Delport, Fischer and the honorary doctorate

Tertius Delport has involved the Democratic Alliance, despite his protests that he speaks only for some rather dodgy caucus in Stellenbosch University and not for the party, in an ugly, unnecessary and wholly ideological dispute about whether to award Bram Fischer a posthumous honorary doctorate. It is rather too much to suggest that Delport is deliberately trying to engineer a party-political platform on the issue. If I know anything about him, I know this: that he is unsophisticated in his over-educated way; that he neither recognises the subtle issue of dividing his responsibilities between the university and the party, nor does he understand that the Stellenbosch radicals may have deliberately set a trap for him and his unreconstructed opinions.

All he had to do was shut up and let Herman Giliomee, who is more lucid anyway, take up the issue and defuse it. Instead, his decision to speak left the party out on a limb, and this has been enthusiastically exploited by our opponents. I hear no comment about the issue that doesn't describe Delport as the DA's justice spokesperson and, since this reaction is wholly predictable, Delport is therefore wholly culpable.

He personally stands to lose everything from his public intervention in the matter; and I hope that he does. At a strictly practical level, his naivety allows us to question his capacity to speak for the party. And since he didn't consult the party about his intervention in the matter, so it is perfectly legitimate to discuss whether he has brought the party into disrepute.

Delport's grounds for his opposition to the award is that he doesn't think communists should be honoured in such a way.

Now Fischer may have been, as he claims, a Stalinist who advocated violent revolution. But, as I have said elsewhere, issues such as these are questions of modern politics, not of original intent or historical curiosity. Delport's words imply that he has a problem with the involvement of the Communist Party in the modern dispensation. There is no other way of reading it. Delport is undermining the legitimacy of the modern, governing, constitutional SACP.

Allow me to stand this on its head. The DA would be within its rights to protest without reservation if anyone doubted our own constitutional participation in modern politics in an equivalent way. If Blade Nzimande were to say - unlikely, I admit - 'I won't permit Molly Blackburn a posthumous honorary doctrate from the University of Fort Hare on the grounds that she represented a party in the apartheid parliament' that would strike fundamentally at the modern legitimacy of the Democratic Alliance. So, conversely, when Delport attempts to deny Fischer an honorary doctrate only on the stated grounds that he was a communist activist, he equivalently undermines the legitimacy of the modern SACP.

Stellenbosch University, I suspect, feels exactly the same way. Delport has effectively undermined the university by associating his political disputes with their otherwise outstanding academic reputation.

I hope everyone who reads this can appreciate the issue of the honorary doctrate itself differs from the fact that Tertius Delport chose to speak about it. The award may have merit, or it may not - that's entirely besides the point. It is that Delport decided to immure himself in it that polarised the debate so much.