Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  'I have explained to the councillors that the old habit of being called baas [boss] just because I had a white skin was over. "I may be twice your age but you must call me Chari." We are still far more disciplined in terms of time. You go and listen to some of these guys and they just like the sound of their own voice. So I tell myself I must be patient. One guy was slouching in his chair in the first meeting and I said, "You must be disciplined. We don't want arguments ..."'

  As he spoke I could hear the voice of De Klerk addressing Mr. Mandela's cabinet in his post-apartheid capacity as deputy president. ANC government ministers muttered after the early sessions that the National Party leader still thought he was the baas and patronized them as inferiors. After one particularly intemperate early cabinet Mandela accused him of addressing ANC ministers in the manner in which 'white men used to speak to blacks'.

  Neither Van der Merwe nor De Klerk, I suspect, consciously wanted to upset their black peers. They genuinely thought they had embraced the new order. But it was beyond their powers to discard the assumptions of their upbringing. No amount of dissimulation could hide the fact that they had been reared to believe that whites were superior to blacks. Their body language, their intonation, their choice of words gave them away. Theirs was the world of the compilers of a "Teach Yourself Zulu" course I briefly used in which the first dozen or so sentences were either commands to black employees such as

  'Come here Joe. Come here I say' or critical asides like 'Joe smokes a lot.' Van der Merwe did try to lower his guard. In the countdown to South Africa's first all-race local government elections in November 1995, I came across him pinning up electoral posters on a telegraph pole on the road to KwaKwatsi. I was driving two of the new ANC councillors back home. We stopped and the three South Africans chatted and teased each other about their electoral chances. Van der Merwe was trying to do his bit in an echo of De Klerk wearing traditional African costume and campaigning in Soweto in the campaign for the general election. The soft evening light enhanced the harmonious impression. But it was a fleeting encounter and such gestures neither meant nor counted for much.

  'I just don't trust him [Van der Merwe],' Charles Masibi, one of my passengers, muttered as we drove on. 'He plots every word he says.. .' I had first met Masibi, a young teacher, during the 'Action Committee' showdown before the election. He raised his eyebrows when I recounted Vander Merwe's account of the swimming pool. 'Of course we don't go there. The first time a group of school-children went there from KwaKwatsi two of them were beaten up by white racists ...'

  In Van der Merwe's defence his was a thankless task. Just as De Klerk was reviled as a traitor by many Afrikaners who accused him of betraying their interests, so Van der Merwe risked isolation in Koppies, an uncomfortable position in such a small town, particularly when your family's well-being depends on regular customers. As the changes began to affect Koppies with the inevitable shift of government spending priorities and the onset of positive discrimination for blacks, so Van der Merwe returned to the white laager. He resigned from the council and helped to found an anti-ANC alliance of local Nationalists and right-wingers. Ironically this was formed just as the town started to liberalize. The doctor ended the old practice of making blacks queue at his back door and allowed them instead into his front waiting room. There was even the odd discreet fraternization in the Hotel Friesland. But Van der Merwe had had enough. He was a dispirited figure by the end, just like De Klerk when he too came to resign.

  'There's no magic wand to be waved here,' Van der Merwe told me. 'There is a bridge between the two communities but no one dares to cross.' (When I returned in 2008, a decade later, I found that it was still slow progress. The school had become multiracial but the town was still, unsurprisingly, divided. As for my old sources, Van der Merwe had left with his family; Charles Masibi had died of Aids.)

  *

  In the early Nineties it became a journalistic commonplace to compare De Klerk with the other celebrated but flawed reformist of the late twentieth century, Mikhail Gorbachev. On my arrival in South Africa I thought the analogy unfair on the Afrikaner. While the Soviet leader proved incapable of adapting his vision and so was subsumed by it, De Klerk kept. In February 1990 he had no intention of negotiating the whites from power. His sights were set on a limited democracy with an enforced coalition entrenching white interests. He even talked of setting up a rotating presidency to share power. As time passed, however, so, albeit reluctantly, he altered his ideas and was at least able to say he had not been defeated. As head of the second largest party he became one of two deputy presidents. He would, he insisted, be able to steer the Afrikaner into a safe haven.

