She has come a long way in less than four years with the party. In the local government elections this year, she joined Helen Zille and Patricia de Lille on election posters as the youthful black face of a multiracial DA. Already, she is being touted as the next DA leader in Parliament.
In preparing for my interview with her, I thought I would gauge whether the DA’s message – that it is the only party capable of ‘delivering a better life for all’ – was reaching its target market, the black voter.
I showed Patience, my domestic helper, an online picture of Mazibuko.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked.
She peered at the screen and then nodded, “Yes, DA,” she said.
“What do you think of her?” I asked.
“Don’t like,” Patience promptly replied.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Zille hates blacks,” she said, “She wants to send them all back to the Transkei.”
“Who told you that?” I asked.
Patience was unable to give me a reply. With her standing at my shoulder, I googled the phrase, ‘Zille, blacks, Transkei’ and sure enough, the phrase came up, verbatim. A comment in response to an article on IOL news on 15 April 2009, read as follows:
A friend informed me that one of her staff members went to an ANC Rally where Jacob Zuma said that Helen Zille hates blacks and will chase all black people to the Transkei.
Mazibuko is under no illusions that the DA is fighting “an uphill battle to change people’s perceptions”. She told the Cape Town Press Club in early August: “The path of divisive, racial politics is an easy one. It is the path of easy villains, lack of empathy and understanding, and the peddling of fear and loathing and resentment.”
Her private school accent and public profile in the DA has made her an easy target for the kind of politics she sees threatening South Africa’s democracy.
“When people talk about white power it’s very obviously repugnant but it’s becoming legitimate to talk about black nationalism in this country. Some see black domination today as the appropriate response to the white domination of apartheid. It’s a response to the hurt and the pain and the low self-esteem that apartheid has bequeathed to us, but what it’s becoming is a tool for populists and for people with nefarious intentions to use people’s pain and scar tissue as a way of getting into power and staying on top. It’s dangerous. It’s bad for democracy.”
She is not afraid to speak her mind. In parliament in February this year, she challenged Higher Education Minister, Blade Nzimande, for using the word “darkies” in parliament. He retaliated by calling Mazibuko a “coconut.”
“Insults like that – it’s like water off a duck’s back. It doesn’t bother me. To me it’s a sign of ignorance. It’s also racist, to assume all black people are a certain way. Because we’re not. We’re so different. You look at me and my age, you can make certain assumptions like Blade Nzimande has; that I went to a Model C school; that I had an easy life. You can’t make those assumptions about people.”
She speaks from experience of both the diversity and the divisiveness of South Africa. Fluent in four of South Africa’s eleven official languages, she has lived in small Swazi towns, the Durban township of Umlazi, and the leafy suburbs of Durban and Cape Town, attended a Jewish primary school, learnt Hebrew and been at the receiving end of discrimination herself. Lindiwe’s private school education came at a cost.
Born in Manzini to a South African banker and a nurse, Mazibuko’s grandfather was the Anglican Bishop in Swaziland. Mazibuko is the second-youngest of five children; she has three brothers and a sister. Her father’s job was to rehabilitate failing branches of Barclays Bank and so, in the first six years of Lindiwe’s life, the family moved from Manzini to Mbabane, to Nhlangano, Piggs Peak and Big Bend. Mazibuko’s earliest memories are of Swaziland. “…the weather, how rural it is. We didn’t live in cities, we lived in small towns dominated by one or two farming families and everyone was attached to them in some way.”
Then Mazibuko Senior was head-hunted by African Bank and the family returned to South Africa in 1986. The country was in a state of emergency and blood was flowing and bullets flying in the townships. The family moved to Umlazi, the biggest township in KwaZulu-Natal, second only to Soweto in size. He later ran a successful butchery and a supermarket here. “The difference was astonishing,” Mazibuko recalls.
“Traumatic. I hated living in Umlazi. I hated South Africa. It wasn’t township life so much as the kind of township we were living in 1986/87. It was Casspirs in the street, gas in the back yard. It was being hassled by the neighbour’s kids because I was different. I spoke differently. I spoke English, I spoke Seswati, (both home languages). I learned isiZulu eventually. Of course, at the same time, because of the Bantu Education system we couldn’t go to Model C schools. I went to a Jewish primary school…So it was a lot of alienation at once.”
Turned down by the Catholics at the Our Lady of Fatima convent, Lindiwe, her brother and her sister were accepted at Carmel College, Durban’s Jewish day school. (now called Eden College). Alumni include: former editor of the Mail and Guardian, Anton Harber, surfing legend, Shaun Tomson, and Chief Rabbi Graeme Finkelstein. Lindiwe’s sister went on to win the Jewish Studies prize when she was in Matric.
“Everyone had to go to Jewish Studies classes. There were Hebrew prayers in the morning, and every Sunday I went to church. So it was a little bit weird. At the time it didn’t bother me much but I think it bothers me more in retrospect. I sometimes think of little things … like how they called all the kids who weren’t Jewish, ‘non-Jewish.”
