The Other Side of History: An anecdotal reflection on political transition in South Africa

One thing the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa have in common is a passion for inventing history. History is not seen as a dispassionate inquiry into what happened, but rather as part of political mobilisation promoting some form of collective self-interest. Not for one second do I pretend to know the ‘whole’ or ‘real’ story of what happened in the old South Africa, or what is happening in the ‘new’. I know that significant parts of what has been, or is being invented, are not the way I experienced them.

This is a personal reflection on a fascinating period in my life which coincided with fundamental shifts in the political life of South Africa. I was fortunate to be in a position where I knew and had access to persons of influence across the political spectrum. This is my account of their interaction with each other and mine with them.

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert was in Parliament in opposition against the Nationalist government from 1974 to 1986.

His career in opposition politics culminated in 1979 when he became the leader of the opposition. He resigned from Parliament over the issue of the Tricameral Parliament, a foolish Nationalist constitutional development, as the ruling party stumbled towards finally accepting that Nelson Mandela must be released and a democratic South Africa negotiated. Throughout this period he arranged a number of conferences with the ANC in exile.

He is currently on the board of FirstRand Ltd and the philanthropic OSI New York, and is Chairman of Adcorp (Pty) Ltd, and Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers Ltd.

THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY

An anecdotal reflection on political transition in South Africa

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: I, too, am an African – if not, why not?

Chapter 1: Inventing the past to secure the future

Chapter 2: From Dakar to democracy

Appendix I: A possible strategy to apply constitutional leverage towards a non-racial democracy

Appendix II: Dakar communiqué

Appendix III: The people who attended the Dakar Conference

Chapter 3: Backroom factotum and facilitator

Chapter 4: Philanthropic reconstruction

Chapter 5: An apprentice businessman

Chapter 6: Taking stock

Conclusion: Mythmaking in the new South Africa

Picture section

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am sixty-six and am too old to remember all the great friends and colleagues who helped shape my thinking. Whoever you are and wherever you are, thank you and do not feel compromised by the outcome.

To Jenny Nothard, again, thank you for the meticulous preparation of the manuscript. It was done with your usual good grace, patience and dedication.

To Jonathan Ball, my publisher: here we go again, and thank you.

F van Zyl Slabbert

April 2006

INTRODUCTION

I, TOO, AM AN AFRICAN – IF NOT, WHY NOT?

On 8 May 1996 Deputy President Thabo Mbeki made an acceptance speech on behalf of the ANC when the South African Constitution Bill was accepted by the Constitutional Assembly. It is an evocative, moving and inspirational speech. He defines his Africanness in an inclusive manner, in which I, as a White South African, am unequivocally accepted as an African. So, too, the Coloureds and Indians. For example:

• ‘I owe my being to the Khoi and San.’

• ‘I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land.’

• ‘In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East.’

• ‘I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas.’

• ‘I come of those who were transported from India and China.’

• ‘Being a part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that – I am African.’

And then the unambiguous, inclusive statement:

‘The Constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins.’

I still have a deep unease, even aversion, to attempts to give ideological, value-laden content to concepts of nationality, ethnicity or race. Perhaps it is because I had an overdose of this growing up in a predominantly rural Afrikaner environment. I will never forget as a 16-year-old on a school visit to the Cango Caves, the lights being dimmed, organ music filling the darkness, and a deep voice announcing: ‘Civilisation came to South Africa with the landing of Jan van Riebeeck on 6 April 1652.’ Even then I thought: ‘How completely and utterly absurd.’ There was later at Stellenbosch a dear old professor called Bun Booyens who said: ‘An Afrikaner is someone who, when the sun goes down, in his soul hears the tinkling of milk cans and the cooing of doves.’ The fact that ‘the Afrikaners’ were ±80% urbanised when he said this was of little consequence.

I can live with most of the rhetorical and metaphorical flourishes in Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech because he demystifies the identity of an African by referring to the Constitution that was adopted at the occasion, i.e. Coloureds, Asians, Whites, and the offspring of all the indigenous tribes, are all African. Personally, I am happy to give the concept ‘African’ an unambiguous geographical reference. I am an African because I can trace my history here, and have a South African passport which states that I come from South Africa and am a South African citizen. Apparently the first Slabbert put foot on shore here in 1670. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. One of them had three children with a slave woman. Again, through no fault on my part.

Unfortunately, Mbeki’s first inclusive and generous definition of Africanness, almost ten years later, has been ideologically mangled and historically appropriated beyond recognition. The new historiography, often more by implication than by being explicit, makes it quite clear that a Coloured, Indian or White can never be an African. In the South African context, an African, for purposes of policy, is ‘a Black of a special kind’. For example, the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act defines a Black as a Coloured, Indian and African. So it is possible to be Black without being African. This is reinforced by the paper on ‘the National Question’ in Umrabulo no. 23 put before the ANC National Congress in June 2005, where it states that the National Question, inter alia, is about ‘the liberation of Blacks in general and Africans in particular’. Of course, this should offend Mbeki’s sense of constitutionality of Africanness as he motivates it in his speech ‘I am an African’. Unfortunately, since then, he has increasingly played the ‘race card’ in considering problems of development and foreign relations: ‘Whites think Africans can’t govern, Whites think Africans are promiscuous’, and so on.

