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#StayWoke: Go Broke: Why South Africa won’t survive America’s culture wars
It’s time to fight back.Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions – ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense.Have you been “cancelled” by an online mob that won’t stop harassing you until you’re fired from your job?Helen Zille almost was – but she survived by fighting back.In # Go Broke, the bestselling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa’s future than the populist Right does.Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values – or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world.If you’re looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then # Go Broke is for you.Buy it now.
205 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 26, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 7, 2021
Don't be fooled by the title of this book - it is Helen Zille's plug for the DA and her "side of the story"; not a critical and detailed review of what being woke means in South Africa. So the rating is more like a 2.5.
I wanted to read this book because even if I don't agree with what she might have to say, I thought it would be an interesting insight into why the older generation vehemently oppose woke culture. Needless to say, all it was was a woman trying to oversimplify the matters at hand, selectively argue certain points she didn't agree with (not engage wholly) and give herself an opportunity to express her anger/opinion over the "colonialism was not all bad" incident. And make no mistake, she was clearly quite angry when she wrote the book.
The thing that frustrated me when reading this book was the fact that she so completely missed certain things. For example, she speaks frequently (sometimes too much 🙄) of the DA's commitment to non-racialism and how it's the only way forward for SA. Which just showed me that she has missed the point the completely.
People would love to live in a society where they are judged on their actions, not their race/creed/gender/sexual orientation. But it's not enough to say "you don't see colour" because people do! They may do it inadvertently or unconsciously, but they favour in-groups over out-groups every day of the week - a quick read of a 1st year psychology textbook would have told her this! And SA is still very much grappling with the after effects of Apartheid, how it defined these groups and how people are still being taught things from the older generations that are playing out today. So if we want to break those structures, attitudes and thought-patterns it *has* to be tackled in a deliberate and uncomfortable way. On the latter point we agree. Where our opinions differ is that the younger generation believe we can't cop out with a policy like "non-racialism" because it's gotten us nowhere so far.
That's not to say her assessment of the ANC was wrong. In fact I found it to be incisive and on point. The ruling party is corrupt and at the rate it's going I also don't believe it will be able to survive much longer. However, what will emerge has yet to be seen. I don't believe the majority of people see the DA as the party to take SA into the future, they appear too tame, and I don't think the EFF is that representation either. If this was a ploy to get people to vote for the DA - which is very much appeared it was - I'm not sure this book helped all that much. If you agree with their opinion then the book will just reaffirm that, if you don't, trust me when I say this book will not persuade you otherwise.
I wanted to read this book because even if I don't agree with what she might have to say, I thought it would be an interesting insight into why the older generation vehemently oppose woke culture. Needless to say, all it was was a woman trying to oversimplify the matters at hand, selectively argue certain points she didn't agree with (not engage wholly) and give herself an opportunity to express her anger/opinion over the "colonialism was not all bad" incident. And make no mistake, she was clearly quite angry when she wrote the book.
The thing that frustrated me when reading this book was the fact that she so completely missed certain things. For example, she speaks frequently (sometimes too much 🙄) of the DA's commitment to non-racialism and how it's the only way forward for SA. Which just showed me that she has missed the point the completely.
People would love to live in a society where they are judged on their actions, not their race/creed/gender/sexual orientation. But it's not enough to say "you don't see colour" because people do! They may do it inadvertently or unconsciously, but they favour in-groups over out-groups every day of the week - a quick read of a 1st year psychology textbook would have told her this! And SA is still very much grappling with the after effects of Apartheid, how it defined these groups and how people are still being taught things from the older generations that are playing out today. So if we want to break those structures, attitudes and thought-patterns it *has* to be tackled in a deliberate and uncomfortable way. On the latter point we agree. Where our opinions differ is that the younger generation believe we can't cop out with a policy like "non-racialism" because it's gotten us nowhere so far.
That's not to say her assessment of the ANC was wrong. In fact I found it to be incisive and on point. The ruling party is corrupt and at the rate it's going I also don't believe it will be able to survive much longer. However, what will emerge has yet to be seen. I don't believe the majority of people see the DA as the party to take SA into the future, they appear too tame, and I don't think the EFF is that representation either. If this was a ploy to get people to vote for the DA - which is very much appeared it was - I'm not sure this book helped all that much. If you agree with their opinion then the book will just reaffirm that, if you don't, trust me when I say this book will not persuade you otherwise.
