The End of Apartheid

by Robin Renwick

  Mandela said that in a meeting with De Klerk and Adriaan Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order, Vlok had claimed that the ANC had a double agenda, with the military wing still planning to use force. The ANC had said that they did not trust the government either.

  Mandela said that he did not expect miracles from his meeting with Buthelezi, but agreed that it would be psychologically important. I said that the government’s attitude mirrored his own about the security forces. They accepted that Mandela and Mbeki were negotiating in good faith, but had legitimate concerns about ANC arms caches and ‘self-defence units’.

  I said that we had noted Mandela’s statement in Lusaka that, if negotiations did not succeed, the ANC would have to ‘seize power’. We did not believe that the ANC were in a position to seize power. If negotiations broke down, they would simply have to be started up again. De Klerk appeared to accept this, and I hoped the ANC did too. Mandela said that he did. He was pleased with the remarkable improvement in relations between Britain and the ANC and was grateful for the role the embassy had played in this. He looked forward to meeting John Major later in the year.

  In a separate meeting, Thabo Mbeki felt that progress was being made in the discussions with the government. They wanted to move ahead on constitutional principles and some sort of interim council on which the ANC could be represented. Mbeki said that the front-line states would be meeting on 7 February to discuss the maintenance of sanctions. I said that, if they repeated the same old mumbo jumbo about ‘nothing having changed’, they would lose all credibility. The ANC should be thinking in terms of the selective easing of sanctions. Mbeki said that he realised that EC sanctions were likely to be further eased by June and that the Americans also were likely to move in the course of the year. I suggested a selective relaxation of the sports boycott, now that cricket had a unified governing body; Mbeki was open-minded about this.

  De Klerk wrote to John Major to thank him for his role in the decision by the European Council to lift the ban on new investment in South Africa. The security legislation was being reviewed with the objective of ensuring free political participation by all concerned. He was hoping to call a constitutional conference before the end of the year.

  1 February 1991

  De Klerk announced in his speech at the opening of parliament the repeal of all the remaining apartheid legislation, including the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act. John Major wrote to congratulate him on this and to say that we would be looking for a further response from the international community. John Major spoke to the Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke, about the need for progress in lifting sanctions. He found, not to his surprise, that Hawke was mainly interested in getting rid of sports sanctions.

  I told Van Heerden that we would be seeking a relaxation of the sports boycott in relation to sports that were integrated and had a unified sports body, such as cricket. The justice department, however, were still making difficulties about some of the exiles, in spite of the indemnity agreed in the Groote Schuur Minute. Mbeki wanted to bring back the two to three thousand people still in Lusaka, and it was in everyone’s interests to help him wind up the ANC headquarters there.

  Barend du Plessis thanked me for our help in getting a more positive European response, adding that for Kaunda to state that the world must maintain sanctions to ‘help De Klerk vis-à-vis the right wing’ was fatuous even by his standards. If De Klerk did not get support from the international community, Treurnicht would exploit that against the government.

  11 February 1991

  Meeting at his office in parliament with De Klerk and Lynda Chalker, Minister of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. De Klerk was pleased that the Europeans had set about lifting sanctions. The ANC were no longer being allowed to dictate their policies. De Klerk said that the ANC had wanted to deal with the government to the exclusion of the other political parties. The ANC’s statement on 8 January in favour of a multiparty conference had been a major step forward. It had triggered heavy criticism of Mbeki and other moderates, which Mandela had sought to counter with tough-sounding rhetoric. De Klerk was trying to accelerate the return of exiles through a judicial procedure.

  Despite Conservative Party advances, he was confident he could win a referendum of the white electorate. The best help he could get from the outside world would be a rugby tour! We said that lifting the sports boycott would take a bit more time. It might have to be done sport by sport. De Klerk said that, obviously, access to the IMF and external capital was more important. I stressed the need finally to resolve the remaining issues over the release of prisoners. De Klerk expressed strong support for our military actions in the Gulf, where coalition forces were fighting to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. He planned to meet the Prime Minister in London in April.

  In a meeting with Mandela, he claimed that the EC decision on new investment had made it harder for him to hold his supporters back from mass action. We pointed out that sanctions were crumbling anyway. To maximise their leverage and accelerate the end of apartheid in sport, the ANC should offer to relax sports sanctions in cases where the sports were integrated. Mandela clearly was having to manage tensions within the organisation between Mbeki and the radicals, but said that he was continuing to make progress with De Klerk.

  26 February 1991

  Dinner with De Klerk. He thought that the exchanges between Mandela and Buthelezi, following their meeting in Durban on 29 January, were doing something towards moderating the violence in Natal. The ANC were backing away from their commitment to nationalisation. In De Klerk’s opinion, Mandela knew almost nothing about economics, but De Klerk spoke warmly of him as a figure of real dignity and authority. He could be rigid and dogmatic, and sometimes his statements did not make sense, but he had to straddle two very different tendencies within the ANC in order to carry his constituency with him.

