by Alec Russell
According to AWB mythology, E.T. and the six other founding members met on 7 July 1973. The date- the seventh day of the seventh month in the seventh decade of the century – is significant. The organization liked to claim that its sinister mock swastika symbol was in fact a cross of three sevens designed as the ultimate Christian symbol to counter the triple-six sign of the devil. The rationalization was typical of the schoolboy ethos of the organization. It did little but bicker and dream until 29 March 1979, when it exploded to the forefront of right-wing politics.
The spark was none other than the ‘Day of the Vow’. By 1979 there was a growing strain of revisionist Afrikaner thinking that maintained that the vow was not a binding covenant but had been artificially revived at the turn of the century when Afrikaners were looking for an identity. Professor F.A. van Jaarsveld, a historian at Pretoria’s University of South Africa, was the leading advocate of this thinking, and in March 1979 published an article arguing that it was illogical to claim divine intervention in wars. He also proposed the question that Afrikaners should ask themselves whose side God had been on when the Zulus massacred Piet Retief and his trekkers.
A few days later the professor was elaborating the ideas at a lecture in the university when Terre’Blanche led more than twenty young men through the hall to the podium. Taking the microphone he said the ‘Boer’ people could never stand by and watch the desanctification of a holy day. His men then threw a bucket of municipal tar over Van Jaarsveld and coated him in feathers.
The horrific incident resounded through white and indeed black South Africa. The belief that the white man could still have his way in Africa had won a new lease of life. The AWB claimed in the Eighties a membership of thousands. Despite their capering, no one dared dismiss them as a spent force. They were known to have sympathizers in the upper ranks of the army and police, as became starkly clear in June 1993, when hundreds of them rampaged through the World Trade Centre, the conference hall outside Johannesburg where politicians were negotiating the post-apartheid settlement.
Spearheaded by an armoured vehicle, which crashed through the building’s plate glass façade, they took over the negotiating chamber. Police stood by and watched, awaiting instructions that never came as delegates took refuge in a locked office. It was a meeting of the old white-run Africa with the new, of country and town, of reaction with reform. The escalators which moments earlier had been thronged by dark-suited politicos were packed with men in khaki and hobnailed boots, crunching broken glass, singing triumphal chants. They clearly felt they had done nothing wrong, on the grounds that they were white and the law did not apply to them. Laying down their weapons they reached for their picnic bags and celebrated their triumph with a barbecue in the conference hall grounds.
Their bubble burst only just before the April 1994 election.
It happened in, of all places, one of the tribal homelands, which were an integral part of the apartheid dream.
*
I missed the last skirmish of white Africa by a few minutes. It was 11 March 1994 and a force of several thousand white right wingers had assembled at an airport hangar on the outskirts of Mmabatho, the capital of Bophuthatswana. The homeland was as absurd in its layout as in its name. With its disparate chunks of territory scattered in the northwest of South Africa it looked as if an apartheid cartographer had thrown ink at a map. Mmabatho made no more sense, with its giant floodlit stadium, a parliament and a shopping centre in the middle of the bush. But there was nothing farcical about the countdown to the battle of Bop, as the last 'stand' of the white right became known.
The right-wingers had been invited by Lucas Mangope, the president of Bophuthatswana, to shore up his crumbling pseudo-state against the escalating street protests of thousands of his subjects, many of who were demanding immediate incorporation into South Africa and the right to campaign for the election. Officially the right-wingers would bring Mangope's capital under control before retiring across the 'border' to the farms and small towns whence they had come. But their mission posed the greatest threat to the 'new' South Africa since the release of Mandela four fraught years before. Many of the right wingers were experienced soldiers or members of the citizen commando, South Africa's territorial’s. If they decided to stay in Mmabatho, South Africa's negotiated settlement risked falling apart. The officer corps of the South African army abounded with right-wing sympathizers. It is far from clear that they would have moved against their former comrades. Their loyal ties would have faced an even greater test if General Constand Viljoen, the right-wingers' commander, had urged them to stand aside: he was not only a soldier's soldier, he was also an Afrikaner's Afrikaner.