May 24, 2021
Insightful
Insightful overview of South African history and politics and how it fits into the world. It show why Wokeness is a great cover for corruption and destructive to all but especially to those it condescendingly pretends to stand for! It also shows that identity politics can and must be replaced by non racial meritocracy with redress based on need, not race. This is a near impossible task unless thinking people stand up to the woke movement driven by a tiny minority who are incredibly skilled at destroying characters.
Insightful overview of South African history and politics and how it fits into the world. It show why Wokeness is a great cover for corruption and destructive to all but especially to those it condescendingly pretends to stand for! It also shows that identity politics can and must be replaced by non racial meritocracy with redress based on need, not race. This is a near impossible task unless thinking people stand up to the woke movement driven by a tiny minority who are incredibly skilled at destroying characters.
March 19, 2022
In this book, Helen Zille, ex-leader of the DA, the largest opposition party in South Africa, outlines reasons why, in her view, the rising tide of Wokeism in our country is a threat to the survival of our very fragile democracy.
To clarify this concept - which she needs to do for the majority of her readers who are probably everyday people who don't go about their lives pondering the meanings of Critical Theory - she provides a comprehensive analysis of the ideological roots of Wokeism, it's adoption in the Humanities Departments of Universities, particularly UCT, and its violent manifestation in the student protests of 2015-2018 when UCT students went on a rampage of anti-colonialism damaging property and art works, and injuring staff and employees. It has also swept into the media where calls for a panel to monitor the Whiteness of the advertising industry are gaining traction and into politics where it has been endorsed by a large faction of the ruling party, one of whom recently made a public statement denigrating the judiciary “ The most dangerous African today is the mentally colonised African. And when you put them in leadership positions or as interpreters of the law, they are worse than your oppressor.”
On account of the deep scars of our apartheid past, and in an attempt to eradicate lingering racism (which clearly still exists), the movement in South Africa has tended to focus more on race than on other marginalised identities such as the LBGTQI+ community. Zille’s liberal policy of seeing people as free and autonomous is the polar opposite of the Woke ideology which identifies people in groups, notes power inequalities between them and seeks to expose these in order to tear them down. Not a bad principle, I would have thought, who can object to that, but Zille digs deeper into the ramifications of this, arguing the negative effect she believes it is having on politics and the economy.
She believes that in allocating identities to groups ( particularly those of race) one is reverting to the crude racism of the apartheid years. Not only, she says, is this identity-allocation playing into the hands of corrupt politicians who have used it to justify the policy of cadre deployment and BEEE which has laid major institutions open to mind-boggling corruption and almost total dysfunction, but it has actually disempowered rather than empowered the marginalised poverty-stricken majority as it is they who have suffered from the corruption it has engendered.
For her, and I expect for most people who were educated in the liberal tradition of two-way debates and respectful disagreements over ideological differences, the destructive side of Wokeism is its chosen tactic of attacking differing opinions by decontextualising any belief that does not accord with theirs, manipulating or distorting it, slapping undeserved labels on the author ( racist, fascist Nazi etc) and then refusing to engage in a reasoned way. These tactics, based on the belief that “Language is Violence and must be met with counter-violence” are deliberately disruptive, intimidating and one-sided as they effectively drown out any explanation or attempt to negotiate meaning. (Witness the EFF's continual heckling to drown out opposition speakers in Parliament). As Twitter has shown us, it becomes impossible to engage with such tactics and thus it becomes a tyranny of the outraged. Zille describes it thus:
“… the core tactic of Wokeness is to mobilise emotional rage, create a public spectacle and force agreement through psychological manipulation and character assassination.”