  6 April 1991

  Mandela issued a statement accusing the government of complicity in the violence in the black communities and of aiding Inkatha. The government should outlaw the carrying of traditional weapons, dismiss the ministers of Defence and Law and Order, dismantle counter-insurgency units, suspend the police officers in Sebokeng, begin phasing out single-sex migrant workers’ hostels and appoint an independent inquiry. If these demands were not met by 9 May the ANC would suspend negotiations and discussion of a new constitution.

  April 1991

  Steve Tshwete for the ANC and representatives of the sports bodies agreed a constitution for fully unified rugby in South Africa. De Klerk announced that over nine hundred ‘political’ prisoners had been released. Over four and a half thousand applications for indemnity had been approved for the exiles.

  2 May 1991

  To try to help break the deadlock, I had lunch with Joe Slovo, regarded as the master strategist by his colleagues in the ANC politburo. Slovo said that the government must phase out the migrant workers’ hostels and ban the carrying of traditional weapons. I said that in response to the ANC’s ‘ultimatum’ we had urged the government to offer a multiparty meeting on the violence and a commission of inquiry headed by a judge. The ANC had rejected both proposals and were threatening to suspend talks on the new constitution. ‘The only alternative to negotiations now,’ I added, ‘is negotiations later’. There would be no sympathy for anyone who broke them off. ANC supporters as well as Inkatha were responsible for the violence, and, however poor the performance of the police, the government could not stop them on their own.

  Slovo agreed that it was a mistake to have called the ANC document an ultimatum. I said that the idea of arming ANC ‘self-defence units’ was likely to cause further trouble. They needed to start talking again to Inkatha. Slovo acknowledged that the violence was not benefiting De Klerk. There was some convergence in the government’s and the ANC’s positions on the constitution and, he agreed, this was the fundamental issue. I said that, the sooner negotiations were started on the future constitution, the easier
it would be to manage the transitional problems. I learned afterwards that Slovo had used exactly the same argument with his colleagues on the ANC’s national executive committee.

  6 May 1991

  I telephoned Mandela at his house in Soweto. I told him that we knew that De Klerk had never ordered the killing of anyone, any more than Mandela had done. We were continuing to try to narrow the differences between the government and the ANC on violence. The government were allocating some funds for the conversion of hostel accommodation into family units, but the phasing-out of single men’s hostels would take years.

  Mandela said that he had been encouraged by a telephone call with De Klerk. But he was adamant that there must be a ban on the carrying of ‘cultural’ weapons. De Klerk wanted this to be permitted only on genuinely cultural occasions.

  I said that the ANC were not going to get satisfaction on all the points in their ultimatum by 9 May (Mandela acknowledged this). It was one thing for them to ‘suspend’ negotiations on a new constitution which had not yet begun anyway, but they could not afford to break off discussions on the issues of violence, release of prisoners and return of exiles, on which good progress was being made. We had pressed the government to offer an inquiry, headed by a judge. This would put pressure on the police to behave. We wanted the ANC to reconsider their decision not to participate.

  Mandela thanked me for the efforts we were making. He would be back in contact with the government, as would Mbeki. The police must learn to deal with black crowds as they would with white ones.

  The police, meanwhile, raided a number of hostels, confiscating weapons and putting a strain on De Klerk’s relations with Buthelezi. By this time, following the shots that had been fired at the embassy in Pretoria a year before by an extremist faction led by Piet ‘Skiet’ Rudolph, I was being denounced in the extreme right-wing Afrikaans propaganda sheets as, improbably, the reincarnation of Lord Milner, bent on the destruction of the Boers.

  CHAPTER XIV

  ‘We can hardly drop them on Lusaka or Soweto’

  The other cause we had been trying to pursue throughout my time in South Africa was to prevail upon the country to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to destroy its small arsenal of nuclear bombs. This was no small ask as, hitherto, no country had ever been prepared to do this. The Americans, too, were working very actively on this cause.

  I found a powerful ally in Barend du Plessis. The military nuclear programme by now had cost nearly a billion dollars. Du Plessis could not understand what use South Africa could possibly make of nuclear weapons. ‘We can,’ as he said to me, ‘hardly drop them on Lusaka or Soweto.’ Since the inception of the programme in 1974, under Prime Minister John Vorster, South Africa had managed to produce six and a half Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Their scientists were confident that these would work, though no tests had been conducted.

  De Klerk had come to the same conclusion. Nuclear weapons had been intended to deter the total onslaught on South Africa led by the Soviet Union. With the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola, the progressive disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, he concluded that the massive cost of the nuclear programme no longer made any sense. He moved quickly to close it down. Not long after becoming President, at the end of 1989 he gave instructions for the decommissioning of the enrichment plant near Pretoria at Pelindaba – a Zulu word variously translated as ‘end of the discussion’ or ‘where important matters are settled’.

