The audience is almost entirely African. But there is an occasional white face in this black sea. Ever since South African blacks first won the right to organize trade unions some fifteen years ago, they have employed many whites as office staff. That hundreds of young white radicals, many of them Jewish, have been able to spend their lives working for black unions is one piece of evidence for the liberation movement’s remarkable transcendence of racial feeling.
The lineup on the speaker’s platform is interracial. Four others are sharing the stage with Mandela today. Two are African: Tokyo Sexwale, a rising young star in the ANC who is a candidate for regional premier of the country’s industrial heartland around Johannesburg and Pretoria; and Charles Nqakula, general secretary of the SACP. One, Geraldine Fraser, is Coloured (mixed race); and one is a white labor economist wearing a bright red baseball cap, Alec Erwin. Fraser and Erwin are both running for the national parliament. Like many ANC candidates, both are also members of the SACP.
The ANC owes some of its nonracist tradition to its longtime links with the SACP, which has always been determined to see the world in terms of class rather than race; in Africa, promoting that viewpoint is usually uphill work. The Communist Party was one of the first political organizations in South Africa open to all races. Then came forty years underground and in exile until it was legalized, along with the ANC, in early 1990. But the Party is a paradox. Despite the bravery and nonracism of many of its leaders, for nearly three quarters of a century they have loyally, uncritically followed every twist and turn of policy laid down by Moscow. They backed every Soviet intervention, from East Germany to Hungary to Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan, until there was no Soviet Union to back any more.
What, then, does it mean today that many top ANC leaders are also Party members? The ruling National Party of State President F.W. de Klerk, which thunders endlessly about this in its propaganda, would have you believe it is all very sinister. But in the end, it may not mean much at all. When communist spokespeople appear on television in this campaign they wax as enthusiastic as everybody else about Christianity, tolerance, and the need for foreign investment. They have little choice. The Party still theoretically favors democratic socialism farther down the road. But that prospect, however appealing to many, is clearly a receding one in a world economy increasingly dominated by multinational corporations.
By now the Pretoria fairgrounds hall has filled with several thousand people. Although more are still arriving, the program begins. Today’s event is what’s called a “worker’s forum”: union members file up to two microphones and ask questions. After half a dozen or so, one speaker gets up and answers them. Then the process repeats.
This morning, as at several similar events later in the day, some questions come in English, some in Tswana or Sotho, and one or two in Afrikaans—the home language of most Coloured South Africans:
“How are we going to get that money of ours?” (This is from a Bophuthatswana municipal worker worried that the deposed dictator Mangope has robbed pension funds.)
“Are the taxes we are paying now going to the ANC or to the National Party?”
“Will the ANC cater for the nurses?” (This from a woman in a nurse’s uniform.)
“What about affirmative action?” (This is from a Coloured worker: the National Party has been whipping up fears that affirmative action means Africans will be jumped ahead on the job ladder.)
“Will there be maternity leave . . .”
“. . . On full pay? For how long?”
“What will they do with the statue of Andries Pretorius?” (Pretorius was the Boer leader who defeated the Zulus at the pivotal Battle of Blood River in 1838, setting the stage for white rule of what would become South Africa. The new post-apartheid country is in for a long series of tussles over statues, monuments, and holidays, many of which commemorate similar victories.)
“How is the land going to be shared among the rightful owners and the invaders of it?”
For about an hour the four speakers other than Mandela take turns answering. The questioners are always addressed as “Comrade,” which is sometimes shortened to “Com,” or, for an older woman, “Com-momma.” Some answers are colorful and specific. Alec Erwin assures the Bophuthatswana worker, “If you’ve paid pension money into any government fund, that will be secured. Even if we have to go and take it from Mangope’s pocket!” But most answers follow the rule of politics the world over: if you’re about to win an election, don’t put your foot in your mouth. “Comrades, that matter will be reviewed!” “Affirmative action will not be at the expense of dropping standards!” And so on. Asked about socialism, Charles Nqakula promises that his Communist Party will “defend the working class”; asked about redistributing wealth through taxes, he says, “We will look into the question.”
By now the hall is filled with perhaps five thousand people. It is time for Mandela. The audience greets him with a song and a massive foot-stomping ovation. Everyone is dressed in work clothes, except for one man in a Zulu warrior outfit with club, spear, feathers, and a sort of fur skirt who bursts out of the crowd and prances exuberantly up and down. He carries a small satchel full of coins and knick-knacks, and in what seems to be a traditional gesture of homage he spills the contents on the floor and lays down his club and spear near Mandela’s feet.
Mandela speaks slowly and solemnly and in no way talks down to his audience. He reviews the situation in Bophuthatswana and then sharply condemns the crowds who looted shops during the recent turmoil there. “We understand that people are poor and the temptation is there. But you don’t behave like that! We appeal to our people in Bophuthatswana to respect the property of others.”
He then talks about a sense of “insecurity among whites, Coloureds, and Indians. There are some people, Africans, moving from car to car in trains, saying to members of the Coloured community, ‘Your time is up!’ This is something extremely dangerous. We condemn this in the strongest possible terms.”