Zille can speak to this from her own experience of being pilloried for a post she wrote on Twitter that claimed that colonialism was not ALL bad, giving a couple of institutions in Singapore as an example. From this it was inferred that she was pro-colonialism; a red rag to a country that had suffered deeply from being colonised. I am not a supporter of Helen Zille and thought her comment was ill-advised and insensitive. Still, it was decontextualised and overlain with multiple layers of deliberately inferred mis-meaning for which she was attacked vociferously by those determined to be both offended and outraged by what they wanted what she said to mean. It soon became a feeding frenzy of outrage and personal insults. This spilled into the media and into politics and led to her being suspended from her party and being cancelled by hypocritical event organisers who claimed to believe in free speech. From this, she offers advice to others who inadvertently post something that brings down the full might of the outraged and indignant Twitterati on their heads. I have no idea if it is helpful or not but God help the poor souls who step on that landmine. They could probably use Helen Zille’s advice given what she went through - and survived.
DA policies aside ( and I thought there was way too much justification of these in the book), I found the sections on Wokeness a great help in clarifying the growing rhetoric in South Africa and understanding why student protests had got so violent, why shouting down, humiliating and labelling opponents have become an acceptable form of disagreement, why Cabinet Ministers say our judiciary has a colonised mind and generally why our national discourse has got so damned nasty. Now I know.
To clarify this concept - which she needs to do for the majority of her readers who are probably everyday people who don't go about their lives pondering the meanings of Critical Theory - she provides a comprehensive analysis of the ideological roots of Wokeism, it's adoption in the Humanities Departments of Universities, particularly UCT, and its violent manifestation in the student protests of 2015-2018 when UCT students went on a rampage of anti-colonialism damaging property and art works, and injuring staff and employees. It has also swept into the media where calls for a panel to monitor the Whiteness of the advertising industry are gaining traction and into politics where it has been endorsed by a large faction of the ruling party, one of whom recently made a public statement denigrating the judiciary “ The most dangerous African today is the mentally colonised African. And when you put them in leadership positions or as interpreters of the law, they are worse than your oppressor.”
On account of the deep scars of our apartheid past, and in an attempt to eradicate lingering racism (which clearly still exists), the movement in South Africa has tended to focus more on race than on other marginalised identities such as the LBGTQI+ community. Zille’s liberal policy of seeing people as free and autonomous is the polar opposite of the Woke ideology which identifies people in groups, notes power inequalities between them and seeks to expose these in order to tear them down. Not a bad principle, I would have thought, who can object to that, but Zille digs deeper into the ramifications of this, arguing the negative effect she believes it is having on politics and the economy.
She believes that in allocating identities to groups ( particularly those of race) one is reverting to the crude racism of the apartheid years. Not only, she says, is this identity-allocation playing into the hands of corrupt politicians who have used it to justify the policy of cadre deployment and BEEE which has laid major institutions open to mind-boggling corruption and almost total dysfunction, but it has actually disempowered rather than empowered the marginalised poverty-stricken majority as it is they who have suffered from the corruption it has engendered.
For her, and I expect for most people who were educated in the liberal tradition of two-way debates and respectful disagreements over ideological differences, the destructive side of Wokeism is its chosen tactic of attacking differing opinions by decontextualising any belief that does not accord with theirs, manipulating or distorting it, slapping undeserved labels on the author ( racist, fascist Nazi etc) and then refusing to engage in a reasoned way. These tactics, based on the belief that “Language is Violence and must be met with counter-violence” are deliberately disruptive, intimidating and one-sided as they effectively drown out any explanation or attempt to negotiate meaning. (Witness the EFF's continual heckling to drown out opposition speakers in Parliament). As Twitter has shown us, it becomes impossible to engage with such tactics and thus it becomes a tyranny of the outraged. Zille describes it thus:
“… the core tactic of Wokeness is to mobilise emotional rage, create a public spectacle and force agreement through psychological manipulation and character assassination.”
Zille can speak to this from her own experience of being pilloried for a post she wrote on Twitter that claimed that colonialism was not ALL bad, giving a couple of institutions in Singapore as an example. From this it was inferred that she was pro-colonialism; a red rag to a country that had suffered deeply from being colonised. I am not a supporter of Helen Zille and thought her comment was ill-advised and insensitive. Still, it was decontextualised and overlain with multiple layers of deliberately inferred mis-meaning for which she was attacked vociferously by those determined to be both offended and outraged by what they wanted what she said to mean. It soon became a feeding frenzy of outrage and personal insults. This spilled into the media and into politics and led to her being suspended from her party and being cancelled by hypocritical event organisers who claimed to believe in free speech. From this, she offers advice to others who inadvertently post something that brings down the full might of the outraged and indignant Twitterati on their heads. I have no idea if it is helpful or not but God help the poor souls who step on that landmine. They could probably use Helen Zille’s advice given what she went through - and survived.