  May/June 1991

  On one of the days in this period in which Mandela had suspended negotiations and there was an appearance of deadlock, I spent the evening with him and some of the best jazz musicians from Soweto at the house of his and our friend, Clive Menell. As with Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki, I argued that there was no alternative to getting back to negotiations and speeding them up if possible. Mandela said he agreed. He wanted to do more to curb the security forces, but negotiations would be resumed. He wanted there to be discussion of the new constitution by the end of the year.

  Mandela, however, was greatly affected by the trial of his wife, which had begun in February. Winnie Mandela was accused following the kidnapping, in December 1988, of four youths and the murder of one of them by members of the Mandela United football club, her bodyguards. The ‘football team’ had been conducting a reign of terror in Soweto. Mandela kept telling me, and even maintained in Long Walk to Freedom, that she was innocent.38 It was her infidelity, rather than her association with this bunch of thugs, that caused his rift with her. More revealingly, he kept saying that he blamed himself for her difficulties, having been unable to offer her any effective support throughout his years in prison.

  My term as ambassador was drawing to an end. Before leaving South Africa, I paid a farewell visit to Bloemfontein to see the wise and humane Chief Justice Michael Corbett. I told him that, while Winnie Mandela might well be found guilty, I doubted if Mandela would be able to cope if his wife were sent to prison. Kobie Coetsee was delivering a similar message to the judiciary, who evidently came to a similar conclusion, as the outcome, on appeal, was a suspended sentence for Winnie Mandela.

  As De Klerk had confirmed to me that he would in due course be calling a referendum of the white community to seek support for his policies, I asked to see Mandela with, this time, his spokesman on sport, Steve Tshwete, also attending. I said that we had discussed several times the need to help De Klerk to retain the support of his constituency. De Klerk himself believed that a resumption of international sporting contacts would have more impact than anything else. Could the ANC please start considering selective easing of the sports boycott?

  I got a positive hearing. Mandela and Tshwete said that they had started discussing, and would be discussing further, what I was proposing. A few weeks later, they agreed to the readmission of South Africa to international cricket and Olympic sport. It was a decision that paid political dividends. On 17 March 1992, De Klerk won his referendum of the white electorate with 68.7 per cent of the votes, a result universally recognised to have been helped by the fact that a South African cricket team at the time was playing in Australia.

  Six months before, Margaret Thatcher had been deposed as Prime Minister by fellow members of the Conservative Party. De Klerk regarded it as a debt of honour to invite her to visit South Africa. The visit was bound to be tricky in some respects, as the more militant members of the ANC were threatening to stage demonstrations against her.

  In Cape Town, De Klerk gave a state dinner in her honour. During a visit to the Independent Development Trust, the police were alarmed when a crowd gathered outside … only to burst into applause when she emerged. More predictably, she got a similar reception from the students in the Afrikaner citadel of Stellenbosch.

  The ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa had expressed to me one major worry about her visit. This was that the Johannesburg city council had declared their intention of awarding her the freedom of the city. Ramaphosa warned that, if this happened, there were bound to be demonstrations. I assured him that she had no intention of receiving this award from an all-white council which represented a tiny fraction of the people of Johannesburg. Instead we took her to Soweto, where she got a warm welcome from the nurses at the Baragwanath Hospital and from Aggrey Klaaste at the Sowetan.

  Having spent two days with De Klerk and his wife at the Mala Mala Game Reserve, I accompanied Mrs Thatcher on the last leg of her visit, to meet Mangosuthu Buthelezi at Ulundi. She was greeted by the usual array of Zulu warriors with their assegais and shields and visited the battlefield on which the British army finally managed to defeat the Zulus on 4 July 1879.

  On leaving South Africa she asked me a question which I and others and African governments themselves are still struggling to answer. Given that the independence constitutions in much of the rest of Africa had been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, did I believe that governments in Africa were prepared to accept the Western notion, dating from the eighteenth
century, that it was in their own interests to limit their own power and that, however irksome a free press and independent judiciary might prove to be, the alternative was worse? Though she was no friend of the liberation movements, it was thanks to her willingness to take the necessary risks that we had been able to end the Rhodesian war. Throughout my four years in South Africa, I had received no instructions, but full backing from her.

  I was now on the verge of leaving South Africa to take up my post as ambassador in Washington, DC. I travelled from Ulundi to Pretoria for a farewell party given by my deputy, Anthony Rowell, who had himself established close relationships with several of the ANC leaders. I arrived to find Mandela there, together with his wife. She was in an ebullient mood, having managed to get herself arrested twice in the course of the day. I was described unkindly by the British press as ‘struggling in her embrace’. They were accompanied by Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and much of the ANC hierarchy.39 Mandela had made a special effort to make the journey from Soweto, as at the time he still hated visiting Pretoria, where most of his previous experiences had been at police headquarters. Among our other friends there was Johan Heyns.

  I told Mandela that we were concerned that the ANC should not paint itself into a corner by making non-negotiable demands at its conference in Durban in July. Mandela asked me to write him a personal note about this, which I did on the following day.