In the dying days of apartheid, the townships were a battleground.
“Kids that went to school outside the township, or anyone who went to school at all, were under threat. There were times when we’d hide under blankets in the back seat of the car so my parents could get us out to class. They didn’t want us to miss lessons. My parents were obsessive about education – as were their parents. It was the most important thing to them. My mother came from a family of eight surviving children. They all have degrees. Most of them have Masters’ degrees. It was the same on my father’s side of the family. Whenever there was some kind of violent clash, we’d stay at our friends’ houses in the suburbs. So for several weeks of every year we stayed in places like Glenashley, Glenmore, Durban North, Umhlanga Rocks and saw how people lived in the suburbs and then went back to Umlazi.”
Mazibuko is quick to say that, “I never felt left out and I never felt alienated. I was a gregarious child. I got along with everybody. I was a good student. I learned a lot of things I wouldn’t ordinarily have learned. So it was good for me in terms of broadening my horizons.”
After her father died, her mother moved the family to the upmarket suburbs of Umhlanga Rocks and La Lucia. Mazibuko went to an Anglican boarding school in Kloof, St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls.
“As soon as I arrived at St Mary’s it was a completely different experience. I fit in – hand-in-glove – everything made sense again. There was no weird dichotomy between the religious experiences. There were more black students at St Mary’s so I spoke more isiZulu. I started singing, I got into music.”
In her final year at St Mary’s in 1997, Mazibuko was a prefect and head of the school choir. Her music tastes are eclectic – ballet, choral music, dance music.
“The best thing about my life is that I’ve never been ‘normal.’ By normal, I mean like everyone else around you. I view that as a huge advantage. I think there’s a certain complacency that comes with being normal. There’s a certain complacency that makes you think that everyone’s life is the same, whereas I feel that, since I’ve lived in this country, at least, I’ve never felt that my life is like everybody else’s life. I don’t ever assume I know what people’s experiences of the world are like. From what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced, people’s lives are not at all the same. ‘That’s why I rail against this idea of groups of people being homogenous. It’s just so untrue. I’ve always made a conscious effort to understand how people experience things differently.”
Mazibuko set her sights on becoming a soprano. She studied music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal for one year but didn’t find the course challenging enough. Trinity College in London turned down her application for a bursary and Mazibuko waitressed in a London coffee shop, hoping to find a way to raise the tuition fees. In 2002, she was back in South Africa and, two years later, was studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for a degree in political communication.
In her Honours year, 2007, she did her dissertation on Helen Zille. She admits that, “It wasn’t the greatest work I’ve ever churned out,” but it proved to be the beginning of her political career. At the time, Zille was Mayor of Cape Town and the front runner in the race for DA leader. Mazibuko’s hypothesis was that the media were giving Zille greater prominence than the other two candidates, because “white-owned newspapers with white-owned capitalist interests were protecting a white capitalist”.
“I interviewed all these journalists. They all turned out to be black. And the majority readership of the Cape Argus turned out not to be white but coloured. And the fact that Zille was getting so much press coverage was due to the fact that she was available, media-savvy and ran the best public campaign. It taught me a few things about the media and about preconceptions.”
The dissertation got Mazibuko interested in the DA and a job as a research assistant to Democratic Alliance MPs on parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA).
“Ideologically, I’m in the right place because I’m in a liberal democratic party that believes in individualism and social responsibility. It believes in the power of diversity because each people brings something special to the table. It believes in the importance of redressing the past. That’s a very important alternative to have in a country like ours when the dominant tide still is towards groupism, with separate political parties for Indians, for coloureds, for Afrikaners, for blacks, for whites. It’s a hard sell. It’s the slow attrition of the idea that if you vote for a party where everyone looks like you, you’ll be safe.
I think the best way to be able to embrace diversity and multiplicity is to have a strong sense of individualism at your centre. Once you have a strong sense of individualism, you have the ability to tolerate difference and respect difference. That’s what this country has to be about. There are only two alternatives. There’s racial nationalism or there’s unity. The Malema route, the populist route, is the far easier route. It’s easier to hate than it is to understand people.
I feel increasingly people have abdicated responsibility through a slow attrition of a culture of personal responsibility. They have abdicated responsibility not just for their own futures but for this country as a whole. A lot of people think you mark your X and you walk away. That happens in developed countries but we’re not there yet. The struggle isn’t over and it takes more than just a few people at the top to fix it. If people are willing to go out and do the hard work, and try to understand each other and where their differences lie and make efforts – learn each other’s language. My next speech in Parliament, I’m going to have a go in Afrikaans. Stuff like that says to people in real terms that you are for unity and reconciliation and understanding. It’s a slow and painful road but someone’s got to walk it.”