- Jacob Zuma’s description of the “kleva blacks” has resurfaced as debate grows about the political choices of South Africa’s black middle class.
- The author argues that the black middle class, created through ANC policies, has abandoned its responsibility to poorer black communities and increasingly identifies with white middle-class interests.
- The movement of middle-class voters from the ANC and EFF towards the DA is presented as evidence of a deeper shift in political identity, class interests and racial consciousness.
Jacob Zuma was mocked when he said it. In that slow, mocking, Zulu-accented English, with a smirk that the Sandton commentariat called uneducated. He warned about the “kleva blacks”. The clever blacks. The black bourgeoisie, that is, the highly educated, well-earning blacks who make up the corporate managerial and professional class.
Everyone laughed. The Sunday Times columnists called it jealousy. The FM called it populism. The Thuma Mina brigade said it was a man who failed to get a matric attacking those who have degrees. But Zuma was correct. Prophetic, even. And the 2026 local elections have proved him right beyond any reasonable doubt.
The rise and evolution of the black middle class
These kleva blacks are the direct beneficiaries of ANC policies, especially Black Economic Empowerment. Without the ANC, there would be no black middle class. There would be no Black Lawyers Association millionaires. No black CEOs in Sandton. No black doctors with practices in Bedfordview. No black talk radio hosts earning R1 million a year to tell us the ANC is corrupt.
Thabo Mbeki was intentional about creating this black middle-class strata. It was not an accident. It was policy. Mbeki called it the Patriotic Bourgeoisie. He read Marx, Fanon, and Nkrumah. He argued that for the National Democratic Revolution to succeed, the ANC must deliberately create a black capitalist class who would put the interests of the African majority ahead of self-interest.
Who would invest in township factories? Who would fund black universities? Who would live among the people and be the organic intellectuals of the revolution? Mbeki wrote papers about it. He gave lectures on university campuses. He imagined a class of black industrialists who would look like the Afrikaner bourgeoisie of the 1950s – who built Volkskas and Sanlam for their people – but who would build for Africans.
What he got instead is what W.E.B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth in the United States a hundred years ago. Du Bois thought that the top 10% of educated black Americans would lift the other 90% out of poverty. That they would be leaders, teachers, liberators. Instead, Du Bois lived to see them become the most anti-black Negroes. Men who straightened their hair, lightened their skin, moved to white suburbs, and blamed the black masses for their own poverty.
The kleva blacks are the South African Talented Tenth. And they have done exactly what Du Bois warned about: they have abandoned and rejected their responsibility to the communities that produced them. In fact, they have literally uprooted themselves from the black community to settle in the heart and soul of the white community.
Go to Waterkloof, to Bryanston, to Umhlanga Rocks, to Table View, to Midstream Estate, where top politicians now live, ironically. Who lives there? The kleva blacks. They have bought the houses of the whites who fled to Australia. They have taken their swimming pools, their schools, their book clubs.
They send their children to St John’s and Bishops and Herschel. Their children cannot speak isiZulu or Sesotho or isiXhosa fluently, but they can speak perfect English with a Model C accent. They are white clones who now think and behave like white people.
Listen to them talk. They don’t talk about land ownership. They talk about interest rates. They don’t talk about the deindustrialisation of South Africa. They talk about potholes. They don’t talk about the fact that 70% of the JSE is still white-owned. They talk about load shedding affecting their Wi-Fi. Worse, in the local elections, they have turned against the ANC to vote for the DA.
This is the ultimate betrayal. To them, it would seem the struggle is not for land ownership or a fair share in the economy. Their priorities are their tyres and rims that must be protected from potholes. Listen to what they said on Radio 702 and Cape Talk during the elections. What are your issues, sir?
“I pay high rates in Johannesburg, but there are potholes in my road. My tyres cost R15,000 each. The ANC must go.” What are your issues, ma’am? “We don’t have water in Sandhurst to fill our swimming pool. How can I swim to cool myself in this heat? And my Netflix keeps buffering because Eskom is off. We need the DA.”