DA policies aside ( and I thought there was way too much justification of these in the book), I found the sections on Wokeness a great help in clarifying the growing rhetoric in South Africa and understanding why student protests had got so violent, why shouting down, humiliating and labelling opponents have become an acceptable form of disagreement, why Cabinet Ministers say our judiciary has a colonised mind and generally why our national discourse has got so damned nasty. Now I know.
January 6, 2025
Soooo goood - although old - I really so enjoyed this book!!!
May 13, 2021
Never mind 5-stars. This could have been a 10/10. Let me go the full 100/100. If only Ms. Zille had stuck to Wokeness. If only she had taken a broader, more international view. If only she’s gone easier on DA proselytizing. If only she’d chosen a different medium to grind her axes. If only.
There’s a gem of a denunciation hidden in between the reiterations and the personal gripes. I just hope one day someone (herself, even) pick up the cudgels and take it all the way.
It does not matter what you think of Helen Zille’s political views, as a writer, she is on the money in most of what she writes here. Yes, personally she is sometimes depicted as a termagant, irritating as any educated, experienced, intelligent and assertive woman in politics. Not her fault, probably.
This former MP, exMayor of Cape Town and leader of South Africa’s political opposition is a University graduate who has impeccable anti-apartheid credentials (amongst other things, at the height of apartheid, she and her newspaper editor Allister Sparks, took on one of Apartheid cruellest, most unapologetic murderers –Minister of Justice and Police Jimmy Kruger- in an article that exposed Steve Biko’s death announcement as a murder cover-up. At other times she was also arrested for defying apartheid’s Group Areas Act and for being the vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign.
By the way, if you only read one book in a decade, I recommend you read this one. If you are not Seffrican, skip most of chapter 6, the whole of chapter 7 and other bits that feel boring or irrelevant to the central discussion.
There’s a gem of a denunciation hidden in between the reiterations and the personal gripes. I just hope one day someone (herself, even) pick up the cudgels and take it all the way.
It does not matter what you think of Helen Zille’s political views, as a writer, she is on the money in most of what she writes here. Yes, personally she is sometimes depicted as a termagant, irritating as any educated, experienced, intelligent and assertive woman in politics. Not her fault, probably.
This former MP, exMayor of Cape Town and leader of South Africa’s political opposition is a University graduate who has impeccable anti-apartheid credentials (amongst other things, at the height of apartheid, she and her newspaper editor Allister Sparks, took on one of Apartheid cruellest, most unapologetic murderers –Minister of Justice and Police Jimmy Kruger- in an article that exposed Steve Biko’s death announcement as a murder cover-up. At other times she was also arrested for defying apartheid’s Group Areas Act and for being the vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign.
By the way, if you only read one book in a decade, I recommend you read this one. If you are not Seffrican, skip most of chapter 6, the whole of chapter 7 and other bits that feel boring or irrelevant to the central discussion.
June 25, 2021
“At the height of apartheid and in the face of full-blown sanctions against South Africa, official unemployment stood at 10%. After 25 years of ANC rule, the percentage of people unemployed and actively looking for work reached 30%, and that was before the jobs decimation of the Covid pandemic.” - that contrast really left me flabbergasted.
Overall an easy, captivating read. Love her or hate her, “tannie” Helen demands respect as a leader and as a writer.
Overall an easy, captivating read. Love her or hate her, “tannie” Helen demands respect as a leader and as a writer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 3, 2021
Countering the media profile that defined Helen to most quite brilliantly.
Good read to provide another perspective on the world we live in now. As in the worlds envisioned by Alan Rand and George Orville
Helen hold the destructors up against the mirror of the creators for all to see. Very readable and recommendable, and not only for South Africans.
Good read to provide another perspective on the world we live in now. As in the worlds envisioned by Alan Rand and George Orville
Helen hold the destructors up against the mirror of the creators for all to see. Very readable and recommendable, and not only for South Africans.
May 4, 2021
Critical and informative reading
Helen's book underpins true and sustainable democratic values. It is a definitive survivor's manual for all South Africans and communities around the world.
