Of course this particular election is not without its novelty, for the post-apartheid hegemon, the monolithic political force we call the ANC, has never been weaker. And, to be sure, there is no shortage of contenders to fill the vacuum. “The ANC has split, now the DA can win”, says the banner on the opposition’s website. Wishful thinking? Probably! No doubt, something worst than a lack of imagination.
We can perhaps take comfort in the fact that Parliament will have new voices, or, at least, old voices singing in a new band. But Parliament today is simply dull theatre; a well-lit stage for the cast to perform. Government is where the action is.
‘Together we can do more’, they say. More of the same. Whoever wins, or rather, by whatever small or big margin the ANC wins, we can be sure of ‘continuity’. The wheels of the system will keep turning, casting the privileged few to the top, and the rest of us to the sidelines. As the bloated beast we call the global economy enters into a new crisis, their promises of progress appear ever more empty.
Flexiblised exploitative jobs for the lucky, and an existence reduced to mere survival for the rest. This is the dream of modern power.
Still, every five years there is a national election. Party officials don T-shirts and knock on our doors, renewing their promise of ‘a better life’. And, for our part, all we need to do is vote. This is what politics has become. The empty ritual of a secret ballot...as if what is political is something best expressed in private. Public politics is for professionals. We can no longer be satisfied with this state of affairs in which the only space for political action is also its foreclosure.
Every five years there is a national election, but what we need is a new way of doing politics, new ways to giving flesh to our dreams in the here and now. Coming together under the sign ‘Nope!’, we move not from a rejection of politics, not even of electoral politics, but from the desire for politics to be something more than an empty ritual. Nope! is a refusal of the narrow model of mainstream politics, and an experiment with the possibility of being more politically.
In fact, we don’t care what you do with your vote. We care what you do beyond voting, what you do in giving public expression to your dreams and desires, and in re-making the world in their image. For whatever these dreams are, they can never be expressed in a single, secret, anonymous mark – two intersecting lines, a cross. Nope! is our experiment to give space to other ways of doing politics. Other ways of expressing who we are politically.
