the past, when we had been on opposite sides of electoral contests, Athol and I moved on quickly and developed a strong, productive partnership.
We met every Wednesday evening for a drink, so that we could talk through what lay ahead in the parliamentary caucus meeting the next morning. Even these short engagements made a big difference to the smooth interface between our offices. We never experienced the ‘two centres of power’ problem I’d been warned of, despite the fact that we were both strong personalities.
Ryan resigned from parliament to become chief adviser in my office in the provincial government. He made as big a difference to re-imagining our role in government as he had to re-engineering our party.
We had the numbers to govern the Western Cape on our own, but we decided to offer a position in the cabinet to the Independent Democrats and COPE, who had two and three seats in the forty-two-member legislature respectively.
The ID accepted a cabinet position; COPE turned us down, wishing to carve out an independent identity.
I had to fill the remaining nine cabinet positions by matching the portfolio with the skills of individuals in our twenty-two-member caucus.
Our success in government would depend on getting this fit right. And I also had to be mindful of the ‘balance of internal forces’ between contesting groups and factions inside the DA in the process of constituting a cabinet.
I scoured the CVs of the twenty-two elected DA members of the legislature and found the best fit possible in the circumstances.
I was prepared for the inevitable fallout.
Except I did not anticipate its force and extent. It reverberated throughout the country, and lasted for years. In fact, today, seven years later, it is still often raised by my critics.
The reason for the furore was that all nine of the DA’s cabinet members I appointed, as well as the one from the ID, were men.
People responded as if I had personally rejected every woman in the Western Cape. Was there not one single woman in the whole province who was good enough to sit in my cabinet, critics asked.
‘There are thousands,’ I responded. ‘Unfortunately, they did not make themselves available for our election list.’
Most critics seemed unaware that I was not free to choose from the entire Western Cape female population. I had to pick a cabinet out of the pool of twenty-two DA members who had been elected to the provincial parliament, of which only three were women.
There were far more women on our list for the national parliament than the provincial legislature. In the DA we allow freedom of choice for candidates to put themselves forward for the list of their choice.
The public criticism was justified, at least in part. Although the DA rejects quotas, it taught me a lot about ensuring greater gender diversity in our processes, from the start.
Nevertheless, the political opportunism of my opponents rankled, as they tried to turn it into a major scandal. Tony Ehrenreich, the ANC and COSATU provincial loudmouth, threatened to go to court to overturn my cabinet selection and call a general strike unless I apologised.
Everyone who was anyone in the ANC accused me of sexism, and worse.
Irritated, I said this criticism was rich coming from a party that had never had a woman leader in its hundred years of existence and was led by a ‘self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views, who put all his wives at risk by having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman’.
I originally wrote this sentence in a letter to the Cape Argus, in response to ANC criticism. As the furore gathered momentum, my spokesman released the letter as a press statement.
With that, we leapt from the frying pan into the fire.
I had expected the statement to cause a flurry. Indeed, it was intended to. I was sick of the rank hypocrisy of those accusing me of sexism.
I did not anticipate the uproar that followed, however. There was unmitigated outrage from almost every quarter, friend and foe alike. Initially, I was puzzled (since I had stated the bleeding obvious), but then I began to understand a phenomenon that sets in after the election of a new national leader.
It is a process of societal adjustment, of realignment, where people instinctively fall in behind a new power hierarchy. It is expressed in the old adage ‘The king is dead. Long live the king’. I had bucked this convention.
If I had attacked Zuma using the same words during the election campaign, no one would have noticed. The fact that I said it afterwards, about a newly elected leader, just as everyone was adjusting to the new order, made it unforgivable (even if it was true).
On and on the furore went, as if nothing else was happening in South Africa, let alone the rest of the world.
The ANC competed with its alliance partners and affiliates to release the most extreme statements of condemnation.
When I read a news report of the ANC Youth League saying ‘Zille has appointed an all-male Cabinet of useless people, the majority of whom are her boyfriends and concubines so that she can continue to sleep around with them’, I knew it was time to take another short break from reading newspapers.
I needed to restore my equilibrium.
Reading the newspapers formed part of our morning routine. Either Johann or I would jump out of bed, make tea, fetch the newspapers and open the blinds so that we could prepare for the day ahead. Usually, I read the newspapers while Johann did his meditations.
When I needed a break from the media, I would leave the papers unopened in a pile, prop my laptop on my knees and work on my email correspondence instead. Johann would get to the papers after his meditations, and inform me if there had been any new development about which I needed to know.
This was the bedroom scene on an autumn morning in late May 2009.
Johann suddenly burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.
He pondered the article he was reading for a second, and said: ‘This is actually serious, but it’s so outrageous, it’s funny.’
‘What?’ I asked impatiently, trying to get on with my emails.
Johann proceeded to read aloud a report of a media briefing held the previous day at Luthuli House, the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg, where the MK Military Veterans Association presented its considered analysis of why I had appointed an all-male cabinet.
‘The real reason,’ said MK Military Veterans Association Chairman Kebby Maphatsoe, ‘is so that its members are kept close enough to satisfy her well-evolved wild whore libido.’
Then he added: ‘They [the men] are also kept in her power corridors isolated from other women, so as to satisfy her and her alone; hence the exclusion of other women as they pose undesired sexual competition to her undying lust for sex with her male groupies.’
Maphatsoe then moved on to the political relevance of these observations: ‘She is a fascist of the worst kind, who, after evidently sleeping with more than her fair share of white males in her preferred lifestyle of serial monogamy, now turns around and demonises those who are honest to their cultural preferences,’ he noted. If I did not ‘refrain from this anti-African and racist behaviour’, the Military Veterans would ‘not hesitate to launch a political programme aimed at rendering the Western Cape ungovernable’.
The general secretary of the South African Communist Party, Dr Blade Nzimande, was quoted next, saying, ‘I’m worried if Helen Zille is still together upstairs.’
The ANCYL repeated the line about my appointing my lovers and ‘concubines’ and threatened ‘militant action’ against me if I continued to ‘speak hogwash’.
Johann and I looked at each other in astonishment. Then we both burst out laughing.
‘These guys have actually done you a favour,’ said Johann. ‘They have confirmed your point about where the real sexism lies.’
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