MILTON SHAIN: Dramas of 1930s raise red flag for ANC coalition with DA
Centrist coalition likely to be short-lived, with ANC populists reuniting with their EFF and MK comrades
Those expecting that a DA coalition deal with the ANC (possibly including the IFP) will solve SA’s problems will do well to revisit the dramatic days of 1932 and early 1933. Like now, SA was in crisis. Then it was fuelled by a raging “poor white” problem, made worse by the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and a burgeoning Afrikaner nationalism.
Public attention then was focused on the gold standard debate. Britain’s withdrawal in September 1931 had left SA exports hugely overvalued, but prime minister JBM Hertzog and his fellow Nationalists were reluctant to follow the lead of the “mother country”. They were also wary of kowtowing to the Chamber of Mines, long seen by them as the symbol of geldmag, or money power, and personified in the figure of “Hoggenheimer”. Going off the gold standard, argued some, would also have inflationary implications. Adding fuel to the fire was that subsidies to the farming industry had failed to relieve rural distress, greatly worsened by the ...
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