  Within three years of Mandela's election, however, the Gorbachevian cap fitted the Afrikaner all too well. Just as the last Soviet president was lauded abroad and vilified at home, so De Klerk too led a schizophrenic existence. He was lionized on the international speaker circuit as the midwife of South Africa's democracy. He had, after all, shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela. But in South Africa he cut an embattled figure stirring resentment among, ironically, blacks and whites.

  For black South Africans, De Klerk's image was damaged by his apparent hardening of heart post-1990. By releasing Mandela and unbanning the black liberation movements he had caught the ANC unawares. For the first time in the National Party's forty years in power, blacks had a reason to applaud their head of state. But those anticipating Afrikaner capitulation had to think again. After his fateful announcement, the influence of his granite predecessors came to the fore and he focused his attention on the volk.

  Subtlety has seldom played a part in African politics. It is a continent where all too often power is all that counts - and members of rival tribes have to look to themselves. In the bloody four-year period between De Klerk's February 1990 speech and the election, elements in the apartheid security forces did all they could to undermine the transition.

  De Klerk himself has always denied knowledge of the hit squads that waged an underground war in the countdown to April 1994, fomenting fighting between the ANC and Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party. He angrily rejected the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up after the election to expose human rights abuses committed by both sides between 1960 and the end of white rule, and which linked him to the 1987 bombing of an anti apartheid centre in Johannesburg. The commission was a crucial part of the post-apartheid settlement. Intended as a halfway house between Nuremberg and amnesia, it offered perpetrators amnesty for political crimes in return for confession. In a series of public hearings all over the country it also gave victims the chance to tell their stories of suffering. Supposedly the victims would be appeased, the oppressors humbled and the country could then move forward to a brighter future, purged of its past. But politics inevitably mired this bright design. On the eve of the commission's final report De Klerk's lawyers said they were contesting the findings, and, much to the outrage of the commissioners, had his name excised from the report, pending the case.

  The secret policemen who controlled the shadowy 'Third Force' had frequently in the Eighties operated as autonomous units. In the final days of apartheid there was no shortage of disillusioned police and army commanders who could give orders without seeking political approval. In some instances indeed the 'Third Force' may have been motivated as much by a desire to discredit De Klerk as the ANC, given that he was seen in reactionary circles as a traitor.

  However, critics suspect that 'Tricky Frikkie', as he was dubbed, was playing a double game during the transition in an attempt to reduce the ANC's vote. As president of one of the world's most centralized and autocratic societies, they assume that he must have known of the Third Force, and must have been able to stop it. He himself concedes in his autobiography that his relationship with the security forces was like a man who is given two watch dogs who has to decide whether to try pulling on their leashes and 'choke them' or risk letting them 'slip their collars and cause pand
emonium.'2 Mandela never forgave his co-Nobel laureate for the violence. More than I 0,000 people died in political violence in the transition, mainly between supporters of the ANC and the largely Zulu Inkatha, as the ANC and the Nationalists negotiated the post-apartheid future.

  'It is impossible to defend him [De Klerk] in our communities,' Mandela said as he prepared to receive the Nobel Prize.

  'In his view their [black] lives are cheap ... that is the most serious problem for us as far as the violence is concerned.'

  The ANC was also incensed that De Klerk refused to apologize for apartheid. For many who had suffered imprisonment or torture or lost relatives in the fight against white rule, it stuck in the throat that the closest he came to an apology was to concede that excesses had been committed in apartheid's name. He bridled when challenged on his failure to apologize, and insisted he had. But his 'apologies' were always hedged with conditions and the insistence that all sides had sinned in South Africa's 'struggle', an assertion which was undeniable but which equally was missing the point. Even in 2010 he still refused to apologise, arguing that apartheid in its purest form of separate nation states was “morally defensible”.