A latter-day Cincinnatus, the retired Roman senator who returned from tilling his fields to save his embattled republic from barbarians, Viljoen had been called back from retirement on his farm to lead the Afrikaner Volksfront, a group of right wing parties that included the AWB. His presence added a much-needed gravitas to the white right. The silver-haired diminutive general was a legendary former commander of the South African Defence Force who was famous for leading his men from the front in the bush war against the Cubans in Angola. In 1978 he joined a Parachute Battalion raid into an enemy outpost 160 miles inside Angola and had to be rescued by helicopter while the air force kept off encircling Cuban tanks. Two years later he was blown through the hatch of his armoured personnel carrier by a Soviet mine and walked away with a bad headache. His straight-talking ways and piercing blue eyes could and did win over the most ideological opponents to apartheid. Mandela himself always said he had a far better rapport with Viljoen than he did with De Klerk. They were more obvious soul mates as both had entered politics for a cause rather than as a career, but, notwithstanding all the talk of mutual admiration, both Mandela and the old Afrikaner war horse forged the link as much because of strategy as sentiment and respect.
For Viljoen's followers the Bophuthatswana mission was just like the old days. Douw Steyn, a veteran of Angola, was to mobilize a force and assemble it at Mmabatho Airport. Then Colonel Jan Breytenbach, a former Special Forces commander with a reputation for daring exploits, would take over. He would link up with Mangope's small but well-equipped Bophuthatswana Defence Force and restore order to the homeland. There was only one problem- what to do with the AWB?
When Mangope made his appeal for help he is said to have warned that his soldiers would mutiny if Terre'Blanche's racists took part. Viljoen himself had long ago left no doubt of his disdain for the AWB's fake decorations and racist bluster. He warned Terre'Blanche to keep his men out of the homeland. But it was too late. As soon as Mangope's request for assistance reached the Volksfront headquarters eager AWB members were broadcasting to their colleagues on the farm radio networks and telling them to mobilize.
As dawn broke on 11 March more than a hundred AWB diehards were cruising through the back-streets of Mmabatho and its satellite town, Mafikeng, in bakkies, trucks and family cars, hell-bent on trouble. They had driven through the night from farms and dorps all over South Africa. In their fevered minds the invasion of Bophuthatswana was in the spirit of the bittereinders, the Boers who went on fighting the British long after their leaders had surrendered. It was a stand against the ungodliness and Communism of black rule. It was also an excuse to get their own back on the new order. They would shoot a few blacks before returning home in time for a braai, too many beers, a drunken reminiscence and a long sleep before church the next morning. As Beeld, the main Afrikaans newspaper, reported with heavy irony the next day, for the AWB it was a 'kaffirskietpiekniek' (a kaffir-shooting picnic).
Garbled reports that the AWB were on their way met scepticism in the casino where I was staying. In the heyday of apartheid, 'Bop' served a vital function for Afrikanerdom. As an 'independent' state it was free from the Calvinist prohibitions on gambling. Every Friday night the roads north and west from Pretoria would be clogged with civil servants going 'abroad' for a quick flutter. The Mmabatho Sun was built to cater for
this demand. Little more than a swimming pool and a giant casino, it symbolized the tawdry reality of the grand apartheid vision. Indeed, the flashing lights of the one-armed bandits and the cheap fittings were, like the very concept of the homeland, intended to insulate visitors from reality. So the pre-dawn rumours of a right-wing invasion that roused me and other journalists from our beds seemed to many of us just another element of fantasy in a surreal half-world. But by dawn a band of thick-set white men with guns was visible at the front gate. A mile down the road in Mafikeng battle had already been joined.
