An Obituary For Helen Zille
by Roger Young
“Dolly Parton — love her. She nursed her ill husband till the end. She looked like a complete floozy, but she was a strong and deep human being. RIP.” — Helen Zille
After Dolly Parton’s death last week the DA leader and current Johannesburg Mayoral Hopeful Helen Zille tweeted the above – in her words, a “compliment” as tribute to the star’s passing, which sparked a mild middle-class outrage.
In Zille’s defence, she was not calling Parton a floozy, she was saying that she looked like a floozy. Parton herself famously said that, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Zille was merely riffing on this famous line.
But looking “like a floozy” and looking “this cheap” are two very different statements.
Parton’s statement can be read that it’s not cheap to look cheap, that it is an aesthetic choice that is dubbed as “cheap”, because it is the aesthetic of those who are deemed as “cheap”. It is not easy to look the way Parton did, she spent a lot of time and effort and money to do so, and in doing so proved that looking “cheap” was not an accident, those without money who still looked “cheap”, had to put in time and effort to make this aesthetic choice. It was a statement that assigned agency to an aesthetic choice.
Zille’s statement on the other hand assumes that there is a whole category of personhood such as “a floozy” that is not good to look like. She looked like a floozy but that bad choice was redeemed by the fact that she was a deep yadda yadda. She looked like she was promiscuous but at least she nursed her husband.
In Zille’s world Parton nursing her husband gave her a pass on her bad aesthetic choices. In Parton’s world the aesthetic choice was triumphant.
Zille sees Parton’s agency as questionable, which is redeemed by nursing a husband. This completely misses that Parton existed within and entirely externally from those two things. What it doesn’t miss is that this is what Zille chose to see in the life of Dolly Parton. Perhaps Zille was conflating Parton with that other big-haired woman who took care of her husband – Margaret Thatcher.
Let’s talk about floozies then. A floozy by any other name would rhinestone just as sweet.
“a usually young woman who has multiple sexual partners: a woman who is sexually promiscuous — used as a term of abuse and disparagement” — Merriam-Webster
“a woman who has a lot of sexual relationships, or who wears clothes that attract sexual attention in a way that is too obvious. Synonym — slattern.” — Cambridge Dictionary
“If someone refers to a woman as a floozy, they disapprove of her because she has many casual sexual relationships.” — Collins Dictionary
To Helen Zille a floozy is a thing that exists. She was not calling Parton a floozy, but she was saying that this thing, this sexually promiscuous woman who was (clutches pearls) wearing clothes that attract sexual attention is worthy of disapproval. A slattern.
Helen Zille, unwittingly, just admitted that she categorises a whole subset of women as sluts. Not as individuals who make choices based on circumstance or agency or desire or lack thereof or despite or any other myriad confluences of, you know, life, but just plain sluts. Thank Schuster that Dolly only looked like one, she had a husband, you know.
Dolly Parton wrote more than 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million records, won 11 Grammys and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She built Dollywood, stimulating investment, tourism and employment in the Appalachians, and used her fortune to fund scholarships and educational initiatives. She donated $1 million to COVID vaccine research. Through the Dollywood Foundation, her Imagination Library has now put more than 330 million free books into the hands of children who might otherwise not have had access to books at all.
When a cover version turned Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” into one of the biggest songs in the history of popular music, Parton earned millions in royalties. She used some of that money to buy an office complex in a predominantly Black neighbourhood of Nashville, saying she wanted to be “down here with her people, who are my people as well”, and called the place “the house that Whitney built.”
Helen Zille likes explaining poverty to poor people, referring to Eastern Cape pupils moving to Western Cape schools as “education refugees”, calling Simphiwe Dana a “professional black”, and, in 2019, defining “black privilege” as “being able to loot a country and steal hundreds of billions and get re-elected”. She has said that being poor in Langa was “a hundred, probably a thousand times better” than being poor in many other townships in the country. Subtext: Your misery caused by a colonialism and apartheid and further entrenched by the DA's property ownership policies is not that bad, make better choices, etc.
In a 2011 declaration of financial interests, Zille listed a R2.5 million house in Rosebank, a R500,000 share in a cottage at Keurboomsrivier. She also has, as per a 2016 disclosure, investments in FirstRand, Reinet, SABMiller and New Gold. Her Rosebank, CT, house was a Victorian property near UCT which she sought permission to demolish and redevelop; after the demolition plans failed, it was sold in 2019 for only R5.5 million.
She has defended a property-owning model of Cape Town in which the middle class pays rates and taxes that subsidise services to poorer residents. While “admirable” this hardly shifts the material circumstances to a place where those with less resources have enough resources to allow them agency.
The same 2011 declaration listed a R750,000 house in Parklands, bought for her domestic worker, Grace Voyiya. Voyiya had worked for the family for about 17 years by then and helped raise Zille’s sons, during this period evidently not having managed to save enough money to buy a home of her own. It is a matter of public record that the bond remains in Zille’s name, and Zille has said there was a verbal agreement that Voyiya was the owner. Which begs questions about the property rights. Zille has said of her, “I certainly did not want her living in a shack.” What Voyiya would have wanted is not a matter of public record. Zille has also defended colonialism.
*“They got you where they want you There's a better life And you think about it, don't you? It's a rich man's game No matter what they call it…” – Dolly Parton – 9 to 5
In Helen Zille’s world a domestic worker needs her choices made for her, and wearing nice clothes to be sexually attractive is bad unless you have a husband.
In the press it is common to write a public figure’s obituary pre-death, so that it is ready to beat out all the other voices clamouring to use grief to gain attention.
Here is my pre-written tweet for Zille.
“Helen Zille — largely indifferent to her. She retained her property rights until the end. She looked like shit, but she defended colonialism and called women sluts. RIP.”