  It was, however, always improbable that De Klerk would issue a whole-hearted mea culpa for the simple reason that to do so would be to undermine his and his party's world view for the previous forty years. Apartheid required a continual self deception. Nationalists had to keep deluding themselves that their system was pinned on firm moral foundations - namely, the need to allow 'nations' to develop untainted by others. Maintaining this required considerable contortions, moral, religious and linguistic. For many Nationalists the world view changed because of a simple but profound meeting with a black South African in an unaccustomed role. Inevitably, in the aftermath of the 1994 election it was impossible to find anyone who had voted for apartheid. But there were still very few former Nationalists who were prepared to concede that it had been actually wrong.

  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission pricked the bubble of self-righteousness. While scrupulously condemning ANC abuses, the process proved a damning indictment of how during the last years of apartheid South Africa had developed into a police state, as former agents and policemen laid bare their complicity in atrocities, many already well documented but some of which were previously unknown. But even amid the avalanche of revelations most Nationalists, including De Klerk, found it impossible to concede that their philosophy had had a rotten core.

  De Klerk was prepared to admit that specific acts of repression had been beyond the pale. But as for the philosophy of apartheid itself he could never go beyond conceding that it had ultimately been proven misguided and unworkable. As Lourens Ackermann, an Afrikaner writer, explained: 'He had no sense of the rightness of apartheid and yet also had no sense of its wrongness. What apartheid was on the one hand and what it pretended to be on the other hand has completely seduced him-he believes only in the latter.'

  The furthest De Klerk was prepared to go in acknowledging the misery of being black under apartheid was to admit that the planners 'forgot that human beings and not planning statistics were involved.' 3

  Even after the end of white rule, De Klerk still saw politics in an ethnic prism. In his speeches and interviews he would harp on about 'group' rights. Those who had expected other wise had made the mistake of assuming he was a new model Afrikaner when in fact he was an old model. Not only was De Klerk motivated by conservatism, as his critics supposed, but also duty ran deep. He was doggedly determined not to abandon his party. He had promised to lead the volk into the new era and he would do so. The irony is that the more he dithered and agonized over which way to go, the more he was pilloried as a turncoat by the very people he was meant to be leading.

  Six months before he was to resign, I had an intriguing behind the-scenes peep at the final days of De Klerk's National Party. It was a balmy Cape evening after a typically gorgeous southern summer's day. The day's debate in parliament had just ended and the tree-lined avenue outside Sir Herbert Baker's classic, colonial parliament building was packed with MPs of all races and creeds chattering like school-children after a long and disputatious day. It was a reminder of how South Africa had changed. Once, however, I turned off the avenue and headed for the Nationalists' parliamentary offices I found myself back in a very different era.

  The chambers were wreathed in smoke from a dozen cigarettes. They were also filled with grey-suited middle-aged Afrikaner males. These were the rump of the parliamentary caucus who had survived the shock of the election when they shrank from having a comfortable majority of seats to barely a fifth. De Klerk was at the centre of a conspiratorial huddle in one corner, busily defending himself against a recent attack on him by the Afrikaans press, while absorbing praise for his combative performance in the chamber a little earlier.

  Starved of the publicity of the apartheid era when the world's press followed their every move, the MPs welcomed the focus of a foreign correspondent. The chief whip took me to one side and assured me that within a decade he would be a cabinet minister. 'You wait. Once the Mandela glue goes we will get 30 or 40 per cent of the vote....’

  His arguments and insights were as outdated as the heavy three-piece suits of the party founders whose portraits covered the walls. His naivety did, however, help to explain why De Klerk remained in politics as long as he did, one of the conundrums of my time in South Africa.

