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Zille too fast asleep to understand wokeness, and what a pity it is

Iwas mouthing off about Helen Zille the other day — something that happens, I will admit, about once a month in our house — when my wife, who overheard the conversation (little knowing that she was the person I had been talking to) asked, ever so casually, “Is this about her new book?”

It was indeed about Zille’s new book: the awkwardly titled #StayWoke: Go Broke: Why South Africa won’t survive America’s Culture Wars.

“Have you read it?”

I affirmed that I had not, nor did I need to; I knew what it was about, I knew what was in it, and I knew that it was second-rate hogwash.

“But you can’t have an opinion about it if you haven ’ t read it. You wouldn’t accept one of your students doing that. Even Eusebius McKaiser said as much.”

Damn that Eusebius, I thought to myself. This is typical of the man — consistent in promoting a culture of reading and rigorous, informed debate (even though Zille takes pot shots at him at various points in the book).

McKaiser was right, of course, as was my wife. This was inconvenient. There was nothing for it; I had to buy and read the book.

After wasting a few hours of my life that I will never get back, I’m here to tell you (as I told my wife, and will tell McKaiser next time I see him): I didn’t need to read it after all. There is nothing in #StayWoke that you couldn’t have gleaned from Zille’s Twitter timeline over the past few years.

She is more eloquent in the book than on social media. But the same snide, superior persona prevails, as does the same lazy pseudo intellectualism. I wouldn’t be so upset about this — as Zille has insisted when interviewed about the book, even though she is “not best positioned” to be an advocate against “wokeness”, “we’re a free country, I can choose to do it, anybody else can choose to do it ”— were it not for two considerations.

First, I would like SA to have a viable opposition party. It matters that Zille is not a random citizen self-publishing her half-baked analysis but the chairperson of the federal council of the DA (and the figure most strongly associated with the party’s brand). Her narrow understanding of SA — and, for that matter, US — history and politics, so evidently on display in this book, both constrains the party ideologically and strategically and further reduces its electability.

Second — and here I must adapt an Americanism into a language Zille understands — she mustn’t come and kak on my stoep. Zille has railed against SA academics in the humanities for years now, creating straw men and women at whom she can lob derisive tweets, knocking them down to the delight of her duly duped fan base.

But you don’t get to write a book about the culture wars in the US if you think they started in the 21st century and only really got going when Donald Trump became president. (One wonders if Zille’has read James Davison Hunter s 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which introduced the phrase to popular discourse — if she has, she might have cited it; if she hasn’t, this tells you all you need to know about the depth of her research.)

You don’t get to adopt “wokeness” as a catch-all term for Ideas You Don’t Like, and “cancel culture” as a description of people saying they Don’t Like Your Ideas, just because a bunch of self-styled free speech activists and right-of-centre podcast bros in the US have done the same.

You don’t get to denounce “critical theory”, which Zille bizarrely deems to be the “academic label” for her target (“wokeness”), if you don’t know anything about ... I don’t know, say, the Frankfurt School? As an aside, this is a pity for Zille; Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin were of that generation of Jewish intellectuals who fled Germany to escape Nazism —a phenomenon that is central to Zille’s public biography and to her keen eye for the persecution of minorities.

I could go on. Frankly, Zille’s book doesn’t deserve it. She has had her moment atop Amazon’s lists, but soon #StayWoke will drop off the radar. And that, dear reader, will be a very good thing.

LIFE

en-za

2021-05-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

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