The book on President Thabo Mbeki’s speeches, Africa: Define Yourself, edited by Essop Pahad and Willie Esterhuyse, never seriously addresses the challenge that he issues. The moment one moves away from using the words ‘Africa’ and ‘African’ as uncomplicated geographic references, one enters a world of value-laden and ideological agendas in which one’s arguments can regress to a situation in which one looks up the orifices of one’s own assumptions, i.e. a tautological quagmire: ‘Why am I an African?’ ‘Because I smell the world in a special way.’ ‘Why do I smell the world in a special way?’ ‘Because I am an African.’ But the same style and abstraction can be used to give mystical and poetic content to being an Appalachian, Catalonian, Basque, Patagonian, etc. Even an Afrikaner. Ask Oom Bun Booyens about ‘the tinkle of the milk cans’.

One of the ANC intellectual heavyweights who excels in this kind of identity mysticism is Pallo Jordan. In a paper delivered at the South African Union Diaspora Conference in Jamaica, 17 March 2005 (also included in Umrabulo no. 23), his title is ‘Blood is Thicker than Water – the Relevance of Pan Africanism Today’.

In it he says, ‘By demonstrating in practice that the blood that binds the peoples of Africa and the diaspora is thicker than the waters of the Atlantic, the Pan African Movement has demonstrated its relevance in tackling the common challenges of the present.’ In it he also makes no bones about the fact that Whites are ‘the villains’ and ‘people of African descent are the heroes’. (Thabo, where are you now that we need you?)

You see, when ‘we Whites’ arrived here in 1652 we found indigenous African tribes filled with ‘ubuntu’ sharing grazing land and babysitting one another’s children. Our ‘White racist’ forefathers destroyed all that and inculcated a culture of greed, militancy, envy and selfishness. Racism is a White invention; Africans are genetically incapable of being racists. Unfortunately, Coloureds and Indians inherited some ‘White racism’, but Africans are mercifully free of it. You see, they have the right kind of blood. And so on, and so forth, blah-blah-blah.

Enough has been written about the different patterns of colonial conquest and exploitation, whether English, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, French, Italian or German, for me not to have to waste time expanding on them. Anyone who reads about the exploits of King Leopold in the ‘Belgian’ Congo can only be filled with revulsion and disgust, even if one does not have ‘African blood’ (Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost). But before one gets swept away by the exuberance of these bloody references, let us pause to reflect for a moment. I do not know whether Pallo was present at the Slave House on Goree Island in July 1987, but Thabo and I certainly were. The guide, who was an old paratrooper, started expounding on the history of slavery. By the way, he was a black (African?) Senegalese who fought for the French in World War II.

The old man made it quite clear that there was continuous and enthusiastic collusion between African tribes in providing slaves for export by the Portuguese and Dutch slave traders. ‘Ubuntu’ seems to have been suspended for a while. And by the way, the slave trade along East Africa, e.g. Mozambique and Zanzibar, did not just happen because a slave trader stood on the beach, fired a gun and 300 slaves came crawling out of the bush. They were delivered, manacled and shackled, by men of ‘African blood’.

There is a whole new literature reconstructing and reinvestigating the history of slavery, including many documentaries written and made by people of ‘African blood’. For example, when Alex Haley was challenged on the historical accuracy of his work Roots, he said: ‘I tried to give my people a myth to live by.’ In the same work from which this reference comes (Black Rednecks and White Liberals), he says: ‘While slavery was common to all civilisations, as well as to people considered to be uncivilised; only one civilisation developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history – Western Civilisation. Today, slavery still exists in Mauritania, the Sudan, parts of Nigeria and Benin’ (p. 116). He continues: ‘Contrary to the myths to live by created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were no way the innocents portrayed by Roots, baffled as to why White men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kente supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent – before, during and after the White man arrived’ (p. 120). (The writer is an African American intellectual, descendant of slaves, and works as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. According to Pallo he must have impeccable African blood!)

The documentary ‘The African Trade’ (televised on SABC Africa) shows dramatic footage of African Americans breaking down when confronted with evidence of Africans selling fellow Africans into slavery. The slave trade on Goree Island was managed by African women married to slave traders. (I can already anticipate the howls of rage and blasphemous indignation in even mentioning these thoughts. It is like a Palestinian challenging Jewish historiography, and vice versa. They need to define each other out of history in order to capture the future.)

Sowell says of WEB du Bois, whom he admires as much as Pallo Jordan does, that he said of the White New Englanders who established schools in the South after the civil war to educate liberated slaves that it ‘was the finest thing in American history’. He continues, ‘A wholly disproportionate share of future Black leaders came out of schools and colleges established by New Englanders in the South, not even counting Oberlin College or Dunbar High School. These alumni of institutions founded as New England enclaves in the South included WEB du Bois, James Weldon, Johnson, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethriene, A Phillip Randolph, James Farmer, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jnr’ (p. 40). He goes on to make the (for Pallo, most outrageous) statement that: ‘The advance of European imperialism around the world