  As each month in the post-apartheid era passed, so De Klerk's prestige and authority declined. He was one of six Nationalist cabinet ministers in line with a clause in the interim constitution which granted cabinet seats to parties that secured more than 10 per cent of the vote. As second deputy president he was the third most powerful man in the country. But his aides complained that he had minimal influence on policy and that his deputy presidency was little more than a sinecure. He was, they said, at best expected to act as South Africa's ambassador at large, travelling around the globe and addressing investors as the reassuring white face from the new black government.

  With the Truth Commission's revelations chipping away at his reputation it was a humiliating routine for a man who had once commanded the world's attention, and yet still he soldiered on as party leader. But as the chit-chat of his parliamentary colleagues in their Cape Town offices made clear, his party lived in a time-warp and had blinded itself to the reality of politics in a mainly black country. De Klerk himself was convinced, one confidant went so far as to suggest, that he still had a good chance of being re-elected, that the people would turn back to him for reassurance once Mandela had stepped down.

  A reformist wing recognized this was patent nonsense. The only way they could see the National Party playing a significant part in national politics again was with a new name, new leadership and a genuine commitment to multi-racial member ship. Before the election the Nationalists assiduously and successfully courted the Coloureds, people of mixed race who made up the majority in the Western Cape province. Fearing they risked once again being the wrong colour - they had been too black in the old era and now feared being too white - two thirds of South Africa's three million Coloureds voted for De Klerk in the 1994 election, ensuring that the National Party won control of the Western Cape provincial government. Afrikaans helped to bond the partnership of Coloureds with their old oppressors, as it is the first language in most Coloured communities. Emboldened by its success, the National Party even set its sights on winning black votes and opened a branch in Soweto.

  But the non-racial 'crusade' was unconvincing. The party leadership remained dominated by Afrikaners. De Klerk was too clear-sighted a politician not to appreciate that if Afrikaners were to play a political role in South Africa's future they had to be part of a truly non-racial party. But he was, it emerged, a one-match wonder. He had crossed one Rubicon but could not do so again. When his reformist lieutenant, Roelf Meyer, who had been the Nationalists' main negotiator in the constitutional talks, broached the idea of disbanding the party, De K
lerk balked. Party insiders suggested that after being branded a traitor by one wing of Afrikanerdom for ending white rule, he did not want to go down in history as the man who had destroyed the National Party - even though that was what he had effectively set in motion in 1990.

  For his critics both within and without Afrikanerdom it was easy to be impatient. But the final stage of South Africa's revolution had been astonishingly swift, and psychologically many Afrikaners inevitably lagged far behind the political changes. The evolution of Nationalist thinking post-1994 was reminiscent of the agonized stop-start ideological development of former Communists in Eastern Europe post-1989. Bar a few diehards, most recognized that the values of their old world had failed and yet they still had to be prized from their former beliefs. In the same way, Afrikaner Nationalists knew that white rule was doomed and yet still found it hard to renounce the past, particularly given that, as in Eastern Europe, the new order was far from perfect.

  The agonies and confusion of this process were starkly apparent at the first public session of the Broederbond, the secret society that in the Twenties and Thirties masterminded the Nationalists' rise to power, and then underpinned white rule. Under apartheid you had to be a member of the bond, or at least to know one, to get anywhere in South Africa, whether in the government, law, church or civil service. At the bond's fiftieth anniversary congress in 1968, H.J. Klapper, the first chairman, boasted they controlled South Africa. 'Do you realize what a powerful force is gathered here tonight between these four walls?' he said in a speech later leaked by a defector. 'Show me a greater power in Africa. Show me a greater power anywhere even in your so-called civilized world?'

  How mortified Klapper would have been by the hunched shoulders and defeatist expressions of the broeders a mere twenty-eight years later as they filed into the University of Bloemfontein. The meeting had been billed as the bond's 'coming out'. It had been renamed the Afrikanerbond and, supposedly, had its first non-white and women members, although I saw only a handful of white women amid the ranks of Afrikaner males, and the only three blacks were the parents of children singing in the multi-racial choir that self-consciously opened proceedings.