The AWB were not expecting any serious resistance. They arrived assuming that the protesters would cringe and flee, as, over the years, had so many of their farm-workers in their presence. In the process they would be taught a lesson they would never forget. Graeme Williams, a photographer friend, followed one breakaway convoy of a dozen vehicles and watched as a man in the rear car took careful aim at a black woman and shot her dead. Nothing epitomized more clearly the out-and-out cowardice of the AWB and the difference between them and professional soldiers like General Viljoen. Graeme was spotted, chased, beaten up and had his cameras smashed. He was lucky. If he had been black, he would almost certainly have been killed.
A few miles away on the outskirts of Mafikeng I was following a second AWB convoy when three troop carriers jammed with soldiers of the Bophuthatswana Defence Force rumbled past. They had, it seemed, mutinied against Mangope and were intent on repelling the AWB. On impulse we abandoned the second convoy and followed the armoured cars in the direction of the airbase on the edge of the town, where the right-wingers had assembled. And so it was that we missed the final show down.
I gleaned the background to the swirl of events an hour or so later in, of all places, the Mmabatho Sun's poolside bar. The Africa of Evelyn Waugh's novels remain an astonishingly accurate guide to how the continent works. In the most chaotic of situations there is often a businessman or spy, monitoring and manipulating events, and privy to the inside story - just as in Scoop, where a mysterious financier provides a chapter and-verse account of the upheaval in the fictional Ishmaelia. The challenge is to find such characters and persuade them to talk.
The key to the Mmabatho imbroglio was a British-born Bophuthatswana intelligence officer who had left London for Africa in the Sixties in search of adventure after seeing an advertisement for Rhodesia's British South Africa Police, and never returned. He lived in a small suburban house in the back streets, a slight greying professorial figure. Old friends knew him as the 'Plato of the platteland' as he liked to read philosophy in his spare time. Mmabatho was his last post after more than three decades monitoring regional security matters for various bosses.
In the measured tones that he no doubt used for postmortems of his wife's latest hand of bridge, the obsession with which she whiled away long hours in southern African towns, my source explained that Mangope was cowering in a country estate on the border with Botswana, Terre'Blanche had backed down, the AWB were on their way out of town, the main body of the right-wingers was leaving Bop following the mutiny of the Bop soldiers, and South African units were preparing to take over the homeland. Everything he said that afternoon was later proved accurate. The only insight I had to 'trade' was a second-hand account of the critical encounter of the day. It was not much of a swap. A few hours later it was on the national television news.
Even as I had decided to follow the armoured cars of the Bop Defence Force, the AWB were pulling out of the airbase bound for home following a bitter argument with General Viljoen's commanders. One of the convoys of about twenty vehicles made a final foray through the back-streets, and as it sped past Mafikeng police station shooting broke out. It is not clear who fired first. But the final car in the convoy, a light blue Mercedes, slewed to a halt in a volley of shots.
The front passenger door opened and the dead body of Nic Fourie, an AWB 'general', slithered to the ground. The driver, Alwyn Wolfaardt, a mechanic from the conservative northern town of Naboomspruit, was the caricature Boer of schoolbooks, six feet five inches tall, with a flowing brown beard. One of his ancestors, Pieter Jordaan, had been impaled with Piet Retief. He had been raised on an undiluted diet of anti-Communist rhetoric and Boer nationalism. Now his worst nightmares had come true. He lay face down in the dust pleading for an ambulance as his close friend, Fanie Uys, lay propped against the side of the car bleeding from his hip.
An angry crowd gathered screaming 'bulala amabhulu' (kill the Boers), in a subconscious echo of the fateful command uttered by Dingane. As journalists interviewed the two Afrikaners, a young black policeman strode through the throng and shot Uys in the head. Swivelling, he walked up to Wolfaardt and shot him twice. Then he thrust his rifle in the air in triumph and kicked the dead bodies. This time there would be no Blood River.
