The Democratic Alliance (DA) chairperson Hellen Zille sat down with Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh on his podcast, SMWX, to discuss her political career, views and personal life.
Less than three minutes into the conversation, the controversial figure told Mpofu-Walsh that her opponents always turn to race when they have nothing else to attack her with.
“The playing of the race card is an absolute evil in our society. When people have run out of arguments, they will call you a racist. It’s the cheapest and easiest newspaper or media report to say X accused someone else of being a racist,” she said.
In 2017, Zille made headlines across the world for saying that colonialism was not all negative.
“For those claiming the legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport, infrastructure, piped water etc,” she posted on X (Twitter).
She added that anyone who knows her and the work that she has accomplished, know that the idea of her being a racist, is nonsense.
“This (race politics) started with the fight that I had against the voluntary severance and redeployment scheme in education in the 1990s … The entire point of it was to protect disadvantaged schools from being stripped of their teachers,” Zille said.
She also opened up about her early life, saying that her parents were refugees from Germany. “Most of my grandmother’s siblings were murdered in the concentration camps.”
Zille said her father instilled in her the importance of being forward-thinking and having confidence, not worrying about mistakes and a painful past.
She revealed that at the dawn of democracy, she was skeptical that the African National Congress (ANC) would have too much power and debated her husband, who was a member of the party about the matter.
“I said the greatest risk for South Africa’s democracy going forward is that the ANC will have too much power, too much power will be concentrated in too few hands. And, I said we have to start building a strong non-racial alternative,” she said.
Zille also claimed that the Interim Constitution was better than the final Constitution.
When asked about BEE and whether taking one’s identity seriously is a problem, she said: “The most important thing about you is what you decide the important thing about you is … It is incredibly dangerous when a society decides that the most important thing about people is their colour and their chromosomes.
“They will be put in a box and labelled and their value determined by those identity markers. That is a dangerous thing and so you suddenly get a hierarchy of victimhood and sexuality. That becomes fixed as categories, determined not by a broader movement in society.