Finally, he also condemns ANC supporters who have been harassing National Party candidates. “Don’t disrupt meetings of any party! Mr. de Klerk is going to Soweto, and I’m going to request the deputy president of the ANC, Walter Sisulu, to ensure that Mr. de Klerk does not encounter any problems. We are all fellow South Africans! In the course of this campaign, we should not open up wounds that would be hard to heal.”
All this moderation is not what these thousands of labor unionists have traveled for hours sardined into minivans to hear, and their applause is more polite than enthusiastic. But Mandela segues smoothly into what pleases the crowd more:
“We want you to give de Klerk a chance to put forth his policies. Because unless you do, people will not see that he has no policies! Why does the National Party say now they’ll create a better life for you? What have they been doing for these last forty-five years?”
He runs through the basic promises in the ANC election manifesto. They are all very down-to-earth. “Our task is to get each and every one a job!” Schoolbooks will be free. Education will be free and compulsory for the first ten years. “Any parent who fails to send his or her child to school in those first ten years, we will lock him or her up!” This line draws wild applause, perhaps because it is an indirect attack on the black teenage gangs who terrorize townships.
He speaks of electricity, clinics, hospitals, running water, of the seven million people who now live in squatter camps, and of the ANC’s plan to build a million new homes for them. “We want flush toilets. We want to pave the roads in our country. We want proper sports stadiums. These things cannot be achieved overnight. You must be patient.”
Finally, as happens at every event during this campaign, Mandela methodically goes through the voting procedure, since voting will be a new experience for almost everyone in this hall. Go to the first table, show your ID, get the ballot for the national parliament, mark it in private. Do this all over again for the ballot where you choose provincial legislators. And he reviews what
to look for on the ballot itself. Because more than half of South Africa’s new voters are illiterate, each party line will also show a logo and a photo of the party leader. “Look for a handsome face!” he says, pointing to his own, and the crowd roars.
• • •
Mandela’s small entourage includes surprisingly few security men—half a dozen at most. As his motorcade leaves the Pretoria showgrounds and speeds out of the city, cars on side streets are held up by traffic police, both black and white. The white ones are expressionless behind sunglasses. The black ones grin and salute.
The next stop, an hour east, in the veld beyond Pretoria, is the Premier diamond mine. The world’s largest diamond, the 3,106-carat Cullinan, was found here in 1905. Premier is owned by the Anglo American–De Beers conglomerate, the corporate giant that controls, depending on how you calculate it, between 30 and 50 percent of the value of companies traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Anglo/De Beers, Business Week once wrote, “looms larger in its home economy than does any other company in any country.”
This corporate empire owns businesses of every sort, but gold and diamond mining is its core. These mines are worked by black migrant laborers; if there is one thing in South Africa that cries out for change more than anything else, it is the migrant labor system, which forcibly separates some two million men from their families for most of the year, for all of their working lives.
Waiting to hear Mandela speak, close to a thousand miners are sitting or standing on a hillside next to the grim barracks, called “hostels,” where they live. The hostels are lined up in drab gray rows, their prisonlike look reinforced by an architectural quirk that seems deliberately sadistic: the only windows are above head level, too high to look out of. (You see exactly the same thing in the floor of servants’ quarters that sits atop many a high-rise apartment building in the white residential areas of Johannesburg.) On the hillside beside the barracks, some miners have been sleeping all night so as to be sure of a place from which they can see Mandela. Waiting for his arrival, they blow whistles, dance, and sing in the broiling sun. As they hear his motorcade approaching, several hundred of them, in orange safety helmets and orange jumpsuits, race down the road to meet his car and escort it into the mining compound. ANC flags flutter from their helmets.
When the cheers subside and Mandela takes his place before the microphone, he tells them, “I arrived in Johannesburg in 1941 and my first job was in the mines!” He was a security guard: “I had a khaki outfit! Big boots! I had a whistle. And I had a knobkerrie [a club].” Then, realizing that few in his audience know much English, he switches to his native Xhosa. But you can tell when he gets to the part about voting for the ballot line with the handsome face, for he points to his own, smiles, and the miners roar. He ends in English: “The National Party is a mouse. We are the elephant!”
Scattered throughout the country in these weeks leading up to its first democratic election are signs that this is an event not for South Africa alone: reporters from around the globe, observers from the United Nations in blue baseball caps, observers with the European Union’s circle of gold stars on their shirts or jackets, and today, as we visit the diamond mine, several Australian mine workers in union T-shirts. They scramble to get a good vantage point to take photographs as Mandela speaks. The black miners here, far out on the veld, like everyone else in South Africa, can see that the whole world is watching.
This hillside, however, is not the only stop Mandela’s caravan makes at the Premier mine. Another is perhaps more revealing. For lunch, the party goes to the mine’s guesthouse, a luxurious, carpeted building with a lounge, dining room, patio, and bar. Its walls are hung with photos of mustachioed white faces from the turn of the century onward, all of them past Premier executives. There are also group portraits like “Chairman and Mine Staff, June 1926”—white men in suits and ties, lined up, seated and standing on a columned portico.
