When in doubt, you should call a friend, and that’s exactly what I did. “Do you know Roman Cabanac?” I asked this leading light of the local libertarian scene.
He said he’d met him a few years ago at a braai, with some other DA thinkers, and they’d chewed the liberal fat around a fire somewhere in northern Joburg. “He’s not a racist. He seemed a very nice guy. And he’s not alt-right or anything like that. Check his tweets and you’ll see.”
So I did flip through Cabanac’s tweets — or what’s left of them, because the really meaty stuff (to continue the braai idiom) has apparently been removed. That’s since DA leader John Steenhuisen appointed him chief of staff in his office at the ministry of agriculture, which he now heads in the government of national unity (GNU).
For the benefit of all farmers out there, you now have a notorious super-blogger serving as a top official in the agriculture department.
He sure knows how to take the woke bull by the horns and plough a furrow straight through the barren acreage of “mainstream journalism”. There is a time to reap and a time to sow, and Steenhuisen has most certainly chosen to sow. One can only wonder at the harvest of thorns that will be the fruit of the crop, and what it says about the DA as the self-declared guardian of liberalism in South Africa.
Perhaps one can understand why Cabanac, in his previous incarnation as an online shock jock, felt the need to be more provocative than is his true nature — unless, of course, he really believes this stuff. But if that is so, why did he feel the need to remove it? Why not simply stand by it? And what does the DA associating with a man social media has been quick to brand a racist say about the party?
Do the hard-earned rands of South African taxpayers have to be spent on a public-facing figure who disses the constitution, opines that Jacob Zuma was a better president than Cyril Ramaphosa ... and raises doubt about the received Sharpeville mMassacre narrative?
Don’t worry, though — he’s not a friend! That’s according to Steenhuisen, who says Cabanac came recommended. By a DA deployment committee, perhaps?
Steenhuisen famously led a DA legal and propaganda campaign against the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment, and he can argue until the cows come home that this is different, but if it looks like a duck and sounds like one, it must be Cabanac honking in the farmyard.
“The position is an inward-facing administrative one that manages staff and workflows,” Steenhuisen explained, as if he’d never encumber a friend with such tedious tasks.
Does all this mean a law-abiding South African who loudly proclaims his love for family and country, but who expresses views that range from the bizarre to the borderline inflammatory, is now persona non grata?
Not at all, one would like to think, but do the hard-earned rands of South African taxpayers have to be spent on a public-facing figure who disses the constitution, opines that Jacob Zuma was a better president than Cyril Ramaphosa (whom he called a “p**s”), and raises doubt over the received Sharpeville massacre narrative, to name just a few of his tendentious assertions?
It’s not a shock that one of Cabanac’s tweets features a GIF of alt-right guru Alex Jones, who infamously questioned whether the Sandy Hook school mass shooting, in which 26 people died in the US in 2012, was a conspiracy against gun owners.
In the spirit of open inquiry, I looked up “alt-right”. Wikipedia says: “The alt-right’s membership is overwhelmingly white and male, attracted to the movement by deteriorating living standards and prospects, anxieties about the social role of white masculinity, and anger at left-wing and non-white forms of identity politics such as feminism and Black Lives Matter.
“Rejecting the idea that race is a sociocultural construct, the alt-right promotes scientific racism, claiming racial categories demarcate biologically distinct groups. They call this belief ‘race realism’.”
These themes leap from Cabanac’s Twitter account — even the expurgated version.
Was it “race realism” that led him to conclude that African people could not head a liberal party, as expressed in a (now-deleted) tweet that said, “Bantu people, much like Arabs, are not democratic people. They are monarchists at heart.” Like the British?
A few months earlier, he had tweeted, “So kind of the Bantu tribe to first build the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Colosseum and London — before they built Africa.” Apparently, context is all-important with these pithy takes on history and society.
Perusing Cabanac’s Twitter feed is to take a glimpse into a nether world whose inhabitants are aggrieved and alarmed by what is seen as rampant modernism, wokeism, feminism and ableism. White males predominate here, given they have been emasculated, we are told, in the real world. They include the likes of Donald Trump, the crackpot Robert F Kennedy, Pope Francis, Elon Musk and Dricus Du Plessis (our very own mixed martial arts fighting boykie from Boksburg).
Black males also feature, but mostly when they are atoning for straying from the norms and values the “white world” has claimed as the preserve of it alone. They’re bowing, basically, unless they’re playing the guitar, performing, as Prince the artist does in one reposting.
There’s a picture of Julius Malema looking bereft at losing Floyd Shivambu, there’s the head of Eskom admitting that half its power-station managers had to be fired to get the utility stable again, there’s Joburg ex-mayor Kabelo Gwamanda (the accompanying tweet says, “It’s over for him”), and then there’s ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba, another black man who’s traitorously gone back on his election promise never to go into a coalition with the ANC.
Of Musk, Cabanac writes warmly, “As someone who is largely suspicious of elites, especially modern ones, I feel that Elon Musk is one of the few elites that is humbled by his position. He sees his position as a duty to make the world better, using simple heuristics to do so. No grand plans to eat the bugs — just solid human flourishing.”
How’s that for professional scepticism, if that’s your thing?
Anyway, who wants bugs when “simple heuristics” is (are) on the menu, with a side-serve swipe at tech mogul Bill Gates, hated by radical conservatives for funding a start-up to investigate the feasibility of humans eating insects in the future. It’s a conspiracy, dude!
Cabanac's Twitter account features a profile image quoting the one of the apparent grandfathers of modern conservatism (in other words, a proto-Nazi), Joseph de Maistre. The quote reads, “Democracy has one brilliant moment, but it is a moment, and it must pay dearly for it.”
In this case, it’s a reported R1.4m a year for his efforts as chief of staff.
As Steenhuisen ponders his headline-making choice, savouring a rare moment of media glow for the department of agriculture, his enthusiasm about Cabanac’s inward-looking office prowess may or may not be curbed by this recent (undeleted) tweet. He posted, “I've just been given a laptop with Windows on it, and I cannot fathom how 90% of companies use it. It beeps, crashes, bangs and takes forever to start.”
It’s Gates again, Roman bro!
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