COPE And The Cape

That any single party could ever have had the two-thirds majority necessary to amend the South African Constitution means that it was, to that extent, set up wrongly in the first place. But now no party does, which is a very healthy sign.

COPE is as much a product of the liberation struggle as the ANC, and rather truer to it. And the Democratic Alliance is the successor of the Black Sash movement, of the Progressive Federal Party, and all that. History will judge that that tradition did at least as much in practice to bring down apartheid, and did not prolong the agony by allying with the Soviet Union and so antagonising the West, especially the United States.

An entire province is now run by a party other than the ANC (the DA). With a Coloured majority (that is a capital C, and there is nothing "so-called" or "painful" or what have you about it), with almost as many whites as blacks, and looking out across the harbour at Cape Town to the world beyond, South Africa's great hope is that she contains the Western Cape. Jacob Zuma will never be The Big Man, a Greater Mugabe or a Greater Amin, there.