They demand power to be connected to Wi-Fi to access Netflix. And they want water to swim to cool themselves. They are not affected by poverty, hunger, landlessness and unemployment. They blame this on those who did not work hard enough to lift themselves by their bootstraps. They have become Margaret Thatcher in black skin. They have become Helen Zille with an Afro.
Talk to a kleva black today about unemployment at 33%. He will say, “Our people are lazy. They want grants. They don’t want to work. I woke up at 4am to study.” Talk to him about landlessness. He will say: “Land does not create wealth. What will they do with the land? We need title deeds in townships so we can sell them to white investors. Or rent to Pakis.”
Talk to him about BEE. He will say: “BEE has created tenderpreneurs. We must scrap it and create meritocracy.” Meritocracy – a word he learned at Wits Business School from a white professor who never believed blacks had merit.
Shifts in political alignment and identity
There was a time when they identified with the radical utterances of EFF’s Julius Malema. In 2014, 2015, 2016, when Malema was cool, when he wore red overalls and spoke about land, the kleva blacks loved him. His bark frightened whites. They invited him to their braais in Fourways.
They quoted him on Twitter. “Juju is right, we need economic freedom.” Why? Because Malema was attacking Zuma, and they hated Zuma. Malema was their useful radical. But they have abandoned Malema too for the more liberal and accommodationist view of the rainbow nation.
Why? Because Malema remained radical. Malema continued to say “land expropriation without compensation”. Malema continued to live in Sandton but talk about socialism. The kleva black elite does not want socialism. He wants shares in white monopoly capital. He wants to be invited to the Rupert dinner. He wants to be told by white people that he is “different from the rest. You are not like them. You are clever.”
And so he left Malema for Zille. ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula insists that the black middle strata voted for Zille. As eNCA said correctly after the elections, the black middle strata moved away from Julius. People are tired of EFF sloganeering. Soweto and Tshwane voters left the ANC for ActionSA and the DA. That is the kleva black migration.
The DA understands this better than the ANC. The DA did not win because it is good. The DA won because it told the kleva blacks, “We will protect your tyres. We will protect your property values. We will protect your swimming pools. We will keep the poor out of your suburbs. Vote for us.” And the kleva blacks said, “Finally, someone who understands us.”
Mbeki’s Patriotic Bourgeoisie was supposed to build African schools in Lusikisiki. Instead, it built a wall around Steyn City and hired a white security company to keep Africans out. Fanon predicted this in The Wretched of the Earth 65 years ago. He said the national bourgeoisie of the newly independent African country is not a bourgeoisie that invents, that builds, that works.
It is a bourgeoisie that is a transmission belt for white capital. It is a bourgeoisie that wants to replace the white man, not to change the white man’s house. It wants to sleep in his bed, with his wife, in his pyjamas. That is the kleva black. He does not want to change Sandton. He wants to own a flat in Sandton and complains that there are too many black hawkers outside Sandton City.
Zuma’s insight and the consequences
Zuma saw it. Zuma, for all his sins – and he has many sins – understood one thing that Mbeki did not: that education without consciousness is dangerous. That a black man with a degree from Stellenbosch or Harvard and no ideology is more dangerous than a white man with a degree from Stellenbosch. Because the white man knows he is white. The kleva black thinks he is white.
Zuma said they are clever but not wise. Kleva but not intelligent. They can quote Shakespeare, but they cannot quote Sobukwe. They can analyse the ANC leadership, but they cannot analyse why their grandmother died without land. And now the chickens have come home to roost. The ANC has lost these to the DA. And they will not be coming back anytime soon.
Why will they not come back? Because the ANC no longer offers them anything they want. The ANC talks about grants, about NHI, about land reform – things that threaten their property values. The DA talks about rates, about service delivery, about “getting things done” – things that protect their property values.
The kleva black has made a class suicide, but in reverse. Instead of committing suicide as a middle class to be with the people, as Amílcar Cabral demanded, he has committed suicide as an African to be with the white middle class.
Zuma mocked them. But Zuma was mourning them. He was mourning the dream that a black government could create a black class that loves black people. That dream is dead. What we have is a class of black people who vote like whites, live like whites, think like whites, and then complain that whites don’t love them.
Zuma was right.
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The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conviction.co.za