The 'ifs' of history are manifold in a country with a past as littered with murders and assassinations as South Africa. Would apartheid have moved in a different direction if Verwoerd had not been stabbed to death by a deranged parliamentary messenger? Would Steve Biko, the inspirational black consciousness leader, have led South Africa if he had not been killed in police custody? Would Chris Hani, the charismatic Communist Party leader, have inherited Mandela's presidency if he had not been gunned down by a Polish right-winger in April 1993? These are questions for historians, but the last high-profile killing of the 'old' South Africa gave rise to no such debate.
With his three shots the Bop policeman had spun the old legend on its head. He was the baas. He, the black man, had the gun and it was the turn of the white man to cringe in the dust. The lingering remnants of the white man's African fantasy had been laid to rest.
The incident had been captured on camera and the news spread across the veld like a forest fire. I gave an Afrikaner teenager a lift back to Johannesburg. His father had taken part in the assault and he had briefly 'gone along for the ride'. He said the farm radio network was humming with tales of dozens of dead Afrikaners and that local hospitals were brimming with their wounded. His stories I later ascertained were untrue. The hospitals were full but with blacks, of whom as many as fifty were killed, not whites. The only Afrikaners to die were the three at the crossroads. But my young hitch-hiker believed the rumours and was appalled. He would not dabble in insurrection again.
Ironically, if Terre'Blanche had managed to keep his cadres out of the homeland, the end of white rule might have been far bloodier. But the AWE's behaviour and the bloodshed appalled many of the conservative and God-fearing Afrikaners who were still allied to the right-wing cause. A few hours after the fateful shots General Viljoen formed a splinter movement of the Afrikaner Volksfront and registered for the elections as the Freedom Front, recognizing that the only hope for the bittereinders lay in dialogue, not war.
Four days before the polls were due to open, Joy Brady, my office assistant, was just starting to play the organ in Johannes burg's St. Mary's Cathedral when a massive explosion shook the building. A bomb had exploded outside the ANC's head quarters a few streets away, killing nine people and injuring ninety-two. Ten more people were killed the following day when a bomb exploded in a taxi rank in the city's suburbs. Two days later, on the second day of voting, another bomb, potentially the most deadly of all, exploded just outside Jan Smuts International, as the city airport was then called.
The bombing campaign was a tragic postscript to white rule, which reminded South Africa how close it had come to the abyss. In the heyday of white rule the bombers might have expected to reach a deal with sympathetic police officers. In a fascinating insight into the workings of the apartheid old boy network, Koos Botha, a reformed right-winger who post-1994 'found' his black brethren and ran a housing project in a
black squatter settlement, told me how in the early Nineties, after he exploded a bomb late one night in the deserted premises of a multi-racial school as a protest at the changes, the policeman appointed to investigate the case was an old school friend.
He met me a
t Jan Smuts airport as I flew in from Cape Town... And I said, 'Hey, Chris, what brings you here?' And he muttered that he had come to give me a lift home. And we were chatting away and I could see something was wrong, so I asked him what the matter was. He paused and said,
'Something terrible has happened, Koos. I have been asked to investigate you.' And I said, 'Oh don't worry. I don't mind a bit. Of course I did it.' And a huge smile spread across Danie's face and he slapped me on the back. 'You did? Ah. That's fantastic .. .' So we drove together to my home to work out what we were going to do.
Such was the old order. But a few hours after the airport bomb, as voters disregarded the threat and streamed to the polls, the police swooped and arrested more than thirty right-wingers including members of the Ystergarde. The days of white preferment were over as even Terre'Blanche would have to accept.
'The leier will see you at Klerksdorp this weekend. Drive to the showground and wait for him there. He knows you are coming. He will make a sign when he is free.' Liaising with the AWB had long been a cross between dealing with a second-rate secret society and a royal court. Plans changed depending on the mood- and sobriety- of the Ieier. Terre'Blanche was the prima donna of white politics and had to be feeling like putting on his show. This time, however, the AWB spokesman was adamant. Terre'Blanche was due to address a rally to mark the 'Day of the Vow', which much to the AWE's outrage had been renamed the 'Day of Reconciliation'. He had, the spokesman insisted, an important message.