'South Africa's Obama' Might Soon Be the Country's First Black Opposition Leader

Two white icons have fallen in South Africa within the past week. Firstly, a statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town that had become the focus of a national debate about the symbols of colonialism was pulled down on April 9. Secondly, Helen Zille, the long-time head of the Democratic Alliance (DA), the country's official opposition, resigned on Sunday.

Both speak to a further round of transformation in South Africa that still hasn't been completed, 21 years after Nelson Mandela's government came to power. For two decades, the black-dominated African National Congress party (ANC) has battled against a white-dominated DA in the country's parliament. With Zille moving on, that racial polarity is likely to become less glaring.

Zille announced her decision to resign during a hastily convened press conference at Johannesburg's OR Tambo Airport. Her reasons were straightforward: After eight years and two elections, it was time for a fresh start. Rather than step down in 2017 as she had once intended, Zille said she had decided to take advantage of an upcoming DA national conference next month to hold a snap leadership ballot, arguing that any successor would need longer to bed in ahead of the 2019 general election.

Politically, Zille's waspish, battle-ready tone exasperated some, but she transformed the fortunes of her party. The daughter of German immigrants, in the 70s she was the journalist who broke the story that anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko had been tortured to death in police custody. In the 80s, her home was used as a safe house for opposition supporters on the run.

Zille made much of fighting endemic political corruption, and benefited greatly from the personal unpopularity of President Jacob Zuma. In 2014, her party's election slogan was blunt: "Stop Zuma."

In a nation where the governing ANC can still count on 62 percent of the overall vote, Zille almost doubled the DA's vote share, from 12 percent at the 2004 election, to 22 percent in 2014.

With her departure, South Africa is almost certainly looking towards its first non-white opposition leader. That person, most analysts predict, will be Mmusi Maimane, Zille's 34-year-old protégé, presently the leader of the party's parliamentary caucus, often described as "South Africa's Obama" for his slick oratory and youthful good looks.

Maimane is a poster-boy for much of the demographic transformation Zille has tried to sculpt within the DA. His wife is white. They have two bi-racial children. Unlike many of his opposite numbers in the ANC, his accent is more of the Johannesburg suburbs than the Johannesburg townships. He has an MA in Public Administration from the University of the Witwatersrand, and an MA in Theology from the University Of Wales. After this year's State Of The Nation address, a clip of him describing Zuma as "the broken man, presiding over a broken society" sealed his reputation as an outstanding parliamentary performer.

The election of a non-white successor to Zille would be a major cultural milestone in South African politics. But it may also be a moment of truth — where various disparate forces that have been squished together into the DA have to decide once-and-for-all whether they can stick true to the party's post-racial philosophy.

In close-up, the DA is a patchwork coalition, born out of a shotgun merger between the English-speaking Cape liberalism of the Democratic Party, which opposed Apartheid, and the Afrikaans-centered New National Party, the dying embers of the group who had once held the country in their palm.

Their supporters divide into four key groups: English-speaking liberals, the less conservative spectrum of Afrikaners, Cape Coloureds — the multi-racials with a unique culture, who feel almost as left behind by ANC dominance as they once did by Afrikaner dictatorship — and the urban black middle classes. The danger for a Maimane-led DA would be that he would take the liberals and black middle classes with him, but alienate Afrikaans and Coloured voters.

Even if he manages to hold on to this frail coalition, Maimane would have his work cut out for him to grow the party. In terms of white and Coloured support, it is near saturation. Real growth can only come from reaching out to black voters. Roughly 760,000 black South Africans voted for the DA at the 2014 elections. Out of a voter turnout of 18 million, this is a negligible proportion, but already a sixth of the party's total vote.

Black disaffection with the ANC is abundant. But transforming that into votes has been challenging. There is a widespread sense that after two decades in power, the party has become a flabby, nest-feathering beast with no new ideas. South Africa's GDP growth is no longer keeping pace with population growth and unemployment is increasing. President Zuma stands accused of cronyism on a vast scale and has been personally held to account by the Public Prosecutor for spending governmental millions on his holiday home in the KwaZulu hills. Yet the ANC's share of the vote fell by only 3 percent between 2009 and 2014 — from 65 to 62 percent.

Yet the DA's white roots still make many ordinary voters uneasy. At election time, Zille was regularly forced to allay fears that the party would "bring back Apartheid."

To his opponents, Maimane's suburban vowels, economic liberalism, and white wife already make him easy to tar as a servant of the so-called "white agenda." Lindiwe Masibuko, the former front-runner for Zille's job (before she unexpectedly resigned from front-bench politics), was regularly termed a "coconut" (Brown on the outside, white on the inside) by members of the ANC and Julius Malema's hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters. The question is one of class, but the issue beneath, as ever in South Africa, is whether class and race can truly unbind.

Many others believe that the DA has already hit the logical limits of its support base, and that genuine realignment can only come from elsewhere. The most commonly predicted scenario is that a left-right schism in the broad church of the ANC would lead to a new non-racial opposition party breaking off from the government. Yet despite ongoing in-fighting and the small jailbreak of Thabo Mbeki supporters who formed the Congress of the People party in 2008, the governing ANC seems as monolithic as ever.

Perhaps this is why Maimane has so far held off on formally announcing his candidature, saying he "needs time to think." He hasn't much time to get his thoughts in order — the campaign will be short and sharp. A new leader will be chosen at the DA national convention in Port Elizabeth on May 9.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter: @gavhaynes