Helen's book underpins true and sustainable democratic values. It is a definitive survivor's manual for all South Africans and communities around the world.
September 30, 2024
Zille writes a good book here. I don’t look from the same perspective as what she does. Nonetheless a book with good points on the danger of Wokeness
November 6, 2022
Oh but don't you wonder? Ms. Zille's take on South African "wokeness" in this insert is rather satirical and humourous. I've chosen "Ms." as her referential titularity in this review as the book is less formal than her first installment; that's being juxtapositional. Its first four chapters are rather euphemistic as to how we got to wokeness as a country and what it is. The book could've easily been titled "#StayWoke: Go Broke: The lipstick will be far too pricey on a pig" but that would've only ensconced its first half. She begins to delve into its problematic nature from the fifth chapter, in which she delineates why it's a weapon for the political left who usually aren't aware that they're using their right brain while using that weapon.
You'll begin to see the wit subside towards the end of the book and facts with empirical conceptualization (rather oxymoronic) taking centre stage. Classical liberalism is the order of the day in this book or at least, the perspective from which it is written.
Lastly, I have commentary on two extracts that caught my eye. The first is how, according to the author, "Both the ANC and the NP have in common their sense of a historic mission to redeem their people (racially defined) from oppression and subjugation. They are, in truth, two sides of the same historical coin. And both will leave equally dark stains on South Africa's history." This omits the probability of coloured people who would've come out of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War due to blacks being incarcerated with white Afrikaners. Essentially, my commentary is unifying reverse wokeness in the sense that the world has never been black and white when it was left to its laurels. Even the mixed-race children of pre and during World War II Germany were not of progressive descent. It's a rather lesser known fact that they were mostly of naturally German bred women with French/Belgian African soldiers who'd just had their country and population trituterated by King Leopold II two decades earlier.
Secondly, how, according to the author, "The ANC was quite open, inside its own forums and in its internal documents, about moving beyond the first "bourgeois stage" of the revolution, before initiating the second stage — a step taken in 2012 — towards African nationalist socialism, also known as "democratic centralism", or the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)," is flawed wokeness is that moving beyond a stage of governance induction to people who had no experience of running a country clearly meant a bloated and bigger government, if this quite correct extrapolation is anything to go by. We thought it's "more kids" not "more parents" but then again, the constitution enshrines polygamy, which in turn enshrines unnecessary expenditure.
A truly good book to read for an academic chuckle.
You'll begin to see the wit subside towards the end of the book and facts with empirical conceptualization (rather oxymoronic) taking centre stage. Classical liberalism is the order of the day in this book or at least, the perspective from which it is written.
Lastly, I have commentary on two extracts that caught my eye. The first is how, according to the author, "Both the ANC and the NP have in common their sense of a historic mission to redeem their people (racially defined) from oppression and subjugation. They are, in truth, two sides of the same historical coin. And both will leave equally dark stains on South Africa's history." This omits the probability of coloured people who would've come out of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War due to blacks being incarcerated with white Afrikaners. Essentially, my commentary is unifying reverse wokeness in the sense that the world has never been black and white when it was left to its laurels. Even the mixed-race children of pre and during World War II Germany were not of progressive descent. It's a rather lesser known fact that they were mostly of naturally German bred women with French/Belgian African soldiers who'd just had their country and population trituterated by King Leopold II two decades earlier.
Secondly, how, according to the author, "The ANC was quite open, inside its own forums and in its internal documents, about moving beyond the first "bourgeois stage" of the revolution, before initiating the second stage — a step taken in 2012 — towards African nationalist socialism, also known as "democratic centralism", or the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)," is flawed wokeness is that moving beyond a stage of governance induction to people who had no experience of running a country clearly meant a bloated and bigger government, if this quite correct extrapolation is anything to go by. We thought it's "more kids" not "more parents" but then again, the constitution enshrines polygamy, which in turn enshrines unnecessary expenditure.
A truly good book to read for an academic chuckle.
December 22, 2024
The book is good but clearly the author doesn't actually live by the principles of the book. Helen Zille says one thing but does another. It's a good book but because the other merely pays lip service rather than living what she writes it deserves a one-star. It feels like this book is a cash grab.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews