On Sunday Polokwane turned blue for the DA Manifesto day. Thousands of DA supporters filled the Polokwane Showgrounds to watch the party’s leadership put on a rousing display of political theatre. The crowd’s T-shirts were a sea of blue. Blue confetti showered down from the heavens.

The sky, as Helen Zille pointed out, was playing along, providing an azure umbrella to proceedings. The blue was one of the only aesthetic giveaways that this was not, in fact, an ANC rally.

It was the DA’s opportunity to display their new image to a national TV audience, and they seized it with both hands.

If there was one thing that seemed to be missing from the DA’s manifesto launch, it was a certain energy from the crowd. But the DA’s top brass had brought their own energy in spades, singing, dancing and exhorting their audience to take a chance on an opposition party desperate to cast off its old white image.

The only white face given a platform during the two hours in which the launch was broadcast live was Helen Zille’s. In all other respects, the rally looked like it could have been that of virtually any post-independence…