At the entrance of the guesthouse, white mine executives wait to meet Mandela and his party. He introduces those with him, drawing out Charles Nqakula’s title with obvious pleasure, “General Secretary of the . . . South . . . African . . . Communist . . . Party!” The executives smile and shake hands with Mandela’s group, and then they all enter the dining room together.
The press and lower-ranking members of today’s campaign team must make do with hors d’oeuvres in the bar. But from there we can see through the door into the dining room. At Table No. 1 are seated Mandela, Nqakula, the manager of the Premier Mine, and Nicky Oppenheimer, deputy chair of De Beers and heir apparent to control the entire Anglo/De Beers empire, which was founded by his grandfather.
What are they talking about at Table No. 1? The conversation looks convivial and lasts more than an hour. My guess is that the subject is less likely to be politics than this week’s cricket match between South Africa and Australia. For the basic political agreement has already been made. And in a way, this Grand Bargain of South African politics, which has made this first free election possible, has been as much between the ANC and corporate giants like Anglo/De Beers as between the ANC and the National Party government.
The first signal that a bargain would be possible came more than eight years ago. Mandela and the other long-imprisoned top ANC leaders were still behind bars. South Africa was at war in Angola, in Namibia, and at home. Black townships were in revolt, suspected informers were being burned alive, soldiers shot at crowds from armored cars with high V-shaped hulls built to deflect land mine blasts. Police death squads roamed the country at night.
South Africa’s largest corporations had had enough. The endless conflict and the growing international boycotts and embargoes were bad for business. The opening move in the chess game that led to the Grand Bargain came on September 13, 1985. Half a dozen of the country’s top white businessmen, including the chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, climbed into an Anglo corporate jet and flew to Lusaka, Zambia. There they spent a day having a much-photographed meeting with the leadership of the exiled wing of the African National Congress. The one-day jaunt was a message from business to the South African government: boys, you need to make a deal.
The Grand Bargain took years more to come into being—years of much bloodshed and of long behind-the-scenes negotiations. Three things speeded up the process. One was the accession to power in 1989 of President F.W. de Klerk, the shrewdest politician on the continent, a canny pragmatist who understood that a deal had to be made, and the sooner the better.
The second key event was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This ensured that a post-apartheid South Africa had to stay part of the Western economic system. It could never count on being heavily subsidized by Moscow, as Cuba did for three decades, and go its own way.
The third factor was that South Africa’s business elite and its white government took a close look into the rest of the continent. And they realized that whites could still make as much money as ever under black rule.
And so South Africa’s Grand Bargain gradually fell into place: blacks got the vote; whites kept their control of the economy. This arrangement is, in part, spelled out very explicitly in the country’s transition-period constitution. An ANC-dominated government, for example, will still have to pay the pensions of the old regime’s civil servants, hanging judges and police torturers included. Still more important are the constitution’s tough clauses entrenching property rights. These provisions will make any redistribution of commercial and industrial wealth (whites own some 95 percent) or land (whites own more than 85 percent) agonizingly, glacially slow.
But much of the Grand Bargain doesn’t need to be spelled out. Circumstances enforce it. The ANC seldom talks now about nationalizing the country’s vast mineral deposits, as it did until recently, or about nationalizing much of anything, in fact. Such talk means capital flight, mass white emigration, no foreign investment, no help from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. And all of that means massive job losses for black South Africa, which
already suffers from 50 percent unemployment. Jobs come first. And, sadly, the liberation movement’s old, inspiring vision—land to those who till it, factories to those who work in them, the riches under the soil to all—will be put aside, perhaps for decades, perhaps forever.
Maybe Nelson Mandela and Nicky Oppenheimer are talking about all this in the Premier mine’s guesthouse dining room, more likely not. As they are finishing their meal, a public relations man for De Beers wanders around the outer room, distributing a press release to the small gaggle of reporters. Its contents underscore the economic realities behind the Grand Bargain. Diamond sales are on the rise, the release says. Overall annual profits to shareholders of De Beers and its European holding company have gone up nearly 20 percent, to $595 million. Taxes took less than $200 million. The market value of all De Beers’ assets is more than $9 billion. It’s a measure of the confidence the white South African business world has in retaining its full power that the company can so routinely trumpet news of such high profits and low tax payments just weeks before this historic election. The press release doesn’t add that the assets of South Africa’s Anglo/De Beers group as a whole are worth more than the annual gross domestic product of the other nine nations of southern Africa combined.
This concentrated corporate might is what Nelson Mandela and his soon to be victorious ANC will be up against. Matching this harsh reality with the millenarian hopes raised over seventy years of struggle will be the ANC’s most painful task. It is why, when he spoke earlier today, Mandela warned against unrealistic expectations and talked about schoolbooks, paved streets, clinics, and flush toilets. All of today’s ANC leaders share the awareness of the great gap between the transformational dream of the century’s oldest liberation movement and the tight constraints they will face the morning after the election. And they worry about it.
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 14